A glorious place for music: Carved by nature, threatened by climate change

Moab • How do you get a piano onto the Colorado River?

Easy enough, if you are the crew of the Moab Music Festival, which over 33 years of operations has elevated logistics to a fine art.

You arrive at a bend in the river’s calm, still waters southwest of Moab, Utah, just as the dawn whispers over cliffs of red, orange and brown, and stings the morning clouds. You back a U-Haul down a ramp to one of two waiting jet boats, which you load with everything you need to hold a leave-no-trace concert in a canyon: tables and toilets, tools and trash cans, along with music stands, a piano bench and about 100 camping chairs. Then you wheel the piano on deck and strap it up tight.

“No big deal,” the production and operations director Michael Edwards said one morning this month, as Sandy — a Steinway & Sons piano about 7 feet long and weighing 800 pounds — sat safely onboard, resting awkwardly on its side.

After all that, though, how do you get a piano off the Colorado River?

A ride I was on carried crew members under Dead Horse Point and took nearly half an hour, as the river guide swerved expertly from bank to bank, navigating waters made so low and so slow by drought and misuse that, halfway down, a deer and two fawns had crossed them to browse on a sandbar in the middle of the flow. (No piano has fallen in, though there have been close calls.) Just past a sign that announced our entry to Canyonlands National Park, we reached what the festival calls the grotto, a towering amphitheater carved naturally into a cliff where the event holds some of its concerts each summer.

There was a time when the Colorado was high enough that the crew could simply wheel the piano off the boat and onto the shore, but that isn’t normally possible in an era of climate change. Last year, sandbars and flash floods reshaped the bank so dramatically that the crew had to build a 24-foot bridge to ensure that the concerts could go ahead. (Tickets cost $500 and benefit education programming.) This year, the water was so shallow that a series of ramps had to be constructed before the piano could be hauled several feet up to the level of the trail, dragged through dense shrubbery and set down in its shaded concert hall, ready to be tuned and played.

By noon, when the first audience members started to file in, the piano looked as if it were just one more natural feature in a part of the world that is already full of them. So powerful is the illusion that patrons sometimes ask if the piano lives there all the time.

Why do this, with all its attendant risks? Nobody is making this slightly out-of-the-way festival lug a piano down the Colorado, after all. And the event — with a $1 million budget that also supports community outreach year-round, and festival ticket sales around 2,500 — is small enough that it’s tempting to think of it as some kind of stunt.

“Heck of a gimmick,” marketing director Tara Baker muttered as we watched the instrument emerge from its truck. “I don’t know how you could even make that a gimmick.”

I was convinced otherwise by five days spent exploring this glorious, barely fathomable chamber music festival, which is held for two-and-a-bit weeks starting around Labor Day. Something more is happening here — something that, as the river falls, temperatures rise and people decline to do all that much about either, ultimately feels quite profound.

Moab aims to provide “music in concert with the landscape,” as its trademarked slogan puts it. In practice, that means offering a satisfying range of music in a breathtaking range of spaces.

I was serenaded by guitarist Frank Vignola and violinist Tessa Lark as I floated downstream, cliffs on both sides and a paraplane whirring overhead. Andy Akiho and Ian Rosenbaum played duets for steel pan and marimba as the sun set and the moon rose at the Red Earth Venue, a little hall cradled in rocks. One hike led me to music by Telemann. Lark, cellist Joshua Roman and bassist Edgar Meyer formed a trio at a private ranch, with bugs beforehand and fireworks to follow. Bluegrass artist Sierra Hull did stunningly virtuosic things with a mandolin at a resort down a road of majestic buttes and imposing gorges. And that Steinway? My ride on the jet boat included hearing it put to use in some Felix Mendelssohn.

All this, and I still couldn’t quite time my visit to catch a recital in the old Star Hall downtown, or convince myself that my life insurance would really stand up to a four-day rafting trip through Cataract Canyon, with musicians performing on the carbon fiber standbys that the festival owns to protect the valuable Stradivarius and Guarneri string instruments of the world.

It was an unusually moving few days, and it felt that way for deeper reasons than hearing beautiful music in a beautiful place. You can get that at plenty of summer festivals, several of which take place in and around national parks, though not those as outlandishly sublime as Arches and Canyonlands. This wasn’t about the once-in-a-lifetime, bucket-list aspect of some of the proceedings either, though that helped. It was realizing that the festival goes to such lengths because it knows that it can offer some of the purest, most intense listening experiences around.

Nowhere is that truer than in the grotto, which has been hosting concerts since before the festival started in 1992. Nothing gets in the way of the music down there, except for sand if you choose your footwear poorly. Your phone won’t work, and there are no subway trains or ambulance sirens to frustrate you as they might in an urban concert hall. (Canyon wrens we will excuse.) The acoustic is ludicrously good, so clear and bright and detailed that you quickly forget to think about it at all. You don’t so much feel close to the music as part of it. I heard a string quartet — made up of Blake Pouliot, Aubree Oliverson, L.P. How and Jay Campbell — tear into Franz Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” and it was overwhelming.

The other part of Moab’s mysterious hold was more distressing, perhaps stemming from a niggling sense that events like these might not be possible for all that much longer. The Colorado is arguably the great protagonist of the festival, whether you’re sitting on it or gazing at what it has done to the rocks around it. You’re here because of it, and you can’t not think about its fate.

Before one of the concerts, I talked with John Weisheit, a deeply experienced river guide and the executive director of the Living Rivers conservation group. He has worked with the festival for years, and he explained that the crisis of the Colorado is not just a story about global warming and its effects on snow melt and groundwater, and a lot else besides; it’s also a parable about our own behavior and how badly we treat the little water that we still have left.

“So how do you incorporate that with the Moab Music Festival?” he said. “You could say there is some joy.”

Until this year, the Moab festival was led by its founders: pianist and conductor Michael Barrett, and violist Leslie Tomkins. In 1991, Barrett passed through town on a drive down to Santa Fe, New Mexico; the next year, he brought Tomkins to visit for a few days, and, she said in an interview, “There was something about it that just fully resonated in me.”

“Chamber music to me is one of the most beautiful art forms there is,” she added, “and I thought, well, that might combine really well with these rocks — which was an insane idea.”

Plenty of musicians have followed Tomkins and Barrett down the river as Moab has transformed from a tiny uranium mining town into a heaving tourist hot spot, though mostly musicians of a certain sort. The festival attracts players who “want to endure some of the unusual conditions,” said Campbell, the cellist of the JACK Quartet and a festival veteran, during a hike one afternoon. “Other people, I think they just see a pile of dust.”

The conditions require care, though not as much as you might think. “It’s better to bring it to a desert than to bring it to a rainforest,” Kristen Lee said of her violin. “Sand can come out, but water can really damage.”

Even so, it takes time to adapt, especially for artists in their first year. “I was sinking,” Meyer said after playing some Bach, carrying his bass down a canyon with the help of a young volunteer. “It’s not 100% different,” he added of the experience, “but it’s just a little bigger than normal.”

A festival regular since 2016, Lark became its artistic director this year. Effusive and endearing, she plays bluegrass and jazz as readily as classical scores, and she has cherished Moab as a place where she can do it all.

“Michael and Leslie are ultra creative, they’re so quirky and wild in the best way,” Lark said. “I just love the freedom that’s here,” she added. “The festival for 33 years has almost been built such that at this point, now that there’s a change in directorship, it’s like a blank slate. There’s no constraint, because you could go or continue in any direction.”

Lark seems likely to embrace that wilder side of the festival — the maverick Lou Harrison was once a composer in residence — and that can only be a good thing. One morning, I found myself at the head of a short, slightly tricky hike to a place called Middle Earth, another grotto-like area but a far more capacious one than the one down the river. I clambered across a rock wall, found a depression to perch on, and listened to a program whose main event, incongruously, was Weber’s Clarinet Quintet. I got the idea but grew eager to hear something that spoke more directly to the raw violence, the sheer immensity, of what I saw around me.

The possibilities felt endless. Get the permits in place, and there is nowhere this festival could not go, nothing it could not perform.

Just so long as that piano can keep going down the river.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.