In the Silence | SATB Chorus with divisi | 6'

While composing In the Silence, I kept coming back to a particular image from childhood: staring out the back door of my parents’ house in New Jersey, into the dark woods behind the house, as it snowed. If you looked up at the snow from the window in that particular door, the rate of the snow falling seemed to change; often, it looked like you were slowly floating up, rather than the snow falling down.

 

A musical interpretation of this sensation is scattered throughout In the Silence, and the silence and stillness suggested by the title is represented not by literal silence, but in the moments where the music itself comes to rest.

 

In the Silence was commissioned and premiered by Choral Arts Northwest (Robert Bode, director). This piece is published in the G. Schirmer Dale Warland Choral Series.

 

 

text

​

Give me this life,
Give me this life, too:
That I may hear you, blessed world,
That I may hear your secret life;
That I may hear the snow as it nears,

That I may hear the snow as it kisses the earth.

 

—Robert Bode