Hunter Noack travels for work. One week he might commute between Oregon or Washington, and the following month, flit between Montana, Utah and California. You can track his whereabouts on his website—and might even see him on the highway.
Noack is easy to spot. He’s the one in the pickup truck, pulling a 1912 Steinway Model D grand piano on a flatbed trailer.
He’s taking it to his office, which is in a forest. And on a mountaintop. Or, sometimes in a canyon. Having figured out a way to fuse his love of classical music with his passion for the outdoors, Noack plays by an entirely different set of rules when he punches his time card.
Instead of a computer screen, he reads sheet music, sitting at the same piano used in Carnegie Hall. Only in Noack’s performances, there is no theatre seating or ushers. There are, instead, birds, deer and squirrels experiencing his art alongside people on blankets, people sitting on rocks or people in walking meditation, taking in the gorgeous scenery.
Since 2016, his traveling show, In a Landscape, has allowed him to give over 300 concerts to more than 75,000 people in state and national parks, working ranches and epic natural spaces that leave most attendees speechless.
His product is awe and wonder, and his mission is to connect people to nature through classical piano music. With a flatbed that rises to become a stage, and wireless headphones that allow guests to explore their surroundings as the music flows through them, his ROI is measured in faces and feelings, which are not quantifiable by any known marketing metrics.
How Noack’s journey started
Ten years into his whimsical traveling concert series, Noack’s enterprise hovers between $1.2 and $1.4 million—and a staff of 10. But when he started in 2016, an $18,000 grant from a regional arts agency allowed him to fund nine concerts where, with the help of his family, outside donations and lots of bootstrapping, he’d boldly bring a rented piano into the wild.
“My partner and my mother and stepfather have always been a huge part of making this project happen,” he shares, adding that “my mother came from a career in nonprofit management. And so, at the beginning, it was very much a team effort, kind of trying to figure out how we could make this happen. Now my partner is still involved informally, my mother is the executive director and my stepfather is the board president, and so it still very much feels like a family organization.”
When Noack got a larger grant from the Oregon Community Foundation the following year to bring the project across the state, hauling rented Steinways became too much of a liability. Thanks to the help of philanthropist Jordan Schnitzer who, in 2016, bought the first set of headphones (which reduce external noise since the outdoors lacks proper acoustics) and, in 2017, allowed him to pivot to a more permanent setup.
While others advised him to tote a keyboard around because it was easier, he says Schnitzer understood the value of having the same piano used in one of the best concert halls in the country for his project and bought him a fully restored 9-foot Steinway Model D built in 1912. Noack firmly believes that a large part of In a Landscape’s success is owed to the caliber of the instrument he uses.
The inspiration for the project
Noack says he got his inspiration for such a grand project from The Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Music and Theatre Projects, which he says presented thousands of free concerts and plays in theatres, public spaces and parks throughout the country during the Great Depression. “What I was particularly inspired by,” he says, “was that they brought … the performing arts outside of the concert hall and into what I believe are our most democratic spaces, which are our public lands … so with the first round of In a Landscape, I specifically chose parks and WPA sites.”
Because of Noack’s passion for natural resource management, the bulk of his concerts are in public lands, which include everything from city and county parks to state and national parks like Yosemite Valley and Joshua Tree.
“We work with federal land management agencies, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, national parks, state parks as well as … private resorts, ranches and farmers,” he says, adding that “the hope is that these different landscapes—some that are more wild and others where the human impact is more a present part of the story—inspire a state of curiosity to learn more about the landscape.”
Traveling with a hundred-year-old Steinway
To get his piano to such unique locations, Noack says he and his team had to design their own system of set-up and breakdown wherein the piano always stays inside the trailer with removable legs that allow for easier set-up and breakdown. The trailer elegantly transforms into a stage and is pulled behind a pickup truck that can go anywhere an off-road vehicle can go – including 9,000 feet on top of Mount Bachelor.
“We did a concert a few times in Big Sky, Montana,” Noack shares, “where through the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center, they arranged a snowcat to bring the trailer out into the middle of this open field where they had groomed a special cross country ski trail so people could snowshoe and cross country ski while they were listening to the music. It was amazing.”
Noack’s roots run deep
The seed for such a grand idea was planted when Noack was in college, living in the middle of San Francisco, LA and London, where he had to make an effort to be in nature. Having grown up in Oregon, where the outdoors was his playground, he says he longed for his work to bring him outside, but instead found himself creating indoor spaces that felt like they were outdoors.
“The context completely changed how people heard the music… and it was very effective,” says Noack.
While earning a M.A. from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, he won an award, which offered a stipend and the use of a Barbican theatre for two weeks. He decided to produce a theatrical presentation of the string sextet by Arnold Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht, which is based on the Richard Dehmel poem about a woman walking in a forest with her lover. Noack wanted to bring the story to life, so he worked with lighting and set designers to transform the theatre into a moonlit forest—including leaves on the ground people shuffled through, forest smells piped in and a choice to sit on seats or tree stumps.
“In a Landscape” is a hit
When he returned to Oregon, he realized that if he could recreate a forest inside a London theatre, he could bring a theatre experience into the breathtaking natural spaces in his home state and across the country.
That sensitivity benefits his attendees—many of whom have never heard classical music before, particularly those in rural areas who may not have access to a concert hall. Others, he says, “would never consider going to a classical music event, but because it’s on their neighbor’s ranch, they’re going to check it out. And those people are pleasantly surprised that they feel something.”
After his first year of In a Landscape, the feedback he got was unlike anything he got while performing inside concert halls. He says people were describing feelings of spirituality and transcendence, which helped him realize his project was much bigger than just him. “[It] has helped me expand my view and be more sensitive to what’s immediately happening around me and letting that energy be a part of the music,” he says.
Thanks to more than donations and grants, Noack can keep his ticket prices low, and his Good Neighbor program provides free tickets to those for whom the cost is prohibitive. “In this day and age where there’s so much that is telling us that we are living in different realities, I think that physical experiences together are really important,” he says. “I think that spending time in nature, listening to music together … is really important … and so I really hope that with this project we … get people a little bit out of their comfort zones to experience some magic in the wild.”
Photos by Arthur Hitchcock.
