Intertwining The Lives Of Moths And Humans Through Music

SPEAKER 1: Emergence, flight, migration, immolation. If you’re a fan of moths, you’ll recognize these words as important stages in their lives. But as a pair of musicians discovered during lockdown in 2020, they can also apply to us too.

So they created The Moth Project, a concept album and stage show that combines songs of a whole ecosystem of genres– ’80s pop, funk, classical, covers, and even spoken word combined with stunning photos and videos of these creatures.

And they learned that we have a lot more in common with moths than you might think. Sci-fi producer and host of our podcast, Universe of Art, D. Peterschmidt, sat down with them and has that story.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: In 2020. Peter Kiesewalter was at a small family cottage in Ottawa, Canada, taking in the summer night with his brother, Toby.

PETER KIESEWALTER: I’d been watching Toby while I was down at the campfire, making another gin and tonic and watching these moths flutter around. And I remember one night saying to him, what’s that about? Why do they go to the light? Why do they go to the flame? And the first night I saw images from his camera, I was blown away.

The last few years, I’ve really been turned on to moths.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: Toby is a park Ranger, an interpretive naturalist for Ontario parks, and he’d been getting into mothing, which is like birding, but for moths. He learned how to photograph them and showed Peter some of his pictures.

PETER KIESEWALTER: It was absolutely stunning to see when you zoom in on them, they look like shag carpeting, the amount of hair and colors were just extraordinary.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: Peter is a musician based in New York City. He’s a Grammy-nominated artist, and he’s composed music for ABC News, Monday Night Football, even Winnie the Pooh Show. In spring 2020, he was about to go on tour with another musician, but that fell through when COVID rolled around. So he went up to the cottage in Canada with his family.

PETER KIESEWALTER: What’s this one? Holy smokes.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: That year we were all trying to find ways to deal with our anxieties. Some people got really into sourdough bread. Peter got obsessed with moths.

PETER KIESEWALTER: Hello, you. That big one. And that one, that looks like a leaf. It’s not a leaf. You gotta remember, I’m also a product of where I live. And in Western civilization, they get a bad rap. Moths are known as the critters that eat your clothes and have deforested great swaths of forest around the world. So I really didn’t know anything about them until I started to think of my own situation and think, well, what can I create a show about.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: And Toby had a book recommendation for Peter, Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. And she brings those two perspectives together into a celebration of the natural world around us. That book helped him see moths in a new way.

PETER KIESEWALTER: In some Indigenous cultures, they are casting a completely different light than what we see them as. And in some cultures, they’re viewed as guardians of dream time, which is a really cool and beautiful way of looking at them as opposed to in the Bible or any reference in Shakespeare, always casts them as harbingers of death and destruction.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: One of the book’s central questions is what can you give the Earth in return for all the Earth gives you? This hit Peter hard at that point in the pandemic.

PETER KIESEWALTER: And she says, if you’re an artist, create transformative works of art. And that was my epiphany, reading that saying, ah-hah, I can do that. I can create something to pay back the Earth. I saw a similarity between these moths and my own life. I saw resonance, also in this whole thing to the flame. I thought, well, I’m kind of like that, and I’m kind of drawn to things that might be harmful to me.

I think my parents often thought that I was a bit reckless with the way I lived my life, not really knowing month to month or year to year how I was going to pay the rent and raise a family. But in starting this, I realized this is not going to pay the rent for a few years. But nevertheless, here I go.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: His partner, Whitney Lagrange, is also a musician. She’s a violinist who plays regularly in Broadway orchestras and with artists like Billy Joel and Smokey Robinson. But when Peter told her he wanted to make a concept album about moths and that he wanted her to play on it, she had a different reaction.

WHITNEY LAGRANGE: I just said, what? It sounded really weird to me, but the more I looked at these incredible creatures, I just was blown away. I went from what, to wow, this is awesome.

PETER KIESEWALTER: So I had to find a way to interpret moths artistically, and I started to find connections between them and us.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: Those connections became the track titles on the album, basically taking a stage of the moths’ life and relating it to a human experience.

PETER KIESEWALTER: The universal themes of migration, life, death, and especially, metamorphosis and transformation. So I started to write some tunes, but also, given the sheer diversity of moths, and there are a lot of them, I wanted the music to reflect that.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: Here’s one of the first tracks on the album. It’s a folky song called “Migration.”

[PETER KIESELWALTER, “MIGRATION”] Got no time to suffer or fail. Going to hitch a ride on a South Wing gate.

PETER KIESEWALTER: Some moths make this very perilous migratory journeys. Most of them probably don’t make it.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: There’s this one moth called the death’s-head hawkmoth. It’s the same one from Silence of the Lambs. And every year, it travels over 2,000 miles from Europe to Africa to have its offspring.

PETER KIESEWALTER: I saw some parallel story there with my parents.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: Peter’s parents were born in Germany, and they both grew up during World War II. He told me they had some harrowing experiences. By the end of the war, his dad was 10, and his mom was 6. In the late 1950s, they met while working at a shop in Cologne and got married. But they wanted to leave the country.

PETER KIESEWALTER: A lot of people were getting out of Germany because it had been pretty decimated.

[PETER KIESEWALTER, “MIGRATION”] Going to join the exodus, baby/ Ursa Major guide

D. PETERSCHMIDT: So they emigrated to Canada and had kids. Some of their family came with them from Germany, but Peter’s maternal grandfather, a science teacher, he didn’t make it out of the war.

PETER KIESEWALTER: Her only memory of her father is of him pointing out the Big Dipper to her when she’s a little kid. And this cottage, when we stand on our dock, it’s literally right in front of us, The Big Dipper, during the summer months, it’s believed that moths used the stars to navigate at night, which is when they’re active for the most part.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: Scientists believe moths are able to make these long journeys with the help of the moon and the stars. Actually, the reason they circle lights at night is likely because they incorrectly assume it’s a celestial object. High-speed footage shows moths constantly adjusting to keep their backs to an artificial light source, just as if it were flying horizontally in relation to the moon and stars.

PETER KIESEWALTER: So it felt like my mom had also been navigated to this place by The Big Dipper because there it is. And every night, she comes down to the dock, she says the same thing, “Look, Peter, The Big Dipper.”

D. PETERSCHMIDT: As you might know, moths have a similar life cycle to butterflies. They hatch, they grow into a caterpillar, and they try to survive until they can spin a cocoon for its metamorphosis. Inside the cocoon, they turn into a kind of soup. Their bodies break down, and then they emerge, transformed.

PETER KIESEWALTER: The coming out of these winged adults in these fabulous, incredible colors after trying to stay hidden for the bulk of their life, just felt like there’s something here.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: Because when I think of moths coming out of their cocoons, my mind goes to ’80s pop, obviously.

PETER KIESEWALTER: It sat on a hard drive for 10 years, and I pulled it out and revamped it. And I just felt it lent itself to the word emergence.

[PETER KIESELWALTER, “EMERGENCE”] You know, I’ve been shut away in this cocoon a long time. This feeling, this force, it’s got a lot of power, and it makes me feel like– it makes me feel like– whew!

WHITNEY LAGRANGE: I love “Emergence.” It’s just dancing. It’s just filled with life.

PETER KIESEWALTER: It seemed to me I was writing sort of a coming out anthem, but it really had a very universal thing of– well, at some point in life, aren’t we all trying to annihilate ourselves and emerge as a new human being?

D. PETERSCHMIDT: The moth project also helped Peter re-contextualize some difficult experiences in his life. He reworked another unreleased song called “In My Dream,” that he produced with a Canadian musician years back. She wrote the main song and lyrics, and with her permission, he added this autobiographical section at the top.

[PETER KIESEWALTER, “IN MY DREAMS”]

Some Indigenous cultures believe that moths are the guides of dream time,

That you should pay attention if a moth visits you in your dream.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: In 1990, Peter and Toby’s brother passed away after living with cancer for three years.

PETER KIESEWALTER: And that for a few years after his death, I had the same dream every single night for two years. And while I was not having a dream about moths, I was having the exact, same dream about my brother every night.

[PETER KIESELWALTER, “IN MY DREAMS”] It’s autumn.

We’re walking with his dog,

And no one is missing.

(SINGING) I’m running alone

PETER KIESEWALTER: So that song sort of frames that experience for me.

WHITNEY LAGRANGE: I still cry sometimes while we’re playing it because it’s a very, very moving piece, and it just shifts into what really does feel like a dream state. It’s really beautiful.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: In late 2022, Toby was invited to speak at a conference for interpretive naturalists to talk about why interpreters and scientists should collaborate more with artists.

PETER KIESEWALTER: It is such an honor to be up here in front of you tonight in this–

D. PETERSCHMIDT: And he convinced the organizers to have Peter and Whitney perform The Moth Project in full for the first time for a big audience, which they’d finished a few months prior. Projected behind them where Toby’s photos, along with macro pictures of moths from other scientists and nature photographers that Peter reached out to. But even though Peter and Whitney are no strangers when it comes to performing live, there were some pre-show jitters.

WHITNEY LAGRANGE: I was really nervous because I thought, well, we’re talking about science. I hope we got it right, Peter.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: So folks, please welcome, from New York City, Whitney Lagrange, Peter Kiesewalter, and The Moth Project.

WHITNEY LAGRANGE: Listen to my stereo. Come on in. We have the gift of choice, of story, of love, of gratitude. Of hands that make ingenious tools and transform–

PETER KIESEWALTER: Thanks so much.

WHITNEY LAGRANGE: And then when we finished the show, I felt like a rock star. They’re like whew-hoo. The standing ovation, clapping. They just loved it.

PETER KIESEWALTER: Afterwards, they came up to us more than a handful in tears. The fact that so many scientists were emotionally moved by it was quite a surprise to me.

WHITNEY LAGRANGE: It made me feel really good, like a stamp of approval. So that was a great show.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: I mean, Peter, did you think this would end up being so personal when you started it?

PETER KIESEWALTER: No, I was just trying to find ways to sing, write, talk about moths in a way that meant something to me. And it slowly became evident that, actually, I think this show is about our parents and our family. So it revealed itself slowly, to me, that yeah, this is quite personal. And I’ve never done anything quite so personal before.

D. PETERSCHMIDT: If you want to catch The Moth Project live, Peter and Whitney actually have a few performances coming up in Madison, Wisconsin; Saint Paul, Minnesota; and Lincoln, Nebraska, from October 24 to 26. You can find out more, listen to the album, and see visuals from the moth project at sciencefriday.com/moths. I’m D. Peterschmidt.

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