Mid-Winter Songs

Composer: LAURIDSEN, Morten
  • Written in 1980, Lauridsen’s Mid-Winter Songs comprises a cycle of five choral works based on poetry by Robert Graves:
    1. Lament for Pasiphae
    2. Like Snow
    3. She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep
    4. Mid-Winter Walking
    5. Intercession in Late October
  • In choosing to set words by Graves, Lauridsen noted that he was “much taken with the elegance, richness and extraordinary beauty of [Graves’s] poetry and his insights regarding the human experience. Five diverse poems with a common ‘winter’ motif (a particular favorite of mine, rich in paradoxical symbolism of dying/rejuvenation, light/darkness, sleeping/waking) suggested a cohesive cycle and led to the composition of Mid-Winter Songs.”1
  • The overall form of Mid-Winter Songs is an “arch,” with a chronological/ seasonal progression from winter to spring to summer.2

Sources

  1. Byron Adams, Notes in accompanying booklet, Lauridsen: Nocturnes & other choral works performed by Polyphony conducted by Stephen Layton, Hyperion 67580, 2007, compact disc.
  2. Margaret Sue Hulley, “A Study of the Influence of Text in Morten Lauridsen’s “Mid-Winter Songs” (Graduate Dissertation, Lousiana State University, 1988), https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7741&context=gradschool_disstheses.

Cut IDs

45927 12907