SEE BUILDING 14 ON CAMPUS MAP FOR LOCATION OF KAUL AUDITORIUM

HANDICAP ACCESSIBILITY FROM 28TH AND BOTSFORD DRIVE

As a recent Portlander, I can understand Oregonians' image of the river as the highway of the mountains, the great knife that splits the Cascades and runs to the sea. But for me, growing up in sight of the Idaho Rockies, the Columbia was the river that drained the desert, a blue dialectic of wet and dry, the cold water of the Rockies under a fierce desert sun.

We knew as kids that the creek behind our house, brown with Palouse topsoil, would end up in Astoria. We just didn't have a good concept of how much water would be joining it. So this is the conceit of the piece: a drop of water falls high in the Idaho bitterroots, along the divide, and gathers speed as it moves toward Astoria. It passes the great ponderosa groves along the clearwater, where the Nez Perce made giant canoes for navigating the waterways. We hear the scraping and chopping of the timber, and the spash of a hundred-foot canoe entering the water. Cadenzas move us downstream to Celilo, where the Chinook are throwing themselves at the falls, their red bodies clanging like angry metal in the sunlight. Lastly, we meet the ocean, where great whale songs meet the cold freshwater in the deep shelves off the coast. Imagine what Rocky Mountain water must taste like to a passing orca pod: pines, little far-off trout, brown Palouse loess, a billion acres of basalt and dust and sun. This was the contrast I was after in the piece, since the percussionist, Mark Goodenberger, is an Astorian. He takes the trip for us, from sky to rock, to tree, to sea.

Program notes:

prelude: at the high divide

Rain falls on twisted pines at the crest of the Idaho Rockies. Across the tributary streams of the Columbia, a nation of water leaps from to green branches to begin its run to the ocean.

I. Clear Water Pines

At the canoe grove along the Clearwater, mighty pines are felled for hundred-foot river ships. They are burned, scraped, hollowed, blessed, and at last set adrift.

cadenza: Lapwai to Celilo

Through canyons, prairie lands, the bounty of the Palouse, and at last through the desert, the waters converge on the great falls at Celilo.

II. Blood Red Chinook

Ten thousand years of salmon fishers greet ten thousand years of salmon at Celilo. The red metal of fish backs glitter in the bright shouting water.

cadenza: Celilo to Astoria

The Great River of the West rolls like a sleeping army through forests, cities, mountains, arriving at still greater water, just past Astoria.

III. Deep Sea Meeting

The Columbia is the largest river in the world without a delta, and its meeting with the sea is unparalleled in its force. Between two surf-pounded beaches, the river water shocks the Pacific with the taste of Rocky Mountain trees. The hymns of the great pines meet the songs of the migrating whales in the cold trench. It is a song that never ceases.