Behind the Score: A Rainy Day
Several years ago, I composed a set of a cappella pieces that I called, A Rainy Day. The set consists of two pieces, Some Rain Must Fall, and After the Rain. Recently, Canticum Lucis, a local community choir under of the direction of Devan Weixler, performed this set at their summer concerts.
Since we've had some severe rainstorms in our area recently (including one on one of the concert dates) and since A Rainy Day was written in the aftermath of a personal storm, it seems like a particularly good time for me to record a bit of the backstory to my writing the two pieces that make up this set.
In 2002, I discovered Longfellow's poem Snowflakes, and was very taken by the poem. I knew I had to set it to music, which I did. I'll do a different post on Snowflakes and the personal storm that brought it and A Rainy Day into being. The experience of writing Snowflakes led me to seek out additional Longfellow poetry for possible lyrics. It didn't take long before I ran across Longfellow's poem, "The Rainy Day." Once again, I was taken by the poem's beauty and expression of one of life's simple and, at times, difficult truths that, "some days must be dark and dreary."
Similar to my experience with Snowflakes, I felt compelled to set "The Rainy Day" to music. I began to work on it a day or two before Thanksgiving, 2003. I pretty much completed the first version of Some Rain Must Fall (my setting of "The Rainy Day" poem) by the end of the Thanksgiving holiday. It's always fun when pieces flow out like that!
My original idea was that it could be a companion to Snowflakes, since both texts use nature to convey a message about life. However, since Some Rain Must Fall turned out to be similar in tempo and style to Snowflakes, it really wasn't a good match. I spent a few more nights through the rest of the year polishing the piece up so that I could be ready to present it after the first of the year.
I submitted it to Dr. Ronald Staheli and Rosalind Hall at Brigham Young University. They both really liked the piece and Rosalind especially expressed a desire to perform it. However, she felt like I had done a bit too well at capturing the “dark and dreary” nature of the poem and that the piece would work much better in a concert program if it had a companion piece to follow it that would be lighter and more uplifting. She looked for other possibilities over the next couple of years, but came up empty handed. I also began looking for some lyrics, but after hours and hours of searching, I was unable to find a suitable text to match what I was looking to convey. For a time, I gave up and went on to other things.
In the fall of 2007, I was drawn back to Some Rain Must Fall. I really felt like it had something important to say and I knew if I didn’t come up with a suitable companion piece, it may never get performed. So, again I went searching for a fitting poem, but once more, was unsuccessful. At the time, I hadn't done much writing of my own words, but in this case, it seemed to be my only option.
So, I decided to take on the task, and over a period of a few days, penned the words to the companion piece After the Rain. Once I had the words, the music seemed to come right out, as if it had just been sitting around waiting for the words. Within a few days, I was able to show it to Rosalind Hall and she agreed that it was a perfect match. Soon after, I also decided to rework Some Rain Must Fall to shorten it so that the length was a better match with After the Rain and so the set would not be too long.
The BYU Concert Choir debuted the set, which I entitled A Rainy Day, in April of 2008 at the DeJong Concert Hall. Both pieces were very warmly received by the audience.
And now you know a bit more of the story behind the score! Please enjoy a recording of each of the two pieces in the following videos.
