Two decades ago, Phillip Bimstein traveled from his Chicago home to camp in Zion National Park for two weeks.

"Something magnetically attractive led me there," Bimstein said. "There's something that draws us there - and holds us there."

During the trip, he fell so much in love with the red rocks that he bought a house in neighboring Springdale and has owned that house ever since.

Two decades later, Bimstein wrote a song cycle to showcase his love for the canyon; the cycle will be performed in its entirety Saturday at Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center's Jeanné Wagner Theater in Salt Lake City.

The 16 new Americana songs of "Zion Canyon Song Cycle" will be performed by Red Rock Rondo, a six-member ensemble led by Bimstein that includes musicians from the Salt Lake Symphony and one of the founders of the world-famous Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev.

The concert and CD release party will include more than music. Zion National Park Superintendent Jock Whitworth will offer an introduction, while former Springdale Elementary School principal Leon Lewis will join in the music-making. Also on tap: a screening of a PBS music special about the song cycle scheduled to air next year.

"It is so much fun," Whitworth said of the composition. "There's humor, awe, sadness and fun. It puts you there."

Bimstein, a former two-term mayor of Springdale, said the idea of writing about Zion Canyon had been bobbing around his head for years. He began writing the song cycle in earnest about three years ago, after he received support from Logan's Mountain West Center for Regional Studies and a commission from the American Composers Forum in Minnesota.

The commission was granted through the forum's Continental Harmony program, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts as a way for composers from across the country to write music celebrating their individual states.

Bimstein's commission was "to create a cycle of songs and musical portraits which draw upon the stories, voices and sounds of Zion Canyon. Inspired by the geology and the culture that characterizes the community, the work will be many-layered, abutting the old and the new stylistically and topically, crosscutting between the stories and the lives of a diverse people, embracing fault lines and natural bridges alike," according to the Continental Harmony Web site.

Bimstein has composed music performed at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center and London's Royal Opera House, but this canyon cycle became one of the most important pieces of his life. He interviewed scores of people who lived around Springdale and Zion Canyon, and wove their stories into his songs.

"I wanted to have a multiplicity of stories," Bimstein said. "It amazed me on how it happened. I was audacious."

But Bimstein needed special musicians to perform the song cycle. He didn't have to look far, as he had also been composing alternative classical music with three other members of a group called blue haiku. Bimstein recruited the three other members of blue haiku: Salt Lake Symphony members Flavia Cerviño-Wood and Charlotte Bell, who play the violin and oboe, respectively, as well as Harold Carr on the upright bass.

Bimstein sought a female vocalist with an evocative voice, so he chose Kate Mac- Leod, a Salt Lake City violinist, guitarist and singer. Finally, he added Hal Cannon - the founding director of the Western Folklife Center and its most famous offspring, Elko's Cowboy Poetry Gathering - who plays the mandolin, mandocello, banjo, harmonica, button accordion and jaw harp.

The sextet worked well from the start. Cerviño-Wood said Bimstein would bring them the "skeleton" of a song and invite all the musicians to improvise and collaborate.

"At the beginning, it's all improv," Carr said. "Phillip knows what he has envisioned. After a while, they became very solid."

Bell, who also plays the English horn, said her symphony experience helped her in the collaboration. "Classical music teaches you to play with other people and play as a whole."

The end project is a gorgeous, lively assortment of alternative classical music using traditional bluegrass instrumentation, with harmony vocals singing about the Watchman, Angels Landing and the Virgin River.

There are songs about the great Christmas Day Flood of 1861; the time President Harding visited Zion; and a terrible accident in Grafton in 1866 when a log fell and killed two young girls, who now haunt the moonlight in white dresses, hair down to their waists.

There are other, happier songs, which evoke memories of the past while inspiring a love for the future of Zion Canyon and the rest of Utah's redrock country. Here are some lines from "Big Rock":

I'll take you 'round Raspberry Bend

David Burger writes about popular music. Contact him at dburger@sltrib.com or 801-257-8620.