the wolves of Bays Mountain

 

Judy Klein

the wolves of Bays Mountain (1998)

Bays Mountain Park is a nature preserve in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. During the 1990s, I made several trips to the park to record the wolves who were living there. In the piece, the wolves are heard much as I heard them myself, sometimes only footsteps away, and also transformed, such as occurs in the realm of imagination, memory and dream. For the composition I used the Csound computer music language. All of the sounds come from the recordings, in unaltered or slightly modified form and as source material in musical settings and transitions. The piece opens quietly (The beginning is barely audible.), with sounds derived from the recording of a winter chorus howl. Over time, the voices of the wolves become distinct. Two wolves bring the howling to an end with a sequence of short, antiphonal calls. In the middle sections, the recordings are virtually unedited. It’s nearly spring. The wolves are heard in their environment, first in the early morning and then in the still of the late night. The howling in the final section is again from winter, the mating season. It ends with the love song of Kashtin, the alpha female of the pack, and her majestic mate, Navarro, who died the following year and in whose memory the piece was written.

 

About the Pack

In the first months of 1995, the pack consisted of three wolves, Navarro, Kashtin and Djenoun. Later that year, the young adults were joined by three pups: Askina, Nayehi and Kanati. At the time of this writing, only four of the recorded wolves are still alive. Navarro died in 1996, Askina in 1999.

 

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the administration of Bays Mountain Park for granting me permission to record the wolves and for the opportunity to come to know them. I wish to thank the entire staff for their warm welcome and extensive support throughout the project. Special thanks to Ken Childress and “Ranger Bob” Culler for their initial assistance; to Monty Sloan, of Wolf Park, for directing me to Bays Mountain; to Kevin Klein for traveling many miles to help me set up camp; to Francisco Kröpfl for insisting on this piece; and to Sue Shanks and her family, for everything.

 

Judy Klein

New York, December 2003

O P E N S P A C E

29 sycamore drive

red hook ny 12571

www.the-open-space.org