Meet Glen Ellen's sound man Bernie Krause

Bernie Krause easily recalls the day he discovered the true beauty of music and the unexpected path to his second career.

He was 30, already an accomplished professional musician, but he stood in Muir Woods on a beautiful fall day in 1968, worlds away from a stage or sound studio.

Equipped with headphones, microphones and a portable recorder, Krause expected only to gather wild sounds for a commissioned project for Warner Brothers. Instead, he was enveloped by the natural sounds of the birds, breeze, chipmunks and streams he encountered in the redwood forest, music in its purest form.

“That’s what got me started. I was so captivated by the sounds I heard in my earphones in Muir Woods,” said Krause, 76. “I heard the space open up right then and there.”

Since that day 46 years ago, he has been recording, archiving and researching marine and terrestrial habitats around the world as founder of Wild Sanctuary. This year his soundscapes also have inspired a San Francisco ballet and a symphony that premiered in July in the United Kingdom. Both were innovative works blending Krause’s natural soundscapes within the performing arts.

On location over the years he has captured the grunts and bellows of alligators in the Florida swamp; the calls of baboons echoing off rocks in Zimbabwe; the warning yaps of lemurs in Madagascar. Among his most memorable moments are recording the shifting of glaciers and sounds of whales, seals, birds, insects, anemones, foxes, bears, wolves and caribou from more than a dozen trips to Alaska.

“I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been to most countries of the world,” Krause said of his work. “I’m mostly interested in places where there’s still some wild left.”

His Glen Ellen-based consulting and educational service, online audio archive and store contains natural sounds of more than 15,000 species and nearly 5,000 hours of natural ambience Krause has collected throughout his career.

He has traveled with colleagues and sometimes with his wife, Katherine “Kat” Krause, but often he is alone in remote areas “where you can’t buy a (souvenir) cup or T-shirt.”

His work has been commissioned for museum dioramas, public aquariums and zoos, feature films and TV shows, and for academia, science and the arts. Krause also has shared his adventures in the wild through speaking engagements and by visiting schools, where appreciative children send thank-you drawings of the birds and walruses whose voices Krause has shared.

His pioneering work in acoustic ecology “is the narrative of life,” Krause said. “It’s telling the story of living organisms.”

Krause changed careers after working as a studio guitarist in the late ’50s and, in the 1960s, performing folk classics like “Guantanamera” as part of the Weavers. He and a musical partner introduced the synthesizer to popular music and worked on sound effects for film and TV classics such as “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Bewitched.”

Disillusioned with the “egos and crap” of Hollywood, Krause was immediately hooked by his experience at Muir Woods.

He grew up without pets and with little contact with the outdoors, taught by his parents that “it was dangerous and dirty.” He remembers his first outing in Muir Woods as “a terrifying experience.”

Even so, the sounds were so profound that Krause quickly overcame any hesitation or fear of the wild. By 40, he had earned a doctorate with an internship in bioacoustics, a relatively new field at the time.

He coined the term “biophony,” the collective sound of all nonhuman organisms in any habitat, from larvae to large mammals.

The sound in a healthy habitat is organized, he said, “just like the instruments in an orchestra. Each one has its own niche. They all stay out of each other’s way.”

Krause said he believes that nature, animals in particular, “taught us to dance and sing. Our connection and cultural expressions of music are based on what animals taught us.”

He wrote about his experiences in his 2012 book, “The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places” (Little, Brown & Co.), which inspired the collaboration of a symphony that premiered in July in the United Kingdom. That concept also inspired the upcoming collaboration for a ballet in San Francisco, both innovative works blending Krause’s natural soundscapes within the performing arts.

He collaborated with friend and composer Richard Blackford to produce a 30-minute symphony featuring a 70-piece orchestra incorporating the recorded melodies of the nature world. Performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, “The Great Animal Orchestra: Symphony for Orchestra and Wild Soundscapes” celebrates the natural soundscapes and draws attention to the world’s vanishing habitats.

“I’m delighted by the responses to the symphony in all three performances it has had so far,” said Blackford via email in the UK. “They have been much enhanced by the presence of Dr. Krause and the pre-concert talks that we gave, describing some of the background to the work.”

Krause traveled to Europe this summer for the symphony premiere at the Cheltenham Music Festival in England. He presented 18 lectures for audiences of up to 2,000 people, selling out every venue during his 2½ -month tour.

Krause and Blackford hope the symphony will instill a sense of wonder at the sounds and complexities of the natural world.

“I hope they’re engaged enough so they want to hear these fragile sounds of the natural world,” said Krause. “There’s nothing more eloquent than the natural soundscape.”

He’ll further the awareness with a springtime ballet made possible through a grant in collaboration with Alonzo King LINES Dance of San Francisco.

The grant from San Francisco-based Creative Work Fund is one of 13 presented last month to literary and performing artists in the Bay Area, each $30,000 to $40,000 and highly competitive.

The ballet, Krause said, “will be similar to the symphony in approach but not in resolution.”

Krause has seen firsthand the reduction of the world’s ecosystems from human encroachment and the effects of global warming. He estimates that about half of his recordings were taken from habitats that either no longer exist or have been substantially altered. Early in his career it took 10 to 15 hours to collect one hour of natural soundscapes. Today 2,000 hours are required to get the same uninterrupted sounds of the wild.

Even in Sonoma Valley, the difference is palpable.

“The habitats here in Sonoma are changing,” said Krause. “The density and diversity of bird life is starting to change, and it’s quite noticeable in the valley.”

He wants people to recognize the value and importance of these vanishing ecosystems, starting in parks and neighborhoods right at home. Sugarloaf Ridge State Park and Point Reyes National Seashore offer numerous soundscapes, but even a backyard works for those in tune with nature.

Krause’s recommendation is simple: “You get your lardy butt out there and into the wild, and you walk,” he said.

The natural soundscapes are more than music to his ears, he said. They calm his severe attention-deficit disorder and deepen his spirituality.

“To me it’s the voice of the Divine. You can’t get any closer.”

For more information, or to listen to Bernie Krause’s recordings, visit wildsanctuary.com.