Mount Rainier, Washington’s awe-inducing 14,411-foot stratovolcano and the undisputed monarch of the Cascade Range, has inspired countless painters, poets and photographers. This summer, to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the founding of Mount Rainier National Park, the National Park Service will celebrate with song.
Stephen Lias, a music professor from Stephen F. Austin State University in East Texas, has been named the park’s first-ever composer in residence. This summer, Lias will hike, camp and draft compositions in different parts of Mount Rainier National Park in an attempt to capture the spirit of the mountain in a piece of classical music.
“A lot of the parks that retain artists-in-residence programs do it as a way to honor the tradition of artists, poets and authors like John Muir, who really helped sway public opinion to start parks in the first place,” said Lias, 58. “It’s unbelievably meaningful. I don’t have any other way to put it.”
Lias will spend a few stints working and living in the park between now and September. While in the park, he’ll stay in a cabin near the Nisqually entrance, in addition to time spent camping.
In a statement, park Superintendent Greg Dudgeon said he’s “so pleased” to welcome Lias to the park.
“The mountain has nourished body and spirit and inspired the imaginations of countless generations,” Dudgeon said. “As the park’s first official composer in residence, we anticipate Stephen will introduce diverse and distant audiences to the wonder of Mount Rainier.”
Lias began composing music for the National Park Service about 15 years ago. Over the years, he’s composed pieces for parks like Big Bend, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier Bay and Yosemite, to name just a few. Now it’s Mount Rainier’s turn.
The composer has worked with Boulder Philharmonic in the past and is hoping a performance tied to his Rainier residency will come together, either in Colorado or locally, though no concerts have been confirmed as of this writing.
“I started small,” Lias said of his career as a traveling, park-based composer. “Even though I wasn’t funded, a trombonist wanted a sonata, so I wrote her a piece about a park. And then one thing led to another, and I started applying to national park residencies … that led to some bigger and larger pieces for chamber orchestra, then full orchestra, and wind ensemble, things like that.”
As we shuffled across a log bridge over the Nisqually River and hiked on a portion of the Wonderland Trail near Longmire earlier in June, Lias reflected on his role as a musical interpreter of the natural world. Similar to a park ranger, he sees himself as an advocate, ambassador and educator for the park.
“All the interpretive rangers are there to help the public connect with the place. To interpret what kind of tree this is, what kind of moss this is, and how they all interact together,” Lias said. “If somebody who would never visit a national park but does come to concerts and forms a relationship with one of these places through my music, then I feel like I’m playing an important role in making the public better stewards of these lands.”
But how does that process work? Does Lias pack sheet music as part of his 10 Essentials?
“Sometimes, but rarely,” he said. Instead, when he has a musical idea, Lias will record it another way: He may jot it down on paper, sing it into his smartphone, journal about the experience, write a poem or take a picture.
“Then I do a lot of stopping and thinking and processing. Letting ideas germinate,” Lias said. “So, for a long time, there’s this inspirational soup I’m stirring. And then after a while, certain ideas start to rise to the top.”
After about 30 minutes on the trail, Lias and I reached Carter Falls and sat down by a tree. Lias had lived in Mount Rainier National Park for about a week by that point. Much of his time had been spent in the snowfields above Paradise, gearing up for a trek to Camp Muir. Though it was early in the residency, he was already getting a distinct sense of this place.
“The feeling I get from the mountain is, it’s so eternal and so solid and so massive that it doesn’t even know that I’m here. It’s a very keen sense of my own smallness and insignificance,” he said.
“One thing that makes this location unique is the mountain stands so solitary,” Lias continued. “Anywhere in this region you go, this mountain is sort of looking over your shoulder. There are many other beautiful mountain ranges around the country and national parks, but relatively few where one particular peak dominates the way this one does.”
After 15 years of composing pieces about some of the most mesmerizing natural landscapes in North America, one of the new challenges that Lias faces is figuring out how to say something unique.
That is: How do you make Rainier sound different from Denali, for instance? Lias says that question gets back to the core idea behind the project.
“I’m not nearly, nearly, a good enough composer — and I would argue that no one is a good enough composer — to capture this place,” Lias said. “If 1,000 composers came here today and hiked with us, they would all write different music. So, I’m not trying to capture the experience. I’m trying to capture an aspect of my experience.”
Beyond that hurdle, there’s also the artistic challenge of finding interesting ways to shake up well-worn patterns with his work. That includes rhythms.
“When you spend a lot of these residencies hiking, and you’re thinking about, ‘What will the music be of this place? And you’re walking, ‘Walk, walk, walk, walk.’ You establish this rhythm,” Lias said. “And you start thinking of music that falls into that rhythm.”
On our hike, Lias and I made it back to his rental car and drove up to the visitor center at Paradise. The area above was still coated in a distinct layer of Cascade Concrete snow. Dozens of families built snowmen and kids took turns tumbling down the hill. The sky above was a brilliant blue, devoid of almost any clouds except Rainier’s lenticular hat.
“Why go into the park?” Lias asked rhetorically as we stood in the snow. “Well, because it’s the place that inspires me the most.”