Hudson is a three-movement work by Troy, NY-based composer, performer, and mastering engineer Sam Torres. With a run-time just shy of 15 minutes, Torres and co. manage to GPS the listener from the hazy, still-time inflection of the nature surrounding the Hudson river (the piece’s namesake) to the sensual intensity and quick-footedness of New York City.

A range of styles and influences support; languid drones à la New Age music, off-kilter pattern grooves that glance toward the midwest emo playbook, and a happy accident third-movement tribute to Steve Reich—one of minimalist music’s premier composers (and, by proxy, a firm representative of the artistic ‘sound’ of NYC, something that Torres is himself very familiar with)—via a full-ensemble setting and permutation of the famous 12-beat cycle from Clapping Music (or Music for Pieces of Wood). I had the chance to connect with Torres via email about his stylistic approach: 

The original version of Hudson, which I wrote in college about a decade ago, was heavily inspired by minimalism for sure. I was just starting to compose music outside of the jazz idiom, experimenting with different compositional processes while also exploring using acoustic instruments to create the textures that I loved from electronic music, and the rhythms and harmonies of jazz and indie rock. So it was all kind of rolling around in my mind at the time. The original version had even more of these kinds of interlocking rhythmic movements, that would shift in symmetric rhythmic patterns. When I revised the piece in 2020, I cut a lot of parts of that material that kept it mathematically “perfect” but that I didn’t feel were serving the music. The Reich thing, honestly, was an accident—I was listening to a ton of Reich at the time and I didn’t realize until I was pretty far into writing this that I was ripping off that rhythm, but decided to just stick with it. I love his music and the Counterpoint pieces and Different Trains were some of the early pieces I fell in love with when I started wanting to compose outside of jazz.

Accompanying the recordings on the composer’s Bandcamp page are a series of atmospheric videos of the Hudson. Presented as a triptych with one filmic act per movement, they display slow shots of the natural environment, Torres’ journeys down the river by bike, and the Hudson snaking through New York City itself. When asked about the inspiration behind this multi-disciplinary approach, he expressed inspiration in seeing Sufjan Stevens’ “Round-Up” at Brooklyn Academy of Music: 

I got into film photography in high school purely as a hobby and didn’t really connect it with my music until I saw some of the work of Bill Morrison, and even more so when I saw Sufjan Stevens’ Round-Up at BAM. I loved that piece and that really inspired me to see if I could connect my photography with my music. I wanted to show the river in different contexts and how it relates to the city around it.

In experiencing the work, one feels the tandem candidness of an indie rock band with a sense of chamber-esque immensity in all its bends and corners. The filigree of Torres’ musical patterns covers busy ground (especially in movements 2 and 3), while the top-level melodies soar overhead, chime-like and lofty in their sonic presentation; appropriate given the piece’s subject matter (consider the storied grandiosity of New York City (as both a location and ideal), the 315-mile spread of the Hudson River, and the composer’s life-long proximal relationship with both of these giants). Resulting is a front-row seat to the inherent ‘bigness’ that comes with spending quality time near a large body of water. With this in mind, my last ask of Torres was for specific experience[s] that carried the piece from spiritual to physical fruition; he finalized his response with a formative tale:

...my summer camp took us on an annual trip called the Weed Wallow. They would take us to Pete Seeger’s property on the Hudson where he would sing songs and play banjo to us from on top of a shed (he would have been in his 80s already at this point), and we would swim around in the river off his property and pull out some type of water weed that was causing issues and clogging up the water/impacting the natural habitat in that part of the river. I loved Pete Seeger and that was always a really special day.

Torres has brought chambered music to the outdoors and mapped an exciting, autobiographical excursion along the Hudson river with this piece; whether wading as a listener or wallowing in the audio/visual experience, Hudson is sure to put one’s feet at the water’s edge.