Premiere by the New York Virtuoso Singers, conducted by Harold Rosenbaum:

Score Preview

After I met Dana Gioia as a student in his “Words and Music” class at the University of Southern California, there were two works I found in his 99 Poems collection that struck me as needing to be set to music. The first, “Equations of the Light,” I set as an art song in 2017 for soprano and chamber duo, and the second was “The Gods of Winter,” which I have set as this current choral piece from 2019. Both poems enthralled me thanks to Gioia’s ability to shroud his experiences, both with nature and people, in mysterious beauty and evocative imagery. These poems inspire in me a yearning sense of nostalgia – not the kind that you can frame in a picture book, but rather the kind that can, through contemplation of the past, be a spiritual gateway towards the future.

“The Gods of Winter” captures an idyllic yet melancholic picture of a winter storm – the kind of storm that, unlike thunderstorms, is filled with quiet, peace, and the unknown (“a storybook view of paradise”). Gioia heavily emphasizes the finality of winter, which suggested to me an acute sense of memory; of realizing an ideal form of nature and family once it may be gone. Deciding how to capture this reaction in music eventually led me to rethink my relationship with the text. Instead of treating Gioia’s poem as the body of the music, why not treat it as the destination; the goal; the end of a journey? As if the music were traveling back through the storm itself to that peaceful place sitting inside and reflecting on the majesty outdoors?

As such, I decided that for the beginning of the piece to the climax, the music would only use the words, syllables, and sounds taken from the very first line of the poem. I treat it almost like a Kyrie to a mass, in which a very short line of text is repeated over and over until the music transcends the meaning of the text with its own emotional states. In this music I draw equally from my own harmonic discoveries as well as older sounds suggesting prayer and spirituality (imitation and suspensions etc.). After this, Gioia’s poem is set in full – simply, clearly, and virtually unadorned, like quietly sitting next to the fire, looking out the window at the snow in moonshine.