Celilo Falls, revisited, was more astounding and polished the second time around when the Oregon Symphony performed it June 7-9 at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall than when it premiered three years earlier, on June 4, 2022, at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton and repeated the following day at Northeast Portland’s St. Michael’s Lutheran Church. The story of the loss of Indigenous fishing waters needed to be told – even though composer Nancy Ives said she is descended from a long line of colonists without a drop of Native blood. And the story needed to be amplified and sent out to the non-Native world, even if Ives said it was not her “story to tell” because of her heritage.

To make up for her non-Native genes, she collaborated with Indigenous people: photographer Joe Cantrell (Cherokee) and Shoshone/Bannock poet/playwright Ed Edmo, and toggled back and forth between their interpretations of the Celilo Falls destruction. Over three years as the piece took shape, a number of Native people helped. Elder Martha Cloud, Yakama, of Lyle, Wash., urged her to lie face down on a rock to listen to the rhythm of the Columbia Gorge water. Ives visited the She Who Watches petroglyph and spent time at Cloud’s family fishing site. Splayed over a boulder to hear the water’s sounds and symphony, Ives said, “I truly did have an epiphany, and as I got up, someone caught a big salmon. Martha seemed to understand just what I needed to know to finish the piece.”

With a full orchestra, the symphony performance was bigger, better and more dramatic than the original chamber orchestra version played by Portland Chamber Orchestra in 2022. That interpretation was called Celilo Falls: We Were There. Ives, who plays first cello in the symphony, said in an interview with Elizabeth Schwartz in Oregon Symphony magazine that the new shortened title – Celilo Falls – “reflected the reality that Indigenous people continue to live on the Columbia River, preserving their spiritual and communal ties to the region.”

The revised title has an in-the-moment spark, relying less on the past and more on the present. The one-time powerful falls where salmon never ceased to swim, years ago the sixth biggest in the world, were flooded to make way for the Dalles Dam in 1957, destroying the fishing waters and a way of Native life. The “Niagara of the West” was a trading mecca teeming with plentiful healthy salmon. It was a communal spot and draw for many Indigenous people. When the falls were flooded 65 years ago, a wound opened in the Native community. “It broke Grandfather’s heart,” author Linda Meanus, who grew up near the falls, dancing at Longhouse celebrations as a girl, said during the symphony’s Concert Conversation before the June 9 performance. 

Aside from changing the 45-minute composition’s name, Ives and her colleagues tweaked a few things for the orchestral version, though the story and music pretty much remained the same as the original chamber piece. Ives saw her music as a bridge between Edmo’s personal, poetic take and Cantrell’s universal vision illustrated with vivid photos of jumping salmon, brilliant underwater plants and anemones, ancient petroglyphs and modern-day Native faces. As Cantrell said to Ives, “We ARE the rock, we are the water, the salmon. We are made of star stuff.”

Edmo grew up near the falls and his memories are scattered throughout his clear-eyed poetry. His several featured poems included “What I Miss the Most Is the Mist,” “Celilo Blues” and the last movement’s “There Has Been Something”:

I’m not sure what it was
but
sometimes at night
I can hear it in the wind
or it comes to me
in my dreams
like the smell of salmon
cooking

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The poems were incorporated into the piece as actor Brent Florendo Sitwalla-Pum (Enrolled: Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs; Wasco, Yakama, Warm Springs) narrated onstage. Oregon Symphony’s David Danzmayr conducted, maintaining a reflective, meditative orchestral sound rather than an emphatic, insistent or angry tone. A lover of contemporary music, Danzmayr had clearly communicated with Ives to achieve a fitting pacing and balance. “He solicited my feedback and opinions all along the way, which a conductor doesn’t necessarily have to do once the score is in hand,” Ives said in a post-concert email.

Another welcome addition to the orchestral version was Zak Margolis’ video animation of Cantrell’s photos on the big screen posted behind the orchestra, which allowed the photos to flow and fade into one another, like the movement of water.

The mostly melodic score divided into 11 parts featured the harp – for which Ives has never composed before. Played by Matthew Tusky in the chamber and orchestral versions, the harp shone brightly as a musical character. “The harp knits together certain music elements,” Ives said in an interview when the piece debuted, “but most of all, the sound of the harp felt extra useful when evoking the water and wind.”

Woodwind and brass players blew into their instruments (without pitching a note) to elicit the sound of the wind, both melancholy and calming. The roar of the falls and its absence were essential sounds.The merging of these elements with images of salmon hitting the rocks, represented by the tok-tok of percussion, blended into a melancholy sensuous sonic experience.

When the late Yaacov “Yaki” Bergman, the Portland Chamber Orchestra maestro who originally commissioned the piece in 2019, died in 2023, Ives and Cantrell said that the collaboration ranked high – even highest – on their lists of meaningful artistic work.

Ives joins a group of living local composers whom the symphony has featured in recent years, including Kenji Bunch, Andy Akiho, Gabriel Kahane, and Damien Geter, who has since moved to Chicago. Percussion superstar Akiho is the most acclaimed; his work has been nominated for Grammy awards.

A good long satisfying story

After standing applause for Celilo and intermission, the orchestra played a rousing version of Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Op. 35, written in 1888. Danzmayr was right at home, on his tiptoes, swirling his arms to embrace the full orchestra, burning a lot of calories throughout the 42-minute extravagantly Romantic composition. He gave the popular piece dignity and salvaged it from its early reputation of easy-listening. 

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Sarah Kwak soloed on the violin, which represented Scheherazade, the storyteller who spun tales for 1,001 nights and was thus spared by the sultan who had decapitated his former wives and lovers. Kwak hit stratospherically high notes with crystal clearness, bringing the four-movement piece to a stirring end, as did other musicians who had their say in this orchestral feat.

Legend has it that the ruthless and story-tamed sultan and Scheherazade married and lived happily ever after. Nothing like a good long satisfying story. The audience went wild for the late 19th-century piece.