Treesong is, in effect, the Violin Concerto No. 2 by John T. Williams (born in 1932), the world's most-famous composer of film score music (Star Wars, Schindler's List, Jaws, and dozens more). It is, however, not film music, nor does it have much of the "Hollywood sound." It does have the lyrical and rich Romantic sound that might please his film scores and is a notably less modern-sounding work than the 1976 violin concerto. During his tenure as conductor of the Boston Pops (1980 - 1993), Williams often walked in the Boston Public Gardens where he particularly admired a large tree. He learned it was a specimen of the Chinese Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides. Such trees had been known only as 100-million-year-old fossils until Dr. H.H. Hu found a living one, 100 feet tall and 23 feet around, in the village of Modaoqi in Szechuan, China. There are other Metasequoia, relatives of the California redwood, in the area; villagers consider the particular tree as divine and treat it as a shrine. Williams seems to have a strong affinity for trees; his bassoon concerto it titled Five Sacred Trees. He became friends with Dr. Shiu-Ying Hu, a Harvard botanist, and while walking with her in the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, they chanced to pause by another large tree, which she identified as the first Dawn Redwood in North America, planted by her in the 1940s using seeds from the "original" Modaoqi area. She also, it turned out, had planted the Public Garden tree Williams had become "infatuated" with. In the late '90s, Williams received a commission to write a concerted work for violinist Gil Shaham and decided to honor this favorite tree by making it the subject of the music. It is not programmatic, nor explicitly descriptive, music, but as Williams said in his notes for Treesong, it is an attempt "...to connect...the great beauty of this magnificent conifer with the elegance and grace of Gil Shaham and his art." Treesong is 20 minutes long, making it moderately short for a violin concerto. It is in a three-movement form, with the middle movement being the fastest. The mysterious opening, a kind of "life pulse" on an eternal time scale, introduces the lyrical violin theme over a cushion of harp, marimba, piano, and celesta. The first four notes of the theme dominate the entire work. The notes broadly span the chromatic scale; tonality in the work is tenuous. The orchestra mainly provides a misty, indefinite background for the violin's soaring lines. The middle movement, "Trunks, Branches, and Leaves," is a faster, dancing piece ending with a cadenza linking to "The Tree Sings," another dreamy slow movement. Here, however, the music is more tonal, coalescing into a broad melody in a process that will be familiar to fans of the score to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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