Field recording at the Columbia River

A counterfactual thought experiment. A young composer named Annea Lockwood left New Zealand in the 1960s. She attends Darmstadt, where she hears the music of Olivier Messiaen and Morton Feldman. From this experience, she dedicates her life to composing in the language of midcentury modernism. In 1966, instead of mounting the Glass Concert, she composed knotty organ music or soft, floating piano harmonies. She scores dense chamber works while pianos sit unburnt, unplanted, undrowned. As she attends programs of her works at Lincoln Center, no one is there to hear and learn the alien, ancient language of a river.

Luckily for all of us, Annea Lockwood turned out exactly as she should: brave, quick, and happy to embrace lively sounds. Atop and appreciate the world she’s provided us as composers. What would field recording be without Lockwood’s sound maps? How many of us would have learned to listen closely to nature without her being among those who have led the way?

In 1982, Annea completed her Sound Map of the Hudson River, ushering the listener into the hidden life of the waterway that runs near her house and touches where I live in New York on its journey to the Atlantic. Other sound maps followed: the Danube and Housatonic Rivers in 2005 and 2010 and recent collaborations on the Schuylkill River with sound artist Liz Phillips. In 2024, Annea and I made two trips to the Columbia River, recording almost 800 miles of river from its mouth on the border of Oregon and Washington states to the Canadian line. In April of 2025, we’ll tackle the last portion of the river, up into Canada, ending at its source, the massive Columbia Icefield.

At the time that Annea was making editing decisions for the Sound Map of the Hudson River, I was spending my days learning cursive and looking forward to recess. I had never held a trumpet; both my parents were convinced I would be an architect. The Columbia, however, has always been a guest at my family’s table, a topic of our conversations, and the center of our sense of self. When I was in high school, I’d swim across its treacherous currents to get to a small island where I could drink beer with my friends. When my wife and I married, we spent a cold, sea-spray-soaked honeymoon at the river’s mouth.

Annea and I have been friends for almost a decade. We met when I commissioned the piece Becoming Air for my For/With festival in Brooklyn. Typically, a composer would send me a score, listen patiently to early interpretations, and be generally friendly, especially during the post-concert drinks. Annea is different, though, and what started as her piece quickly became our piece. Since its debut in 2016, I’ve performed Becoming Air almost a dozen times, and she has been present for most of them. It’s now more than simply a solo trumpet piece; it’s a way of representing a long and wonderful friendship.

Annea and I often look for excuses to spend time together. We talk on the phone whenever we’re both home, sharing book recommendations and sending articles about rivers back and forth. We jump at the offer of a live discussion for festivals or a published interview for books, magazines, and websites because we get to spend time talking with each other. And that is a true joy. When Annea was approached to write something on her recent work, she proposed another such opportunity, and as always it was an afternoon I’ll cherish. We met in Lower Manhattan’s City Hall Park on a dazzling pre-fall day. After a catch-up and debrief—I had just performed Becoming Air at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, but we didn’t get to talk after the concert—we bought some snacks at a nearby Japanese bakery, found a bench among office workers in their lunchbreaks, and did what we love to do: talk with each other.

N: We’re taking the Columbia from mouth to source. I didn’t realize how different this was from your previous ways of working.

A: It is different, but it doesn't affect how I feel about the river and respond to it. Moving from source to mouth always felt like an opening up of things to me on a basic level, making me curious about what's around the next corner, the next bend—and there's always the next bend. Going upstream doesn't carry the same charge.

But there are positives: we can't start editing until we've been all the way up to the source, and that’s given us this time in which to mull over how we conceive of this work and the implications of working with this particular river at this particular point in time.

N: And working backward from the meeting of the river with the ocean, which is such a mighty confluence, is such a stark contrast when you hit the first dam.

A: Perhaps all the more so for you than for me because you have grown up with the sense of the river’s natural power.

N: How the economy and the culture and the societies around the dam sites change was really something I didn't expect to be so moved by. The sound of the river changed when it began to be controlled, of course, but so did the way people interacted with it and each other. Have you experienced that before with your sound maps of the Danube or Housatonic?

A: Well, it's easy to respond in relation to the Danube because that's ten different countries and cultures, not to mention languages and customs and relationships to the river. But changes in the river are very clearly reflected in its cultures. With the Housatonic however, it felt like such a homogenous river. It's pretty short, just going through Massachusetts and Connecticut. And there was something strange about it: I saw little community interaction with the actual water of the river. Being in a catastrophist frame of mind, I began to put that down to the pollution in the river. For example, there’s a spot near the headwaters where people launch for kayak trips. At that spot, you're warned to immediately wash the mud off your legs and hands because it's contaminated with PCBs. So, I concluded that people were less directly involved with the river because of that danger, and it changed the way I worked. But what have you been observing on the Columbia?

N: I think people living on the lower part of the river are a little more wild. Part of that is their relation to the river, fishing, or working in the bar, which are both incredibly dangerous pursuits. And so the people of the lower Columbia have a little bit more of a celebratory, on-the-edge feeling. As we moved upriver, especially toward an area of frequent damming, we saw a lot more people using the river recreationally. Culturally, it appeared to be a more agricultural mindset, which felt more tame somehow.

A: It seems to me like detachment, as if the river is not at the core of their lives.

N: You said at one point, “We have to find a spot that's got some life in it.” That was something that really struck me because it changed the way I was listening to the river. I remember one site in particular. We hadn’t found anything to record all day, and then we pulled into a small power station with a pool that fed into the river. If you looked at it on paper, it wouldn't make much sense for us to record it because it was very industrial. Besides the sound of the station itself, there was a bridge nearby with a lot of truck traffic. But there was something in the sound there that had “life.” We both agreed on that. You recorded the generator and pool, and I found a spot that had really nice areas for the hydrophone.

A: Oh, I think I remember that site.

N: It exemplifies, to me, one of the things that makes the Columbia different. The Housatonic and Hudson and Danube recordings all have a certain kind of life, but our definition of “life” on the Columbia had to change because of its power and because of the way the river has been managed. All of a sudden you're contending with freeways, power plants, commercial fishing boats, pleasure boats, things that are very present on the Columbia. Was that difficult if you're used to really the natural sounds of water and water life?

A: My initial attraction to rivers established itself in my being in New Zealand as a kid. The rivers I was listening to there were truly wild, so that is what a river is to me. It became my template for what is a river. So the Columbia is a fantastic opportunity to have my ideas infiltrated. It has been confounding, and I value the contradictions that it produces. It makes me think harder about why I love to make river sound maps, why I love collaborating with you and loved collaborating with Liz Phillips on the Schuylkill sound map, and the fact that so far I have not been, for example, thinking about the effects of global warming on rivers, on riparian communities of all sorts, plants and people and fish and so on. Now I can't help thinking about that. And I need to deal with that dichotomy. So this project is incredibly valuable to me in the way it overturns my template.

*

Our daily trips were full of conversation. The Columbia is a highly political river, and every morning we had new information about the effects of its dams on wildlife and riparian culture. In the last half-dozen years, two adjacent waterways—the Klamath near the Oregon and California border and the Elwha in Washington state—have had their dams removed. While we were traveling up the Columbia, many hopeful reports were coming in of early salmon returns on those rivers and an increased role in its future for the indigenous people whose ancestors had so carefully tended to the river and reaped its benefits for generations.

These conversations naturally led us to talk about how the Columbia—one of the largest rivers in America—has been settled, tamed, and used. And of course, we talked about humanity’s effect on the sound of the river. The Columbia’s song is at least partially composed by a human hand, and there was no way to ignore that fact.

© Nate Wooley

Chief Joseph Dam, Washington

N: We talked a lot about what makes a good sound over the course of our trips. Early on, I think we had slightly different definitions, but as we moved upriver, we inched toward each other, to the point that we could get out of the car and make an immediate appraisal.

*

A: And completely understand each other. It's such a subtle process, isn't it? Yeah. And I love doing it together, because, again, it unfixes my ideas. It resets them and pulls them apart in a way that I really relish. I’ve often found that on other rivers—purely natural sites that have nothing to do with dams and control—the sound of moving water at one spot can be completely uninteresting, while at another site, it’s really fresh. At one site, I hear a sound I haven't heard water making before. At another site, it sounds really familiar and much less interesting.

N: I remember one spillway, for example, that looked amazing. It was just this violent green plume of water into the reservoir. Just looking at it, we thought it was going to sound so great.

A: That was at the Grand Coulee Dam, wasn't it? I remember it was massive, but it didn't sound like anything. It was too uniform. I think [one of the ways we value a river’s sound] is connected to interior mobility in the spectrum of the sound. Is there a change going on within the spectrum? If there is, I'm fascinated. If I can't discern the change, (because there's always some), then I lose interest. And then I construe it as, “Oh, I've heard that before.”

N: I think it might be nice to just talk a little bit about the daily process of making the recordings. Whenever I talk to someone about it, the first questions they ask are: “Well, what do you do? Do you have all the spots plotted? Do you have a certain set of places you know you're going to hit?”

*

We meet early for breakfast wherever we’re staying. Typically, Annea has already been drinking coffee and studying her map of the river by the time I arrive after my morning run. After checking out of our hotel, we head to the first area that looks promising. Deciding upon this is a bit hit-or-miss; essentially we look for public areas that appear to have access directly to the water, like boat ramps, civic parks, and anything where a road leads to the false blue of Google Maps. Once we arrive, we get out of the car and cover the shortest distance to the river. We are typically quiet on this walk, keeping our ears (and eyes) open for the possibility of water disturbance. We are trying to find something that may provide sonic interest: wave action against rocks, a fast-moving current; small, still pools that may be hiding something worthy of the hydrophone; a human-made industrial feature that is aurally interesting while telling the story of the river’s workload.

About half the time, we’d search the river, find nothing, shrug, and walk back to the car, where I’d punch up our location on Google Maps to see where the next possibility may be. As we drive to it, we always keep an eye on small roads leading to the river, never sad to take a left or right down a dirt road with Annea’s brand-new rental car in hopes of finding a friendly, and interesting, place to record.

If we do find something of interest, we quickly set up a division of labor. Annea works, for these trips, with her stereo microphone, collecting beautifully rich overviews of the waterscape. I do close-up work using a shotgun and her hydrophone. If we’re truly lucky, we can set up near each other and record the same water through these different sound lenses, taking multiple views of the same flow at the same time. After we decide we’ve gotten enough, we carry our gear back to the car and listen to each other’s recordings. One of my great joys in life is recording an interesting sound well enough for Annea to slap her knee and say, “Hey man! That’s great!” I’ve come to live for that.

This is our process, and it works well for us. Not every day is successful, but every day is interesting.

*

A: See, that's the difference between viewing the work as documentation, which is everybody's temptation and immediate assumption, and viewing the work as experiential. And your own recordings are so vivid and super clean. I relish the way they enable me to hear through your ears.

N: There are certain sites that I can still see if I allow my imagination to wander. And being there and what we captured and the moments when it was just you recording and I was sitting spacing out and looking at the water and vice versa. It'll be interesting to see how we can find a way to bring that to listeners, the feeling of what we were actually doing and going through what the day was like what the hotel was like, and what time we got started.

A:  And did we have a lousy dinner the night before?

N: How many times did we strike out before we found something?

A:  That's what's so amazing about working on this river, that it's actually… it's really possible to go to site after site and not find any sound that was striking. Whereas on every other river I've worked on, you don't strike out so many times in succession like that.

N: We had a couple of days like that where it was just... I remember one of the days we struck out a bunch of times, and then I had been running in the morning and had seen a small, little rivulet at a park. [We then drove for two hours up and down the river. Having our entrance barred to the Dalles Dam, we were sent on wild goose chases by security guards, ending up driving in gravel pits that seemed to be sites of unsavory practices with no visible outlet to the water. We finally gave up and headed back when I finally, sheepishly, mentioned the water I’d seen that morning.]

A:  Oh, yeah, that was a beauty – at Wenatchee. I could have stayed there all day; every time you put a mic somewhere, you got something. I can picture it in my head. So you were downstream from me by a very short distance, and you were using the hydrophone, as I recall. And I was upstream with the Shure, and we were getting great sound. And you were capturing birds through the water, and I was getting them from the air. People walked past chatting. It was a beautiful day, but it was made sweeter because we had spent two hours being frustrated by trying to...

N: Yes, but I think we should mention Memorial Day because it was, to me, a weird psychic center of this trip. There were so many people out partying. And I don't think we got anything that entire day. It was the only time that I felt that humanity was getting in our way.

A:  Oh, I remember that day. Yes. All those inextinguishable boat motors. But what we were doing was listening. And what people in the boats were doing was listening to each other very likely, probably not hearing much of the natural environment because of the intensity of the motor sound.

N: I think that's a much kinder way to put it. Do you remember the next day?

A:  Yes, we got up early, but the wind wasn't up. And when there's no wind, because these are reservoirs that we're frequently recording, there are still bodies of water. So if there's no wind, there's no water sound, as opposed to the natural river, which is busy disassembling its banks and reassembling its banks and moving materials around through friction. And there's plenty of sound always available.

N: I remember the end of that day, too, the wind started to pick up and we got excited. And then it went from no wind to all the wind. It was a good reminder of our very fragile relationship with the wind.

A: Which is to say we have no control. We need it, but only a little bit of it. And I like that. Yeah. Because we're not just at the mercy of the water, but we're at the mercy of the wind. We are more entwined with the natural elements that we're working with than we realize, right?

N: But there's a different set of problems trying to capture sound near the mouth because it's so wild. Trying to get a clean recording is really tricky. And I'm not even sure if it's possible. The wind is always going to be really tough.

A: So then we need to find a way to... I'm trying to work on getting rid of the word ‘capture’. It's exactly the wrong attitude… then we need to work on finding more ways to incorporate the wind so that it doesn't blow out our recordings, but it's tangibly there. And that's possible.

N: That one cove we recorded near the South Jetty¹ should be a training area for field recordists. Just go there for two weeks with a shotgun mic and that's it and see if you can figure it out. It's like trying to catch a fly with chopsticks. I'm definitely going to give it a shot when I go back and see if I can.

A: Yeah, I want to have another shot at that, too. The river may be dammed, but this is not a tame element we're working with.

Talk a little about recording with the hydrophone, wouldn't you? Because that's new for you, and you're doing beautiful recordings with it, which I want to state.

N: There's such a degree of mystery to it. To see a brackish area with maybe some little bits floating in there, you're like, “What's under there?” And to know that you can put a mic down there and hear it is really exciting. In a way—I've never really articulated this to myself—I think the thing that attracts me to the hydrophone, is very similar to a lot of the things I've done with the trumpet over the years, especially on pieces like Becoming Air. It's like you look at a thing, and for whatever reason, you get a feeling that there's something hidden. Everybody looks at a bit of water and can understand the surface of it immediately. Everybody knows what that is. “Oh, here's a bit of water.” And the same with the trumpet. “Here's a trumpet, and I know what that sounds like.” But sometimes a curiosity about what is hidden within a machine prompts you to coax something special out of it. And I think with the hydrophone, it's that same feeling for me. What if I put this in here? What will I pick up? And do I have the patience to explore this for a while?

It's exploration without risk. And there's something about that process that feels very life-affirming to me. It's like the reason that anybody's on this Earth, whether they're using their curiosity to make money or whether they're using their curiosity to, I don't know, to look at a tree, whatever. Those are the moments when you're the most alive.

I'll be very happy now that you've got a second hydrophone, and we can both explore different spots.

A: So now we can set ourselves up at a site, some distance apart with the two matched hydrophones, and essentially make a stereo recording of that site, which will be a lot of fun to do.

N: When you did these by yourself, would you do something similar with different micings in the same spot, or did you just make a decision and then move on to the next area of the river?

A: I did it both ways. In some sites, depending on the nature of the site and the nature of the sound I was drawn to, I would record two different areas and mix them into one site. On the Hudson, years ago, I did something which I've never replicated, but I would be interested in. I recorded the same site very early in the morning—I was camping out—and then at night, and I created a stereo image out of those two different times of the day. The water was distinctly different.

A: It's interesting that you say that, because when I was in Maine this year, I was thinking about how we map the space of rivers, but what would it be like to map an area of water based on time? So I got up every morning at 5:30, and I would just go out from where we were staying. The ocean is right there, and there's a cove, and I would just record the same area at the same time every day. And I honestly thought, there wouldn’t be huge changes. But when I went back and mixed the recordings, I found bits where there was a distinct pitch that would change from day to day. In some cases, it was because there was a boat on the water, but in other cases, it was just the rate of the wave action creating a slightly different pitch…not slightly, like a whole step sometimes.

So now there's this example of mapping in time, but not at all in space, and what you just told me fits perfectly in the middle of that: the same space but at different times of the day.

A: Let's put that in the back of our minds as one thing we'd love to do at the source. It's interesting- I don't know why I think it would be striking or could be beautiful, but I have a sense that it could be. What do we have to lose?

Field recording excerpts

Here you can listen to the Columbia River field recordings. 

The four sites are, in order:

• Mayger Dock at Clatskanie, Oregon
• St Helens Town Dock, Oregon 
• Celilo, site of the drowned Celilo Falls near Dalles Dam, Oregon
• Wenatchee, Washington