2016 | for SATB choir | 3'
Twenty-two winters in the American Midwest were more than enough for me. Living in San Francisco, I don't particularly miss the black ice and dirty parking lot slushbergs of my childhood. And yet there's a certain unique magic to winter where it hits the hardest: tree branches encased in crystal, colorless skies that dim eerily early, the perfect crisp silence of untouched snow. Wallace Stevens' poem "The Snow Man," which this piece sets, captures the harsh beauty of midwinter as well as anything I've ever read.
One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the landFull of the same windThat is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
A recording of Mind of Winter is available through GHOSTLIGHT Chorus, on their concert “SILENCE: A Holiday Vigil” recorded December 15, 2023 at Church of St. Luke in the Fields in New York City. Thank you for supporting this organization!