The Portland Chamber Orchestra is performing “The Great River of the West” as part of their “All American” concert on January 27, 2007. The percussion concerto celebrates the Columbia River, and the second movement, titled “Blood Red Chinook,” celebrates Celilo Falls.

 

Here is a description of the concerto by the composer, Walla Walla-native Forrest Pierce:

 

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.