Today, a one-minute song about a snowflake.

“The Snowflake” is the third in my five-song cycle entitled, “Silvery Songs,” settings of poems by Walter De La Mare, for mezzo, flute and piano.

First, take a look at Thoreau’s beautiful journal entry about snowflakes:

“The thin snow lodging on my coat consists of beautiful star crystals, perfect little wheels with six spokes, six perfect little leaflets, fern-like.
How full of creative genius is the air in which these are engendered! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Wheels of the storm-chariots, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing, with emphasis, the number six.
What a world we live in! where myriads of these little disks, so beautiful to the most prying eye, are whirled down on every traveller’s coat, the observant and the unobservant, and on the restless squirrel’s fur, and on the far-stretching fields and forests, the wooded dells, the mountain-tops.
Far, far away from the haunts of man, they roll down some little slope, ready to swell some little rill. There they lie, like the wreck of chariot-wheels after a battle in the skies. Meanwhile the meadow mouse shoves them aside in his gallery, the schoolboy casts them in his snowball, the woodman’s sled glides smoothly over them, these glorious spangles, the sweeping of heaven’s floor.”

Thoreau's lively, leaping, impassioned prose conjoins the humble and the exalted, seeming to say quite all that prose is capable of saying on the subject of snowflakes.

Only the conciseness of poetry could best it. See how poet Walter De La Mare expresses almost the same thought:

The Snowflake

Before I melt,
Come, look at me!
This lovely icy filigree!
Of a great forest
In one night
I make a wilderness
Of white.
By skyey cold
Of crystals made,
All softly, on
Your finger laid,
I pause, that you
My beauty see:
Breathe, and I vanish
Instantly.

In the song I made of that perfect poem, the flute expresses the snowflake even more concisely than the poetry does, sans a single syllable, solely by its silvery sound!

To hear mezzo Susan Olson sing “The Snowflake" from Silvery Songs, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
January 29, 2017

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

For this cold January day, a one-minute song about a single snowflake, descending upon our world “as if no artifice of fashion, business or politics had ever been.”

First, let’s read Thoreau’s lovely journal entry on the subject:

“The thin snow lodging on my coat consists of beautiful star crystals, perfect little wheels with six spokes, six perfect little leaflets, fern-like.
How full of creative genius is the air in which these are engendered! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Wheels of the storm-chariots, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing, with emphasis, the number six.
What a world we live in! where myriads of these little disks, so beautiful to the most prying eye, are whirled down on every traveller’s coat, the observant and the unobservant, and on the restless squirrel’s fur, and on the far-stretching fields and forests, the wooded dells, the mountain-tops.
Far, far away from the haunts of man, they roll down some little slope, ready to swell some little rill. There they lie, like the wreck of chariot-wheels after a battle in the skies. Meanwhile the meadow mouse shoves them aside in his gallery, the schoolboy casts them in his snowball, the woodman’s sled glides smoothly over them, these glorious spangles, the sweeping of heaven’s floor.”

Lively, leaping, impassioned prose, images conjoining the humble and the exalted, this is Thoreau at his best.

Only the concisest poetry can equal it. Here is Walter De La Mare’s
“The Snowflake”:

Before I melt,
Come, look at me!
This lovely icy filigree!
Of a great forest
In one night
I make a wilderness
Of white.
By skyey cold
Of crystals made,
All softly, on
Your finger laid,
I pause, that you
My beauty see:
Breathe, and I vanish
Instantly.

Looking at this poem on my computer screen, it strikes me that the expanse of white space to the right of those short lines, i.e., the ‘negative space,’ metaphorizes visually a mass of pure white snow.

Prose, poetry and a visual metaphor … now, music.

“The Snowflake” comes third in my five-song cycle titled, “Silvery Songs,” settings of poems by Walter De La Mare, for mezzo, flute and piano.

In the song I made of that perfect little poem about a perfect little thing, the flute opens, expressing the snowflake sans a single syllable, solely by its silvery sound!

In the flute’s last little strain, the snowflake and the music melt into silence, an aural ‘negative space,’ metaphorizing the nothingness into which the snowflake vanishes.

Thus, beauty appears and disappears in our lives, sometimes in the space of a single breath! What a world we live in!

To hear mezzo Susan Olson sing “The Snowflake" from Silvery Songs, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

If you’re curious about the other four songs in this cycle, let me know and I’ll send you links to mp3 recordings and PDFs of the scores so you can follow along as you listen.