Breathing Winter’s Air

Purchase Scores and Parts

Scores and parts for this piece are available for purchase by contacting me. Versions with violin instead of flute, cello instead of bassoon, clarinet instead of alto sax, viola instead of horn, and piano instead of electric guitar (or any combination of these) are also available.

More Information

Breathing Winter's Air for Flute, Violin, Alto Saxophone, Horn, Bassoon, and Electric Guitar was composed in February 2019.  It was composed as part of a project of new works inspired by landscape paintings at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY as part of the 2019 Image/Sound Festival presented by the Eastman Audio Research Studio.  My piece is inspired by Harold Weston's painting called Three Trees, Winter from 1922 that hangs in the museum, and I was drawn to how the painting portrays a sense of calm and stillness during a winter's night while the same time evoking a sense of gentle motion by the rolling hills of snow and the three highlighted trees that almost seem to be dancing.  Weston himself expressed this kind of inner activity in describing an encounter with a tree from the same year:

I stopped beside a big hemlock tree and reached around the great trunk to feel its vigor, its reality, its life existing essence.  My ear, laid against the wet bark, seemed to hear the pulse, the flow of life-creating sap...[R]oots plunged into the soil, made it one with the earth and gave it life. As a primitive pagan I bowed before the mystery of that world spirit that giveth life to nature and to man.

In my piece, I tried to evoke this paradox of a still landscape with a subtle sense of inner motion, with a pulse that you only “seem to hear” and flows as inconspicuously as sap.  I also tried to portray the many different types of snowy hills of varying degrees of steepness that are layered in the painting through using smaller and larger arches of pitches and dynamics in the flute, violin, saxophone, horn, and bassoon parts, but always in a subdued way that never breaks the general sense of calm and stillness.  These horizontal arch shapes are in contrast to the guitar part, which represents the three trees through almost exclusively playing rich chords which mimic the trees' verticality and form a kind of harmonic landscape for the other instruments to gently move through.

Rebecca Foster writes that Weston often “walked on snowshoes through the Adirondack wilderness on nights when the moon reflected bright light on the snow” much like this painting depicts.  This reminded me of one of my favorite things about winter.  On very cold winter nights (ideally 0°F or less) when the moon is out and I'm out in the countryside where it is quiet, I love to open a window and breathe in the super cold air before going to bed.  In this situation, I never feel the cold air as uncomfortable or painful, but it instead fills me with a sense of being alive and of calm, again the same kind of paradox Weston heard in the hemlock tree.  I portray this breathing in the beginning of the piece with all the instruments starting on a unison pitch which grows and breaks out into a cluster chord before dying away again.

Foster says that this painting “is about reaching the transcendent through the immanent, through unremarkable, tangible moments.”  I hope is that this applies equally to my piece as well.

Premiered March 28, 2019 by Mimi Harding-flute, Varun Rangaswamy-bassoon, Jeremy Howell-alto sax, Tasha Schapiro-horn, Raina Arnett-violin, Erik Gibelyou-electric guitar, with the composer conducting at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY.