A Conversation I Will Never Forget & a Train That Made Music

Every July for seven years, a group of people led by Eleanor Sage Leonard produced a nine-day classical music festival of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart under a large white tent in Bridgehampton.

A stage was at one end, about 400 folding chairs were set up in rows at the other. And every year it was poorly attended. One of the reasons might have been because it took place at Bridgehampton’s Sayre Park, where, every evening at 8:55 p.m. a westbound Long Island Rail Road train roared past alongside the tent. It’s a small park. The tent has to be beside the tracks.

Well, as the train comes through, the conductor stops for a beat or two and then, waving his baton furiously, picks up the beat and continues, but demanding fortissimo. Well, that is not appreciated.

I was on the board of directors of this music festival. I love the classics. And I had offered to promote the festival for free in Dan’s Papers.

At one particular October board meeting, after once again grousing about the intrusion of the train in that year’s festival, I got an idea. Why not incorporate the train into the music? The sound of cannon fire works its way into the grand finale of the 1812 Overture. Surely, we could do something with that mournful wail of the train.

And so, just after the Christmas break, we sent out invitations to every music school in the country. Students at the school could enter a competition to compose a 14-minute piece of music that would incorporate the sound of a passing train. The winning entry would receive $500 and have its world premiere at the Hamptons Music Festival by noted conductor Lucas Foss and his 22-piece Atlantic Symphony Orchestra. Entry deadline was April 1.

In January, I contacted Kevin Williams, the public relations director of the LIRR to confirm that their regular evening train to New York would be leaving its Bridgehampton stop at 8:55 p.m. as it always did. I told them what we intended to do. There was nothing else required from them. Just have it emit a loud and mournful horn blast while passing Sayre Park 4 minutes and 12 seconds later. Yes, it was on the schedule, I was told.

Forty-seven music students entered. And the winner, chosen by Foss, was Mark Petering, a music student at the University of Minnesota. His piece was entitled “Train & Tower for Orchestra, Tape and Live Train.”

The evening’s festivities on July 9 that year at Sayre Park were scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. with “Peter and the Wolf” read by actor Roy Scheider, with Hampton Day School first-graders performing in costume, followed by Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” and then, for the grand finale, just as the sun set, Petering’s “Train and Tower.”

I had stepped forward to do the coordination of the Petering event and nobody had stopped me. It was my idea. I’d carry it through. I made posters, sent out press releases, and measured the time it took for the 8:55 p.m. train to pass the park. I even had Petering living in my library for that week. No stone was left unturned. And as the event approached, it got sold out.

By 5 p.m., three hours before the event, everyone involved in this was on the premises, under the tent, going over everything. Doors would open at 7 p.m. The New York Times and CBS News were there. The BBC and NPR were there. The sound and video people were there. Petering and Williams were there. And it was there that I had the conversation I will never forget. It was with Williams. He walked over holding a cellphone to his ear.

“He’s right here,” he was saying. “Want to talk to him?”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Say hello,” Williams said, handing me the phone.

“Hello,” I said.

“It’s Chuck,” the voice on the phone said to me. “I’m the engineer.”

Williams explained. “He’s in the locomotive of your train. Drove it out this morning and parked it on a siding at the Bridgehampton station. It’s all fired up and ready to go. When you’re ready, he’s ready.”

Now he spoke into the phone.

“Chuck, give me some toots.”

Off in the distance to the east a mile away, there were two long toots.

“What about the regular train?” I asked

“There are two trains,” Williams said. “With the regular train it’s too complicated. What if it were behind schedule? You need your own train.”

“How big is it?”

“Seven cars long. 80,000 pounds. By the way, the president of the railroad is on his way out. Should be here about 6.”

And so that’s how it happened. As the sun set, the music began, soft and slow, way off beyond the trees. When I was a boy I had a train set. The tracks were on a ping-pong table. It had a dial you turned to make the train go faster.

Here, it was a phone call. Way down on the siding, it lurched forward. Then it picked up speed. Four minutes later, as the music led by bassoons and French horns climbed into a faster gear to hurry it along, it came into view, suddenly, at 50 miles an hour, crashing through the trees, lights ablaze and roaring ferociously.

The crowd leaped to its feet. Standing, screaming and cheering, they saw it come through in a blur of light and thunder led by trombones, bells and trumpets to be joined in a climax of kettledrums and cymbal crashes. And then, silence. And after that, as the cheering continued, Petering’s parents, Miami residents, came up onto the stage to call their son up, where they gave him a hug and handed him the biggest bouquet of flowers I had ever seen.

Watch and listen to a video on YouTube of Mark Petering’s train and tower, performed for a second time at the festival a few years after the first (see top of page).