The Snow Man, for SATB chorus, is a setting of one of Wallace Stevens’s earliest poems, in which the “snow man” of the title is not a figure made from snow, but a person looking out upon a snow-covered landscape. The poem reveals the beauty of winter to be in its utter stillness, and suggests that a certain dispassion (“a mind of winter”) is necessary to appreciate it. These ideas are expressed with music that emerges from (and recedes into) stillness, making use of the softest dynamics, the deepest parts of the vocal range, and stark, “cold-sounding” harmonies. The Snow Man was written in 2014, and premiered in 2015 by the Isthmus Vocal Ensemble with conductor Scott MacPherson in Madison, Wisconsin.
Recording: The Isthmus Vocal Ensemble; Scott MacPherson, conductor (Madison, Wisconsin, 2015)
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
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