A Woman for All Seasons

I’m please to share that my one of my songs for voice and piano, called Night, will be performed on Thursday, November 21 at the University of Toronto. Clarisse Tonigussi, U of T graduate and creator of the Canadian Women Composers Project, is curating a program of season-related songs by female Canadian composers to be performed by graduate students in the music program at U of T. Night contains autumn imagery and will be included in that section of the program.

Check out the details for the concert here.

Last time this piece was performed (by Clarisse herself) I was unable to make the concert so I’m please to be able to see it this time!

Marla

There Will Come Soft Rains

Back in university, probably around 2007, I wrote an art song with the text of Sara Teasdale's poem There Will Come Soft Rains for a student composer's concert. Due to various complications it never ended up being performed.

Flash forward to this year, when my dear friend Katy Harmer performed it in a recital. It was up in Yellowknife so I was unable to catch it, but she sent along this recording - so I finally have a copy of the piece, eight years later! Thanks, Katy!

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Marla