On the
morning of July 29, I stood at the Watchman Overlook at Crater Lake National
Park. Far below me, tucked deep into the Mt. Mazama caldera, lay the lake, a
royal blue deeper than any sky, any flower, any stone. From behind me an
ancient song of the Klamath Tribe was hurtling over the lake, driven by pounding
drums. Chills swept up my back. These people were singing this same song in
this same spot 13,000 years ago, flinging the power of their song from rim to rim across
this most mysterious and most beautiful of all lakes. The centuries collapsed
around me.
This was the
prelude to Michael Gordon’s magnificent new piece for orchestra, chorus, and
Native American drummers and singers, around 140 musicians, commissioned by the
Britt Festival, in Jacksonville, Oregon, in recognition of the one hundredth anniversary
of the National Park Service. Gordon had visited Crater Lake National Park in winter
and in summer. He had lived with the Klamath Tribe. He had let the history and
natural history, the flora and fauna, the beauty and seasonal variations of the
lake and the park become a part of him. I was at this moment at the world
premiere of the resulting composition, “Natural History.” There would be other
performances at the park the next day, but this one – by invitation only except
for those, like me, who were willing to walk the 3.7-mile trail up and down the
hills along the rim to get there – was the only one at which the audience could
see the lake while listening to the music. I wouldn’t have missed it for
the world.
The Steiger
Butte Drum of the Klamath tribe, the woodwinds and strings of the Britt Orchestra,
a 50-member choir of regional singers, and the VIP chairs were below where I
stood on a hillside. Teddy Abrams conducted from a podium in their midst. Eight
or ten trombonists and trumpeters lined up at the edge of the parking lot, following
a conductor who was following Abrams. Eight or ten percussionists stood in a
line that angled up a hill above Abrams and the orchestra. Behind them sat or
stood a small audience of walkers and bicyclists. The sun beat down fiercely. Introductions
and welcomes were made, including one in the language of the Klamath tribe. Then
the tribal singing and drumming began. Then there was a pause. The lake
shimmered in its velvet blueness, majestic in its enormity, and then, with soft
repetitive notes, as though not to challenge the beauty of the landscape, Gordon’s “Natural
History” began.
Music came in ripples and waves. A reprisal of the Klamath tribal song entered for a few measures. The
trombones and trumpets, from their separated space, came to the fore, not all
together but in waves. A trombone in the orchestra echoed the wave, like the
last lap of water in the distance. The percussionists one at a time, in a wave,
raised their hands with tambourines and let them fall, like wind flowing
through the forest. The chorus entered, starting with words of Thoreau: “I
wish to speak a word for Nature for absolute Freedom and Wildness,” something
the music was doing even without words, but then the chorus went on to speak
more words for Nature: a catalogue of beings found in the park, from red-tailed
hawk to bleeding heart, from bumble bee to rough-skinned newt. The words were
sung in staccato rhythms with the steady beat of the drum (like the bark of foxes,
the cawing of crows). The last of the words evoked again the Klamath Tribe: “My
father always told me that Giwas, which means 'spiritual place', Giwas is
Crater Lake. I go up there to gather healing and prayer.”
The music captured monumentality: of
time, landscape, beauty. It elicited images of waves and wind and water,
crickets and dawn and birds, and, without an obvious boom of the eruption of a
volcano, it also evoked Mt. Mazama, the collapse of the caldera, and the
formation of Crater Lake from eons of snow-melt, spring-water, and rain. The
music was as monumental as the lake and the mountains before me, as rhythmical
as the seasons that fall on the lake, as even and yet as varied as the natural
history of its title. Landscape and music blended into one beauty.
The day before the concert I had
taken a long swim in Crater Lake, swimming so far into the depths of the blue
that my friend on the shore lost sight of me, the way a hawk, spiraling upward,
becomes lost in the distances of sky as we watch. As I listened to this evocative
music from the magnificent overlook of the lake, the only thing better, I
thought, would be to hear that music while swimming. But that would have
been impossible. The music lifted from the musicians, was flung skyward with
the toss of the conductors’ hands, and floated upward, far above the lake, to
disappear, like the hawk, into the blue above.
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