Up North.

Birdsong

by LYNDA WHEATLEY

A pair of neighbors at a pianist’s Upper Peninsula cottage reawakens the composer within.

Most people, when they look to buy a cottage Up North, have a few musthaves in mind: lake or river frontage, say, and enough bedrooms to accommodate their brood, maybe their brood’s brood, too. Perhaps acreage to hunt on, a stone fireplace and a four-season porch.

Julie Chapman had only one requirement: “I wanted to be on a lake that had a pair of nesting loons.”

Chapman is a classically trained pianist and composer. She’s also an avid nature-watcher and, more so, listener; she has entire catalogs of field recordings she’s made of wind, rain, wildlife.

But since her childhood camping trips Up North, she’s loved loons most of all—even before the 1981 film “On Golden Pond” taught her the name of that stunning red-eyed waterbird with the captivating call.

“My whole life, I’ve always had an affection for that sound—it’s just so … musical,” she says.

After four months spent cross-referencing real estate listings with maps and calls to the Michigan DNR, Chapman and her husband found, beside a small lake in Watersmeet that a pair of loons call home, a cottage where they could do the same.

The Chapmans got the keys in November 2016, while the lake’s resident loons wintered in Mexico. Chapman passed her time at the cottage walking the woods, listening and playing—on a battered but heavenly sounding upright Steinway grand piano, circa 1883, that a recording studio in Milwaukee had sold her for a proverbial song.

While Chapman doesn’t compose music every day—she put out her last album before motherhood—not a single day goes by that she doesn’t play.

But when spring arrived, it brought with it the wail she’d waited for all winter. And in that unmistakable melody, Chapman heard another familiar call: to sit down at her century-old piano and compose music again.

What began that day was Gavia Immer, the Latin name for the common loon and the first track on Chapman’s Homage to the Northwoods, an album of 11 original piano solos she composed entirely on her cottage Steinway.

“I didn’t expect it, but all these songs just started happening. It was crazy. I would compose a song almost every day,” she says.

Every single one was her response to the nature around her, moments set to music. For Gavia Immer, she chose the male loon’s yodel, one of four vocalizations, mostly used to stake a territorial claim. The middle section of the song represents the loons diving for fish; the ending, the pair happily paddling about, their babies safe on their backs.

Two Wolves is a musical transcription of a scene she imagined at the root of howls she heard (and, of course, recorded) one night across the lake: a plaintive duet of hungry wolf partners. Plenty of tracks evoke the human experience too. Among them: Dawn, Respite, Curt , and—with more than 14,000 Spotify plays in four months— the sublime twinkle of Quiessence.

Despite her growing fanbase, Chapman says she has no interest in touring; she’d prefer to return Up North with the regularity of her loon neighbors and keep on composing—for herself, for future albums and perhaps soundtracks to films or documentaries. About nature, likely. About loons, certainly. juliechapmanmusic.com