Hello Dearest Listeners/Readers,
The 26th song of the Plant Songs project is entitled Pinus rigida : Endurance.
If you’re able, willing, interested, and you’d like to give me a gift, I’d like you to clear your schedule for 12 minutes and listen to this piece without doing anything else. Ideally you’d have good speakers, or better-yet good headphones. Listen without doing other things. Lay down. Close your eyes if you’d like. Wait until the piece is done, and take a moment of pause, before you read the essay that follows. Thanks.
Ok. You made it through. I’d love to know your reaction to it.
Now I’ll tell you what I was going for with this piece, starting with some history. I think it was November or December of 2007. I was browsing through CDs at the Downtown Music Gallery, which was then located on the Bowery in New York City. It was one of just a few remaining record stores. It’s still going actually, now located in a basement in Chinatown. It’s a store that specializes in avant-garde jazz and experimental music, and its narrow specialty is probably why it’s still open. Bruce Lee Gallanter, the owner, is a hero of the scene - speaking of endurance. Bruce’s love of music of many kinds is very inspiring.
I was in the store browsing, when I noticed the track they had playing in the store. It consisted of slow-repeating piano chords that were changing very subtly. After a few minutes, I kept thinking that it was going to change or develop into something different. It didn’t. It kept on with the same idea the entire time I was in the store - probably about 20-30 minutes. Whoa. What is happening! Bruce said it was drummer/composer Tyshawn Sorey’s new album That / Not and this track was his tribute to Morton Feldman. I didn’t buy the record that day I’m embarrassed to say, but I did a few weeks later. My experience hearing Tyshawn’s piece that day certainly aroused my curiosity about Morton Feldman, whom I didn’t know much about.
A few days later I hit up the NY Public Library at Lincoln Center which had a vast library of CDs that you could borrow. I borrowed all the Morton Feldman records I could find. Later that week I was riding the bus back to NYC from Park Ridge NJ, where I taught piano lessons once a week back in those days. I had some beefy sound-isolating headphones, made for drummers to use while they practiced along with records. As we rolled through New Jersey, I listened to the record of Morton Feldman’s piece For Bunita Marcus recorded by pianist Markus Hinterhäuser. I remember it was December because people had Christmas lights up. This was a completely life-changing experience. The combination of hearing Tyshawn’s record, getting curious about Morton Feldman, and then listening to this piece on that bus ride, absolutely changed the way that I heard the piano. It opened up a world of piano overtones by which I became completely obsessed. Much of my work afterward for years was exploring the piano’s overtones and ability to blend sustained sounds.
My favorite Feldman pieces became For Bunita Marcus, Triadic Memories (both for solo piano), and String Quartet No. 2, which is a single-movement piece that last for over six hours! Again, speaking of endurance. You’ve gotta train for performing that. Concentration aside, I’d have to learn how to be hydrated and yet not need to urinate for more than 6 hours! The piano pieces have a lot to do with overtones and blended sustained sounds as I was writing about above, and the quartet has a lot to do with repeats, and scale (6 hours of it is much different than 20 minutes of it), and rhythmic augmentation. I wrote about back in 2013 in a blog post called Recordings and Memory Satisfaction. I became deeply interested in these things and used them a lot in my compositions. You can hear it on my 2010 trio record Magnolia, particularly on the track Time Canvas (which is titled after a section of Feldman’s book of writings Give Me Regards to Eighth Street), and you can hear it in many of the Bagatelles for Trio (2012).
Last Friday I hiked to the Pinus rigida / Pitch Pine grove up on the mountain. I’m drawn to these pines. I’ve been visiting them weekly this year. I have a feeling that there is something about them that is very important for me. They’ve been “calling” me. It’s now been a year since I started my hiking routine of going up the Pocket Rd. trail three times a week. From the beginning, I headed for the Pitch Pines. On most days, when I limit myself to a twenty minute ascent, I don’t make it all the way to them, but it’s interesting that I naturally went that way over and over again. I have a video of the first time I made it to the Pitch Pine Grove. It was March 11, 2024. I believe I had been doing the hiking routine for a week or two at that point, and on that particular day I took a little more time to continue up to the peak, which doesn’t officially have a name. I’m naming it Pitch Peak. There is a nice rock scramble that you have to climb before you reach Pitch Peak and some great views. You can look across and see the reservoir, and you get sprawling views of the Hudson Valley, all the way up to the Catskill Mountains.
Perhaps the feeling that came up about 16th months ago, that I needed to exercise my heart, was the Pitch Pines calling me. Maybe they called me to Beacon ten years ago. Maybe they called me to NYC in 2002. Maybe they called me into being born. Ha! Maybe, maybe not.
I don’t know the age of the Pinus rigida trees up there. All the trees, the Pitch Pines, and the many Quercus ilicifolia / Bear Oak trees up there are all very small, but I don’t think they’re young. Most are 15 feet or under, I assume because of the harsh growing conditions: rocky soil high on the hilltops where rain water runs off quickly, high winds, cold temperatures. There are many winter days when the trees at the top of the mountain are sparkling white with a thick layer of frost. Assuming the trees have always been on the small size because of the harsh growing conditions, I question if there was any logging done on the peaks in the Hudson Highlands. Would it have been worth the trouble to harvest such small trees? There is a lot of multi-trunk red oaks on the hillsides, and according to Tom Wessels, that’s good evidence of logging. When a tree is cut, often sprouts will regrow from the stump, and usually two or three win out, resulting in a tree with two or three main trunks. I’ve located two Pinus rigida in my neighborhood, down here around 220 feet in elevation and richer bottomland soil, and they’re both much taller than those up on Pitch Peak - around 40 feet.
So last Friday I went to Pitch Peak. Near the white trial and red trail junction, there’s a nice flat boulder right under one of the larger Pitch Pines. I laid on my back on this boulder for 15 minutes. It was cold and I was sweaty from the rapid ascent, and I had to get home to teach a lesson, so I couldn’t stay longer on this day. There were some gusty winds, although they were really mild considering what it must be like often times. The trees swayed and they whistled in the wind. Even on very calm days, these trees make a breathy whistling sound, which is very noticeable. As my Pitch Pine “dream time” was ending, I had a thought of how much these trees endure in these harsh growing conditions.
When I returned home, before teaching my lesson, I improvised what you hear in the first three measures of Pinus rigida : Endurance. Right away I had the idea that it could become a Feldman-inspired piece, something sustained, slow, repetitive, and ringing over-tone-based. After some experimentation, the piece took shape to what it is. There is some fairly rigid (rigida!) architecture to the piece, which you may enjoying trying to figure out, either by listening, or analyzing the score, or both. I thought the piece worked perfectly for a song about endurance and trees. For me the texture matches a the time scale of a slow-growing tree, and depending on how you felt about the piece, you might have needed some real endurance to listen through it once.
