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About the Composer
Jennifer Lucy Cook
Compose Like a Girl
Blow, Blow, thou Winter Wind (Cook) (Practice Tracks)
Premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, your treble choir will love this piece!
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Blow, Blow, thou Winter Wind
Download audio practice tracks for Jennifer Lucy Cook’s “Blow, Blow, thou Winter Wind” for SSA choir, tambourine & hand drum.
Includes full access for 1-50 singers. These tracks are sold in batches of 50, so please round up the number of singers in your group to the nearest multiple of 50. Example: 42 singers = Qty. of 50 in your cart.
All purchases will have a packet of audio tracks (individual part-tracks alone, individual part tracks with piano, piano only track, full mixed track).
About the tracks:
- These rehearsal tracks are recordings of my own voice, singing all vocal parts. I have designed them (with the help of my friend Pete White) for the benefit of distant / isolated singing in your personal spaces, and to encourage independent learning. These audio tracks work best with earphones / headphones on.
- The tracks are professionally mixed so singers are ensured high quality audio recordings to support their learning!
Important licensing & purchasing terms: The purchase of this resource allows your choral organization to distribute it to your singers and staff for their own learning at any time, but not to be duplicated, edited in any way, and/or shared beyond the organization.
“Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind” is filled with delightful surprises, including percussion, some aleatoric passages, rapidly changing dance-like meters, and an unsentimental conclusion that “pops.” Treble choirs of all ages will love singing it, due in large part to expert writing for the voice and repeated patterns.
Composer’s Notes
In this text, an excerpt from As You Like It, “Heigh ho, sing heigh ho!” is a celebration with an undercurrent of bitter- ness. When ingratitude and feigned friendship stings more than the winter wind, you need music that you can still dance to without ignoring the truth at the heart of the mat- ter! It’s a sort of “haters gonna hate, I’m just gonna shake it off” anthem, except unlike Taylor Swift’s pop song, this is a modern take on a medieval folk dance. The tune feels to me like something that could have been sung in Shakespeare’s time to celebrate the winter solstice, while the wind-like aleatoric sections bookend it, as though blowing away the old year and hastening in the new one.
– Jennifer Lucy Cook
Text
Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp, Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
– William Shakespeare, from As You Like It
$1.00 per set
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