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Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander (Seafarer Press)
Praise Wet Snow Falling Early
A meditation on darkness, transcendence and hope.
SATB, piano
Opening with a tender appreciation of one morning’s light, “Praise Wet Snow Falling Early” gradually grows into a broader meditation on darkness, transcendence and hope. With the understated sensibility of art song and an expressive piano accompaniment, this song offers a deeply moving experience for both performers and audience.
Composer’s Notes
In 1997 in the small town of Dryden, New York, a group of people came together in the wake of two unexplainable and horrific murders and did the only thing they could think of to do: they formed a community choir. When the conductor asked me to write a piece for them, I knew I wanted it to address good and evil on a very basic level, offering no easy answers or second-rate balm. The “Gloria” from Denise Levertov’s “Mass for Thomas Didymus” provided a lyric which wrestles with contradiction and doubt as it nevertheless makes its determined way into the heart of praise.
-Elizabeth Alexander
Text
Praise wet snow
falling early.
Praise the shadow
my neighbor’s chimney casts on the tile roof
even this gray October day that should, they say,
have been golden.
Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney’s shadow.
Praise
god or the gods, the unknown,
that which imagined us, which stays
our hand,
our murderous hand,
and gives us
still,
in the shadow of death,
pour daily life,
and the dream still
of goodwill, of peace on earth.
Praise
flow and change, night and
the pulse of day.
-Denise Levertov
© by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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