Winter Songs - A Year Later

My song cycle, Winter Songs, had their premiere on January 20, 2008, at the Fine Arts Recital Hall at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The performance featured Anastasia Jamieson, soprano; Walter Oliveros, violin; Mark Wolbers, clarinet; and Timothy Smith, piano.

I had set four poems found in the now-defunct poetry quarterly, Ice Floe. It was the second of my projected set of four song cycles, each devoted to a season. The first cycle, Summer Songs, for mezzo-soprano and piano, was three settings of poems by Mary Oliver.

Last winter was so busy that I never got around to posting the performances, along with the lyrics. This year, the anniversary of the premiere - January 20th - was too busy to post the songs. Today is a lull, though, as I'm busy stacking firewood and doing research for and composition of Spring Songs; and another song cycle for Kate Egan, Marlene Bateman and Juliana Osinchuk, based on Native Alaskan lyrics.

Here are Winter Songs: (Click on the song's name. That will take you to the Garage Band page for that song. Then click on the green arrow. It opens a new window that automatically plays the song. Then, if you click on the back arrow on your browser, you go back to where you can read the lyric.)

I. Somewhere

Somewhere in a crater-like formation
Of scalloped granite the snow falls all the time,
Even when the sun is shining, and were it not
For an alarming run of bad luck human
Civilization would have started there.

- Hayden Carruth

II. Light

Wherever you walk
Hunting on the tundra,
You feel so happy
When the light shines in the dark.

If you wander in a blizzard
Through a cloud of snow,
How strong is your desire
To see the light of a yarang.

Even if the night is quiet,
You go tired, nearly falling down.
But if a light suddenly twinkles,
Your body resumes nimbleness.

And your thoughts seem to be wings,
And your legs run by themselves.

- Vaalgyrgyn
(translated from the Chukchi by Charles Weinstein)

III. Gift

Snow
is the joy of cold --
reward for deprivation.
It transforms
trees dark and angular,
near death,
to blessed beings
crowned by aureoles,
creates bright presences,
redeems these days --
when sap is gelid
and leaves lie undreamed --
these days
when only snow
comes tender to the world.

- Louise Gallop

IV. The Path

On the ice of the forest lake
in untouched snow
I walk myself a path the shape of a large spiral.
In the middle of the lake, in the innermost of the
helix I stop, standing still.

All around me the spruce forest in dark expectation.
Comes spring and sunshine. Slowly I sink
through the ice.

- Carl-Erik Strom