Winter

The text has a chronological timeline, starting with a robin singing alone on a ‘leafless bough’ and ending with the dark gradually drawing in. The narrative of the poem suggests a through-composed structure rather than strophic and I therefore tried to tell a story through my music, so the listener feels as though they’ve been on a journey by the end of the piece. I used divisions for all of the vocal parts at various points to help create a richer, more sonorous quality, and there are moments in the text, such as ‘on fields in leagues of beauty spread unearthly white’, where I deliberately tried to create an aural impression of a vast, frozen landscape.