Bleeding Pines

Music By David Serkin Ludwig

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.

“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