About

Songs from the Bleeding Pines is an oratorio for singers, chorus, and orchestra based on a play by Ray Owen. The play tells the story of conservationist Helen Boyd Dull, who in 1904, saved an ancient stand of longleaf pines after encountering workers bleeding the trees of their resin for the turpentine industry. Once among the greatest forests, 90 million acreas of longleaf were lost to logging and turpentining by the early 1900s. The trees that Helen preserved are now the world's oldest longleaf pines, surviving because of her faith and commitment – a traveler who fell in love with the woods and fervently protected the land.

Premiere: Saturday, March 21, 2020 at 7:30 pM

Symphony Tacoma (Sarah Ioannides, conductor)
Symphony Tacoma Voices (Geoffrey Boers, director)

“Songs from the Bleeding Pines" is a special project of the Arts Council of Moore County, Southern Pines, North Carolina.

Creative Team

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David Serkin Ludwig, composer

David Serkin Ludwig is “a composer with something urgent to say” (Philadelphia Inquirer) whose music has been described as “arresting and dramatically hued” (The New York Times) and “supercharged with electrical energy and raw emotion” (Fanfare Magazine). An acclaimed composer, this year Ludwig was awarded the prestigious Pew Center for Arts and Heritage Fellowship in the Arts. In 2013, Ludwig’s choral work, “The New Colossus” was selected as the opening music for the private prayer service for the second inauguration of President Obama. In 2012 NPR Music selected him as one of the “Top 100 Composers Under Forty” in the world.

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Ray Owen, poet & conservationist

Ray Owen is a writer from Southern Pines, NC. He has been a contributor to PineStraw and Sandhills magazines, and his performance pieces have been produced in North Carolina and in Northern Ireland. Recent work includes writing the forward to Blair Publishing's Jugtown Pottery 1917-2017: A Century of Art & Craft in Clay. Ray has been a featured guest on UNC-TV’s Collecting Carolina series, and he narrated the film More Than Pine Trees and Sand: Disappearing Frogs Project.

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Sarah Ioannides, music director & conductor

Highly regarded as one of the most creative and inspiring young conductors today, Sarah Ioannides is Music Director of Symphony Tacoma. Listed as one of the top female conductors worldwide by Lebrecht’s “Woman Conductors: The Power List”, her passionate conducting, innovative programming and work with large-scale collaborative projects has been widely documented. With guest engagements spanning six continents, she has conducted orchestras such as Cincinnati Symphony, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Nationale de Lyon, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Tönkunstler, Daejoen Philharmonic, South African National Youth Orchestra, New World Symphony and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. A zealous supporter of living composers, Ioannides has commissioned numerous scores and art films for live orchestral multimedia performances. Her projects have received Artwork grants from National Endowment of the Arts.

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Symphony Tacoma

Inspiring audiences with live musical experiences that transcend tradition, Symphony Tacoma has been a vital part of Tacoma’s cultural landscape for 73 years. In 2014, Symphony Tacoma welcomed new music director Sarah Ioannides, whom the Los Angeles Times called “one of six female conductors breaking the glass podium.” Established in 1946 with 30 volunteer musicians from the University of Puget Sound, the organization was professionalized in 1993 under the leadership of Harvey Felder, now conductor laureate.  Today’s Symphony Tacoma is a metropolitan professional symphony orchestra with eighty-plus orchestral musicians and a volunteer chorus of 70.  Keeping live musical performance alive in the heart of the region, Symphony Tacoma concertizes for an annual audience of nearly 20,000 citizens throughout Pierce County and the Greater Puget Sound area.

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Symphony Tacoma Voices

The 70 member Symphony Tacoma Voices has a long and proud history as part of the Symphony Tacoma organization. The choir consists of professional singers, music educators, as well as amateur singers from across all walks of life in the south Puget Sound region. Our choir, ranging in age from 16 to 86, represents the best of what arts can do for people in a community. Amateur means to work at something one loves. This work then is reflected not only in our energetic and inspiring Monday night rehearsals, but in our volunteerism, our fund raising and support for the orchestra, our visibility in the community and our international travel. Under the leadership of Geoffrey Boers, the choir has toured to China, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Croatia, and Bosnia.

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Geoffrey Boers, Chorus Master

Geoffrey Boers is Director of Choral Activities at the University of Washington in Seattle, a program widely recognized as vibrant and forward thinking. Under his direction, the graduate choral program has developed a singular mission: to nurture the whole student as conductor-teacher-servant-leader-scholar. When not working with the Symphony Tacoma Voices, Geoffrey conducts the UW Chamber Singers, a choir of graduate and advanced undergraduate music majors studying choral conducting, vocal performance, music education, as well as many students from programs across campus. The choir is noted for its vocal agility, varied color, and expressivity, and have been featured at many festivals, conventions, and workshops, including NWACDA, Musicfest Canada, and at the national conventions of the American Kodaly Educators, National Association of Schools of Music, and American Musicological Society.

Texts

YOU KNOW THE WISE MEN

You know the Wise Men made a gift to the Lord of something bled from trees: tears of frankincense and myrrh–and there once was a time when our pines shed tears of turpentine. 

From the trees flowed a stream of gold, the oil of the age, and the bleeding pines of turpentine was once the largest trade.  

Voices whisper in the breeze. Full blue sky of ocean waves, singing in the crowns of trees.

A woman ascended this fiery hill in answer of its call. Her name was Helen, daughter of James Boyd, no stranger to fortune and privilege. Born with a love of nature. 

Her song filled the air and drifted into the trees.

THE SHORE OF AN ANCIENT SEA 

Where are the words, where are the words for saying that I passed into the night and that everyone 

I ever loved passed along with me. 

Look carefully at the trees they tell a story, with strange carvings that echo across the blue 

From the V-shaped cuts made in longleaf pines we have marked this land in a way that marks us 

Not etched in stone in fine thin letters, but in a living thing

There were those who walked among the pines, shining like light sparkling in the rain 

God’s precious, you survived, your memory carved into the trees 

THE CHIPPER, THE DIPPER, THE BUCKET, THE BARREL 

I became a drawer of water, a hewer of wood. Hands tough as leather, bones filled with aches. The sap it ran like sweat, it ran like hell! Every scar I have came from turpentine. 

The chipper, the dipper, the bucket, the barrel - the V-shaped cuts turpentine made in me. 

You are dust, and to dust you shall return. Bones of my bones, and the naked breath that left thee, me of me. 

TREES NOT FALLEN WHAT AM I 

Trees not fallen what am I, bleeding pines of turpentine? Held in place by God’s own hands, gone out a boy come back a man. 

Unbroken pines reaching up to heaven, towering shade made it dusk at midday. We walked through the temple of God and something within me cried out: not as it should be, what it could be, what I hope it will be! 

It’s said a thing that has been is that what shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done. Nothing new under the sun. 

When the spring runs out, where does the water go? When all you want is a sweet drink, where does the water go? 

THE WHISPER OF GOD

What will be remembered from bleeding pines of turpentine? 

A slight breeze moved as we fell silent like silence following marching drums 

Dark and lowering, the wilderness in motion, our carriage wheels sifted sand as pines went slowly by 

You lose yourself, in a place where the whisper of God is wind through the trees 

How long a time lies in those cuts? 

This is my arrow through the heart of time – and I will always be in those trees; they will always be in me 

Beautiful remnants, hold on to what is written in the trees

All who are able to rise, you are my cloud of witness - the glorious pines, this solemn house of God - the sky is your kingdom! 

FIRE LIKE RAIN

Fire like rain, that sustained all of life 

wrought in the wake of the ashes. 

Heaven wore a thorny crown on a fiery gate, like candles of the angels 

We lived in paradise – we bled the forest dry, 

Sleep quietly, sweet peace – 

I will water all around me 

I will water in the air 

I will water in the valley 

I will water in the sun 

 PEACE BE STILL BURNING WORLD  

Peace be still, burning world, the sky calls to you through the crowns of trees 

They say the sea was once here and I believe them, I hear the distant waves 

An eternity of souls through the eye of a needle, look away 

Whirling landscape, desert in the rain, the pines make a slow climb to heaven 

To touch the face of God and know the air we breathe 

Come with me on my journey up the hill, into the oldest stand of virgin longleaf pines 

It is said that without the flames the forest dies - the fire burns so bright it blinds us all 

Beyond the reach of man, in this land shaped by fire and the sea 

In the end this is what you take and what you leave behind 

All texts used with permission of Ray Owen ©2016-2020

Press

“The Bleeding Pines” is altogether a powerful, painterly piece, starkly conveying both the destruction and the hope of salvation that humans hold over nature and themselves.”

- Rosemary Ponnekanti, Sound Magazine


Resource Links

Learn More about The longleaf ecosystem & the bleeding pines