Summer Rain
Commissioned by Mirror Visions Ensemble & Tobe Malawista, Artistic Director
Instrumentation Soprano, Baritone, and Piano
Duration 10'
Program Notes
Summer Rain (2016) is a song cycle for Soprano, Baritone, and Piano setting texts of Amy Lowell and James Joyce. The poems featured in this cycle – Lowell’s "Dog Days" and "Summer Rain," and Joyce’s "She Weeps Over Rahoon" – were written independently of one another, yet they share similar imagery of thunder and falling rain. In this piece, the texts are deliberately assembled together, so as to create a larger dramatic arc which implies a story of love and loss shared by the two singers.
In “I. Dog Days,” we encounter a hot summer’s day on a farm. The baritone is tinkering in the barn, the soprano looking on, as they clean leaves out of a window-sill while standing on a teetering ladder. The music shifts back and forth: sometimes playful and pastoral, sometimes pushing forward as purple wisteria blow across the window, and sometimes slowing in reflection as a sense of nostalgia sets in.
In “II. Summer Rain,” the baritone sings alone, expressively recalling the magic and passion of a night spent alongside his lover as they listened to raindrops dancing on the roof overhead. In “III. She Weeps Over Rahoon,” we find the soprano standing alone in a lush green cemetery, her own tears mirrored by a gentle surrounding rain. Thinking of her husband, she hears his voice calling out, and she sings back to him, sadly, in peaceful contemplation.
— Daniel Temkin
The following texts are used in this work:
AMY LOWELL (1874-1925)
Dog-Days
A ladder sticking up at the open window,
The top of an old ladder;
And all of Summer is there.
Great waves and tufts of wistaria surge across the
window,
And a thin, belated blossom
Jerks up and down in the sunlight;
Purple translucence against the blue sky.
“Tie back this branch,” I say,
But my hands are sticky with leaves,
And my nostrils widen to the smell of crushed green.
The ladder moves uneasily at the open window,
And I call to the man beneath,
“Tie back that branch.”
There is a ladder leaning against the window-sill,
And a mutter of thunder in the air.
Summer Rain
All night our room was outer-walled with rain.
Drops fell and flattened on the tin roof,
And rang like little disks of metal.
Ping! – “Ping! – and there was not a pin-point of silence
between them.
The rain rattled and clashed.
And the slats of the shutters danced and glittered.
But to me the darkness was red-gold and crocus-
coloured
With your brightness,
And the words you whispered to me
Sprang up and flamed – orange torches against the rain.
Torches against the wall of cool, silver rain!
JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941)
She Weeps Over Rahoon
Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,
Where my dark lover lies.
Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,
At grey moonrise.
Love, hear thou
How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,
Then as now.
Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold As his sad heart has lain
Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould And muttering rain.
All poems are in the public domain.
Copyright © 2020 of Daniel Temkin Music (BMI), All Rights Reserved.