Composing pieces from the Pine Tree State Barbara Smith’s ‘A Sense of Maine’ takes listeners from the mountains to the sea in natural rhythms

‘A Sense of Maine’, written and performed by Barbara Smith; produced by Klarity

ORONO – The music just won’t stop pouring out of Barbara Smith.

Eight years ago the retired Orono music teacher thought she had a few piano solos – enough for one CD – inside her.

This summer she released “A Sense of Maine,” her fourth collection of instrumentals inspired by the natural beauty of Maine.

“The music seems to come very easily,” Smith, 72, said recently. “I’ve written twice as many pieces as were used on the CDs. I write a little bit wherever I go.”

The CD includes 12 new pieces composed and performed by Smith. It begins with “Downeast Sunrise” and ends with “Mountain Sunset.”

A musical tour of the state, it travels from the rocky coast through thick coastal fog to the big skies of Aroostook County, then down the rippling waters of the Allagash to the grandeur of Mount Katahdin and the retreating sun.

Although the composer named each piece, Smith said she tried to keep the titles generic so people could imagine their own special places.

When she wrote “Long Pond,” Smith was imagining the one on Mount Desert Island. Listeners, Smith said, could conjure up their own favorite Long Pond since so many bodies of water around the state bear that name.

Smith grew up on a dairy farm in Dayton. She attended a one-room schoolhouse until she went to Saco High School and then to Aurora College in Aurora, Ill., where she studied elementary education.

Like many composers who grew up before television, she and her family made their own entertainment. Smith was given piano lessons at an early age. As a girl, she played duets with her mother at home and on the square grand piano at the tiny schoolhouse she and her siblings attended.

Smith also was exposed to music at the Advent Christian Church, where her mother was the organist for 65 years. Smith is the organist at Orono United Methodist Church.

“The church had an unusual music program,” Smith told the Bangor Daily News three years ago when her last CD, “A Sense of Roots,” was released. “Nearly everyone in the church could sing or play a musical instrument, and it had a 12- to 15-piece orchestra that played classical music. It also had a bell choir.”

“A Sense of Roots” evoked the seasonal activities of farm life, including making maple syrup, haying days and the first snowfall. Her other CDs are “A Sense of Acadia,” Vols. 1 and 2.

Smith began writing music at the urging of her husband, Kent, who gave her some blank-staff music sheets nearly a decade ago. Blessed with perfect pitch, she composes on-site and “hears” the melody, then adds the harmony.

She deliberately keeps the pieces “simple and in easy keys” so that her former students will be able to play them. The music from her first CD has been published.

Smith is not sure how many more CDs she’ll produce, if any, but she continues to be touched and surprised by how her music affects people. She has received hundreds of letters and e-mails from fans and their families.

“My music has brought comfort, solace, serenity and peace to a lot of people,” she said. “Teachers play it in schools, I’m told, and it quiets down the kids.

“It seems to be something people need in their lives.”

Barbara Smith’s CDs are available at Grasshopper Shops, Borders Books, Music and Cafe, and gift shops along the coast. For more information, e-mail Barb36ham@juno.com.