note: this score is free to download and perform for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis

Completed on April 1, 2020.

Text from “Spring in War-time” (1917) by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933). Public domain.

Commissioned and premiered in a digital recital on April 8, 2020 by soprano Arwen Myers.

Program note

Right around the time that stay-at-home orders began as the world faced the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, a robin began singing outside my office window. This first sign of spring was at once so welcome and so tinged with a sense of loss and of irony. But, of course, I’m not the first person to feel this way; Sara Teasdale’s poem “Spring in War-time,” written more than a hundred years ago, beautifully describes how world-shifting crises unfold despite a change in seasons. When Arwen Myers asked me to write a song about our experience of the coronavirus, Teasdale’s words became the right ones for us both.