— WORKS —

WINTER SONGS

PROGRAM NOTES

It's become something of a cliché that winter, as most of Canada experiences it—the harsh cold, mountains of snow, ice, sleet, howling winds, interminable nights—unifies the country's inhabitants, both in celebration of what the season offers and in bitter complaint of the hardship it often imposes. Much folklore and art, including literature and painting, draw on images, and collective responses, to a season that inspires many to admire its beauty, especially landscapes, and to take pleasure in the opportunities it affords, frequently in the form of outdoor activity.

The centrality of winter to the Canadian experience cannot be ignored—nor should it—but care must be taken to avoid reducing artistic response, itself, to cliché. It is therefore incumbent upon artists to seek out subtlety that rises above the obvious. Some years ago I discovered the poetry of the Canadian, Marjorie Pickthall (1883-1922), widely celebrated during her lifetime. Enthralled by her writing's supreme craft, attractive rhythm, clarity of expression, and concision—all lyrical qualities that invite musical setting—I previously set four of her poems in two choral works: Again...Riding (2018) and The Grass Is Full of Stars (2020).

For this cycle, I set another six poems, all but one on the subject of winter. Of these, "Frost Song" and "Snow in April" treat the theme in intriguingly oblique ways. We tend to concentrate on winter's essential qualities, what it means to be in the thick of the season. But what of the transitions, both into and out of winter? Transitions delight in their uncertainty, their ambiguity; expectations are frequently thwarted. In "Frost Song", Pickthall trains her eye on the arrival of frost, a harbinger of winter, but not a marker of the season itself. Moreover, she anticipates winter's promise with a child's glee:

We are not desolate,
When on the sill, across the window bars,
Kind winter flings her flowers and her stars.

"Snow in April", on the other hand, describes the arrival of spring in all its excitement—and messiness. "Life is awake in the robin's flute" yet the "violets shiver" and the "faint snow falls". It speaks to that other cliché: the Canadians who break into shorts prematurely only to grumble in disbelief when another storm sends them running inside. Pickthall marvellously captures the uneven, non-linear transition between seasons: frost in the fall anticipates what is to come; snow in the spring recalls what is being left behind.

Winter Songs is bookended by these two wondrous poems that foreground wintry transitions. The four inner songs chart a loosely chronological trajectory. "Snow" is a rapturous ode to "the white flowers … so shining, so tender". "December Thaw" (in my setting, an alluring blues), in which melting snow trickles in rivulets "to meet the sun", addresses another seasonal subtlety, those welcome periods of reprieve. "February", meanwhile, calls attention to stillness: "Underneath the dreaming deeps, / In the silence, Silence sleeps." I've inserted a sixth, contemplative poem, "Stars", not specifically about winter, but to whose celestial vision lines from the other poems allude: "Calm lamps within the distant southern sky, / And planet-dust upon the edge of space."

Pickthall reuses certain favourite words. In these six poems, besides "snow", words that crop up frequently include "flowers", "stars", "dream", and "silver", that I set to common or related motives across the cycle to unifying effect.

—R.R.

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