Hear the story of the majestic Celilo Falls

The river originates in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia. It flows first northwest and then south through Washington State and into Oregon, at which point it turns resolutely west to form the boundary between the two states. Along the way N’Chewana – that’s its name in the Sahaptin language family; on maps, it’s the Columbia River – has spawned tributaries, carved out gorges, and filled lakes. About 75 miles east of Portland the river narrows. From time immemorial, that narrowing has produced magnificent rapids and waterfalls, a place where the roar of the water pervades the land and the salmon fight their way upstream to spawn. This was Celilo Falls, for millennia a trading and fishing center. 

But that all ended on March 10, 1957, as the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Dalles Dam for the first time. Celilo Falls disappeared under the rising water. The thundering roar was silenced. Not only a landscape but an ancient way of life was obliterated. 

Celilo Falls is gone but its memory remains, and this is where Nancy Ives, principal cello of the Oregon Symphony and notable composer, enters the story. She tells us that the late Yaacov Bergman, director of the Portland Chamber Orchestra and the Siletz Bay Music Festival, commissioned a piece that would honor the coastal Siletz people. She had been intending to write a work focusing on First Peoples, and that brought up the story of Celilo Falls. She consulted with Joe Cantrell, a Cherokee photographer who is deeply committed to service and the conservation of memory. As Ives puts it, this was not her story to tell; it belongs to the people who were there and the people whose lives were changed. That led, in turn, to poet and storyteller Ed Edmo, a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes who was there at Celilo Falls in his boyhood and who can speak about it as it was. 

Thus, the three collaborators created what was originally titled Celilo Falls: We Were There, premiered by the Portland Chamber Orchestra. It is a musical composition to be sure, but it also encompasses poems and narration by Ed Edmo with projected images by Joe Cantrell in an eloquent telling of the story of Celilo Falls, its people, and its way of life. 

Now Ives has re-cast the work for full orchestra, with a rewritten first movement that both expands her sonic materials and emphasizes the broad relevance of the story. Celilo Falls is structured in 11 movements over which not only the narrative, but its message unfolds. The updated first movement is about the river and its people: N’Chewana flows down from the mountains and out towards the ocean, gaining strength and power as it goes; at its peak, we hear the vast thunders of the cataracts, and at the end, a hint of Celilo Falls themselves – maybe in the distance, or maybe their memory.

They fished for salmon off wooden platforms at Celilo Falls, and Celilo Fishermen describes the weaving of the nets and the catching of the fish. Deep Time speaks of the larger perspective, the timelessness of the place that is reflected so powerfully in Joe Cantrell’s photographs. Then comes the first of two Grandfather Storyteller movements, as Ed Edmo’s poetry tells us of the storyteller “weaving words of ancient strength, words colored with ageless time.” 

Ed Edmo tells us about his boyhood at Celilo Falls in What I miss most is the mist, his memories of his dad fishing off the platforms and the breeze on his cheek and the mist caressing the air. After the brief musical bridge Grandfather echo, the inundation of the falls is portrayed in Celilo Blues. 

This is a good place to mention that Celilo Falls is, as a whole, elegiac; Ives took her cue from Ed Edmo’s poems, which mourn but do not condemn. Both Celilo Blues and Inundation, Flat Water lament the loss of the great waterfall while portraying the silencing of the river, followed by She Who Watches, witnessing the sacred site that overlooks where the falls had been. A reprise of Grandfather Storyteller leads to the closing movement There has been something, from Edmo’s poems of remembrance of what has been lost and what yet remains, reflections of songs and sights, and “the smell of salmon cooking.” 

Celilo Falls is about compassion, about connecting, about telling a story that needs to be told. Hope remains. Sonar imaging has demonstrated that Celilo Falls still exists down there, deep underneath the waters. And such things as dams do not last forever. Perhaps in some far-off day the Falls will re-emerge, once again weaving rainbows in the mist as they embrace the land in their sublime thunder.

There’s something inspiring about the durability of Rimsky-Korsakov’s posthumous reputation, sustained as it is against the persistent downwards tug exerted by two trifles that have long been consigned to the purgatory of easy-listening pops classics. First up, the ubiquitous encore bonbon The Flight of the Bumblebee, available in arrangement upon transcription upon adaptation, including that Liberace cash cow Bumble Boogie. Then there’s Song of India – actually “The Song of the Hindu Trader” from the opera Sadko – mildly exotic yet soothing elevator Muzak par excellence in its various incarnations from Mario Lanza, Tommy Dorsey, and the Boston Pops. 

Even Scheherazade, surely Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral magnum opus, was once dogged by whispered suspicions that it might fall just ever so short of full brahmin respectability. For much of its existence, at least outside of Russia, it was treated mostly as a lowbrow entertainment best employed for showing off the megawattage of the living-room stereo. Even as late as the 1970s the average Scheherazade LP was festooned with girly-show jacket art that would not have been out of place on a pin-up calendar. 

But nowadays the scope of Rimsky-Korsakov’s achievement is readily acknowledged by Western musicians while his music is reaching listeners with ever-increasing frequency. And while all those corny arrangements of Bumblebee and Song of India are fading away to nostalgic knickknacks, Scheherazade has rapidly gained ground as a late Romantic symphony on par with the best of its era. 

For a symphony it is, one that threads recurring melodies throughout the work as unifying and narrative devices, the first and most immediately vivid of which is the sociopathic Sultan Shahryar. Determined at any cost to avoid being cuckolded, the Sultan has acquired the exceedingly unpleasant habit of beheading each of his wives after the wedding night. Before his kingdom completely runs out of marriageable maidens, his newest wife, the resourceful Scheherazade, employs a nightly strategy of beginning – but not finishing – an engrossing story. The Sultan, determined to hear the rest of the tale, stays her execution for One Thousand and One Nights, as the collection of her tales is known. 

Rimsky-Korsakov presents the Sultan right at the very beginning via a stern and forbidding theme that positively reeks of malice. But it is followed immediately by a quote from Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, establishing by association that this is indeed a fantasy, a dream. Then Scheherazade herself enters: she is always played by the solo violin in an elegant and intricately ornamented theme that provides the gentle voice of the spellbinding storyteller weaving her magic. 

That magic kicks off with the intrepid Sinbad as he sails the wide seas in search of adventure and romance. We may safely assume that Shahryar sees himself as Sinbad, given the transformation of his formerly snarling theme into a swashbuckling melody that billows and surges through some of the most aquatically evocative music ever written. Whether Shahryar also puts himself into the shoes of the unjustly persecuted wandering (kalendar) Prince or becomes the ardent young prince with his princess isn’t clear. But no matter; the stories themselves come alive in a luscious orchestral landscape that bears powerful witness to the sheer technical skill wielded by a fundamentally self-taught composer. 

Rimsky-Korsakov’s mastery of orchestration was never more on display than in Scheherazade, one of the towering landmarks in the history of that fussy and difficult art. Despite the work’s reputation as an orchestral tour de force, its overriding characteristic is restraint, not excess. Scheherazade is all about the individual players. Filled with solos and near-cadenzas, the work offers up a post-graduate course in writing idiomatically for each instrument, making best use of its inherent character to help the story along. 

Everything has to come to an end; so after the festival in Baghdad and the spectacular shipwreck at the work’s climax, we hear a tamed and domesticated Shahryar, his once-fearsome theme now purring quietly in loving satisfaction, as Scheherazade wraps up her thousand-plus nights of storytelling. In the last moments, that quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream returns to assure us that – what else? – they lived happily ever after.