The Musical Flow
Quiet moment on the Middle Fork Salmon
There is no spot on a river that encapsulates its entire journey from source to sea. No rapid, bend, or eddy can fully convey the odyssey that water takes on this path. Water begins this trek as it tips from one drainage to another, gathers momentum as it joins other streams, crashes down over cascades, and ultimately dissolves its identity upon reaching the ocean. It would be unfair to look out from a cobbled beach and think this singular place represents the whole river.
I thought about this while listening to Handel’s “Water Music” last week at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival Amphitheater; IRU partnered with the Boise Phil to open their season with this wonderful performance. Adjacent to the Boise River, birds flying overhead as the clouds glowed at sunset, it was hard not to draw a comparison between the flowing nature of music and of water.
Just as a river is not defined by an isolated spot, in music no single note could ever represent a symphony. The brilliance of music is its ability to carry the listener on a journey. It picks you up, builds a soundscape, and excites emotions until the end of the voyage. Even a recurring theme cannot convey the entire piece; full immersion beginning to end is the only way to really feel the scope of a piece of music.
But there is another musical connection to flowing water.
The sound of a river is the bass line for the symphony of nature. Listening to the thud of recirculating waves is to feel the pulse of a river, to hear the rhythm of the natural world. As the neighboring willows shake in the wind, as the osprey calls out from its perch, and as the trout splashes while catching stoneflies, all of the orchestral sections of the natural world come into focus—if you’re willing to hear them.
The music of wild spaces has always been there, but our fast-paced industrialized society has grown too loud for many of us to hear it.
Often we spend our free time outside. We seek refuge from phones, fluorescent lights, and traffic. We Idahoans almost invariably find our destination to be near a river. Once there, the harsh blare of conference calls and cable news fades out, and nature’s symphony crescendoes once again. We feel the battery recharging within as we spend time just remaining still, listening.
A river can only truly play its music if it’s allowed to be wild. A river dammed is a river silenced. A river twisted by the hand of progress and greed still provides water; but water alone is not what makes it so special. A reservoir drowns the orchestra. A mine derails the symphony.
Mines, dams, and human impact are facts of life. There’s no stopping the march forward in today’s society. But not every extraction project is ‘necessary,’ and many dams have lost their usefulness. It is possible to reconsider our priorities and make targeted, intentional choices about how we harness the natural world.
Idaho’s rugged beauty is directly linked to its wild spaces. Our state’s 100,000 miles of waterways anchor millions of acres that provide recreation and food for us. They enable an outdoor economy of nearly $8 billion and 80,000 jobs. They sustain fish and wildlife populations.
But beyond that, they inspire us. The flow of water is also an opportunity to remember that we only inhabit a moment in the river of time. Everything we understand is a result of all who came before us; our ancestors are the headwaters of our experience. Maybe that can help us in looking downstream toward the next generation, and hopefully keep them in mind as we navigate how to take care of the world around us.
Do me a favor, for your own sake—go find a spot on a river, and just listen. And remember, that spot is only a piece of the symphony.
Middle Fork of the Salmon River
