HANCOCK—The premiere of Bob Rohe’s new piece "Fog" was low key in a Downeast way, with the intimacy of a kitchen session on the island that inspired it.

At a late summer recital—in a living room, for about two dozen friends and neighbors—Rohe, on bass, and his musical partner, Lynne Mattingly, on cello, tried the subtle work out in public for the first time.

The bows of the two musicians whispered over the strings, faintly drawing notes from the instruments, like breath barely giving voice. Melody was almost entirely hidden in the opening of the piece, like the world concealed in the fog. The muted strings let notes materialize out of the hiss of the bow.

"It’s double piano with a slow tremolo," Rohe said after the performance. "You want it to appear out of nowhere."

Just as fog does.

Rohe’s inspiration for the piece didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from his memories of living on Hupper Island, off Port Clyde, and from a book.

The book is "Acadia: Visions and Verse" by longtime television personality Jack Perkins. Published this summer by Downeast Books, "Acadia" is a collection of black-and-white photographs and accompanying poems, all by Perkins, who spends eight months of the year on Bar Island just off Bar Harbor.

Rohe said he saw the book and read the Perkins poem called "Fog" early in the summer. The experience threw him into a reverie about his years on Hupper.

"All this stuff from the island returned," he said.

The fog epitomizes the solitude and self-reliance of island living, recollections of which Perkins, Rohe and Mattingly—who raised a family on Isle au Haut—all share.

"There’s a tremendous feeling of aloneness," Rohe said. "A great quiet pervades. The birds don’t fly and then the white grayness.... It rolls in like heavy balloons."

Musically the intense mystery of fog comes out in stronger tones punctuated, like a real foggy day, by fog horn blasts from the bass. Aside from that one identifiable sound, the piece is about what can’t be identified or understood. Rohe said it’s an abstraction of what the sensation of fog would sound like, in the tradition of Debussy’s "Clouds."

For Perkins, who read his poem at the recital, Rohe’s work is a compliment and a wonder.

"The music is just perfect," he said. "It’s enough to have your own work completed and out there and apparently appreciated by some people. Being an inspiration is something new."

For Perkins, inspiration came from the landscape of Acadia National Park and the tradition of American landscape photography. Although the genre is old hat to some, it obviously resonates with many others. Perkins’ book is now in its second printing.

The photographs are of trees, fields, rocks, water, snow and, of course, fog. It is not a book about people.

"Some people have bought it because of the other Jack Perkins," he said, referring to his high public profile as a former NBC News reporter and essayist and as host of A&E’s "Biography" series. But he’s sure most people buy it for the images of the park.

He said he didn’t think about popular appeal when he was putting the images together. And even less about it when he composed the accompanying poems.

"As a habit I found myself wanting to do something in words," the veteran journalist said. But he wanted something more personal than a news story.

"Poetry seemed to be personal," he said. "I love to sit in my big old chair in the evening and put on some music and have a thought."

A similar artistic process occurred when Rohe sat down with the thought and image in a book and produced music.

"There’s a symbiosis between visual and auditory arts," the composer explained. He has studied both music and visual arts, and appreciates and finds resonance in both of them. As principal bass for the New Orleans Symphony and now bassist with the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, Rohe has honed his skills as a master of musical expression just as Perkins has learned to tell evocative stories with words and pictures through his successful career in television.

But their time on Maine islands—their experience with fog and the other tastes of nature—give them a common tale to tell.

Life on the island has taught Perkins to fit his schedule to that of the tide. And he has learned to repeat a truism that sounds absurd to the rest of us: "A lot of necessities you don’t need."

For Rohe, who vividly recalls getting caught in the fog on the bay 30 years ago, the fear and wonder of the phenomenon is still fresh.

"It’s one of the natural elements that can isolate. I think it promotes meditation and self-awareness," he said. "I loved it."