Jude Matulich-Hall, left, and Aaron Schuman work through a section of a song.

On Saturday, a set of adventurous local musicians will play the first-ever concert from inside the Astoria Column, transforming the city’s signature landmark into a kind of antenna that will carry the region’s story to audiences listening on Coxcomb Hill and to their radios.

“Musical Stairs” will employ violins, cellos, guitars, horns, flutes and voices, along with the 125-foot-tall Column’s unique acoustics, to provide a musical history intended to evoke a range of eras, from the time of Indigenous peoples to the 1926 dedication of the Column.

The concert will echo the history that unfurls in sgraffito around the Column’s exterior, with its depictions of such scenes as the wreck of the Tonquin, the arrival of Lewis and Clark and Oregon’s statehood.

“This is going to be epic,” declared Jeff Daly, an Astoria entrepreneur who proposed the idea some 18 months ago to the Friends of Astoria Column, the nonprofit organization that manages the hilltop park, which is visited by an estimated 400,000 people each year.

The concert poses some challenges for the musicians, not to mention the sound crew. The 13 musicians will be arrayed vertically on the steps and landings inside the Column, where sounds echo from within the concrete walls. Solo pieces are relatively straightforward, but passages where musicians play together will pose some interesting acoustic and logistical demands.

“We’re vertically challenged,” acknowledged Joel Groves, manager of Aloha Sound, which will distribute microphones and speakers designed to help musicians be heard by listeners outside and over the air, as well as to be heard clearly by those inside the Column. Groves’ task, he said at a recent rehearsal, is “to get the right blend of echo and reverb” within the Column’s acoustics.

The show will include some well-known pieces, from a Debussy prelude to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” as well as some little-heard pieces, such as Tobias Hume’s “Harke, Harke.”

The piece by Hume, a Scottish composer who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries, will be played by Christopher Davies on the viola de gamba, a period viola that is played upright.

“I love the idea of music in the Column,” Davies said. The unusual staging — like “playing in a vertical submarine,” he said — makes the music itself a player. “The sound almost becomes the living entity that you’re feeding,” he said.

The physical constraints of the concert at the Column mean it’s not practical to have a conductor. But the concert’s musical director is Jude Matulich-Hall, who is concertmaster for the North Coast Chorale and the North Oregon Coast Symphony. She will also play violin. When she and Daly started to recruit musicians for the performance, she said, they chose “people whose eyes got big.”

Other musicians for the show include Ed Keller, Jason Hall, Laurie Swanson, Aaron Schuman, Bill Brtton, Len Bergman, Jennifer Crockett, Angelique Poteat and Shelley Loring. Vocalists will be Bereniece Jones-Ceteno and Deac Guidi.

“It’s incredible the way this project has come together, Matulich-Hall said in an email. “We have The Liberty Theatre (Jennifer) and the Charlene Larsen Center for the Performing Arts (Bereniece) represented in this concert. They have been incredibly supportive.”

At the time of this writing, Daly will narrate the sequences between the musical pieces, explaining the musical references to Capt. Robert Gray, John Jacob Astor, Attilio Pusterla and others.

Two years from now, Friends of Astoria Column will preside over activities marking the centennial of the Column’s dedication in 1926. Daly already is dreaming about another concert to mark the occasion.

‘Musical Stairs’

‘Musical Stairs’

A free concert at the Astoria Column, 1 Coxcomb Hill, Astoria

Saturday at 7:30 p.m., for about 50 minutes

Chair seating for about 150 is available at the Ccolumn, and guests can also spread blankets on the grass.

There will be no parking at the Column. Free shuttle rides may be reserved at www.oldastoria.com. Shuttles will run from 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. between the column and Astoria Middle School and the upper lot at Clatsop Community College.

The concert will be broadcast on KAST, 1370 AM, beginning at 7 p.m.