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April 19, 2002Showcasing circle of lifeInterlochen pine felled by lightning makes musical returnBy MIKE NORTONRecord-Eagle staff writer INTERLOCHEN - It was a case of musical recycling - an appropriate combination for the celebration of Earth Day at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. As a loud spring thunderstorm blew in from the west, Interlochen student Peter Rogers played the sad strains of Serge Koussevitzky's "Chanson Triste." But the double bass he was playing has a more cheerful story; it was made from the wood of an Interlochen pine that was killed by lightning in a similar thunderstorm many years ago. The wood of the old-growth tree was saved, cured and shaped into a new work of art - and on Thursday it returned to the place where it grew. "When the double bass was built, nature served art," said Interlochen Arts Academy ecology instructor Michael Chamberlin, who organized the Thursday program. "But in today's program ... the instrument completes a circle of life in which art serves nature." The return of the deep-bellied bass - crafted by Grand Rapids instrument-maker Steve Reiley from a 200-year-old Italian pattern - was a potent symbol of the relationship the 75-year-old arts center has always had with the grove of tall pines that surrounds its buildings and byways. The importance of trees for Interlochen and the entire world was highlighted in other ways, too. For instance, the program featured a performance of the John Philip Sousa march "Northern Pines," written by the legendary composer and bandleader in 1931 as a tribute to the time he spent at Interlochen in its early years. The program also included songs and poems about Michigan's logging heritage presented by fourth-graders from Interlochen Pathfinder School, and a "historical folk opera" about a logging ghost town written by faculty members Anne-Marie Oomen and Chris Campbell. But the culmination of the program was a historic tree-planting ceremony sponsored by the Champion Tree Project, which intends to establish a "tree library" of cloned champion trees on the Interlochen campus. According to Jared Milarch, one of the founders of the program, the two trees planted Thursday at Interlochen are genetically identical to champion trees planted this year in New York, at the Pentagon and at Arlington National Cemetery in memory of those who died in the Sept. 11 terror attack. "This is a place where the trees won't be cut down in 50 to 100 years," said Milarch. "Our children and grandchildren can study tree genetics and learn how they survived the entire industrial age."
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