The Winter Lakes

The Winter Lakes

Duration: 06:12

Instrumentation: Choral (SATB), Piano

Technical Specifications: .wav 48kHz stereo audio

Performer: Exultate Chamber Singers, Conductor: Mark Ramsay

Year: 2017

A long time resident of the prairie province of Canada – Manitoba, I found the landscape change to be quite striking upon moving to Toronto in 2015. Where there was once flat grassland, there was now wild, rocky landscapes with endless trees and beautiful lakes.

While researching the area, I came across a poem by Ontario poet Wilfred William Campbell, where he speaks about the majesty and beauty of the Great Lakes.

In the poem, Campbell talks not only about the immense beauty and sacredness of the Great Lakes, but also their mysterious and dark qualities as well. Through his imagery, I tried to capture the various aspects of the great lakes in my music – both its beauty, but also its violence and mystery.

Winner of the 2017 Exultate Chamber Singers Choral Competition

Out in a world of death far to the northward lying,
Under the sun and the moon, under the dusk and the day;
Under the glimmer of stars and the purple of sunsets dying,
Wan and waste and white, stretch the great lakes away.

Never a bud of spring, never a laugh of summer,
Never a dream of love, never a song of bird;
But only the silence and white, the shores that grow chiller and dumber,
Wherever the ice winds sob, and the griefs of winter are heard.

Crags that are black and wet out of the gray lake looming,
Under the sunset’s flush and the pallid, faint glimmer of dawn;
Shadowy, ghost-like shores, where midnight surfs are booming
Thunders of wintry woe over the spaces wan.

Moons that glimmer above, waters that lie white under,
Miles and miles of lake far out under the night;
Foaming crests of waves, surfs that shoreward thunder,
Shadowy shapes that flee, haunting the spaces white.