A House Covered With Dawn

Year Composed:	2025
Instrumentation:	SA choir, strings
Duration	20 minutes

I	A house that stands in my heart
II	A burst of sudden wings
III	What Robin told me
IV	To a Robin
V	Piping Robin
VI	I dreaded that first Robin
VII	There is another sky

Program Notes

When I was approached by the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra with a project that would pair the string ensemble with the Winnipeg Sonora Voices, my imagination leapt immediately to setting text about birds…specifically robins. Perhaps it was the time of year (I began sketching this piece in March of 2025), or the fact that my infant son, whose name is Robin, was on my mind quite a bit. Musically dramatizing the symbolic connection between robins and the arrival of spring (and with it, the promise of renewal and rejuvenation) proved both an obvious choice and one that was hard to resist.

The inner movements of this seven-movement song cycle are all about robins. As there was no shortage of poems on the subject, I devoted a lengthy period to simply reading and soaking in the literary imaginations of others, eventually choosing texts that pleased my ear and that I felt would create a structurally and emotionally compelling arc. The second and third movements (set to poems by Francis Ledwidge and George Cooper, respectively) are both scherzos: one in swashbuckling compound metre, and the other in a brisk, rousing 4/4. These texts are vivid portraits of flight, song, and the delightful frenzy of nest-building, and I have tried to reflect these snapshots with a musical language that is by turns exuberant and whimsical.

The fourth poem, by William Francis Barnard, is weightier (and by far the longest of the seven). Its reverence for the robin's "secret glee" is tinged with melancholy, and the music expresses the poet's longing for the robin's inner strength with varying shades of light and darkness. This is followed by the briefest of the poems (Annette Wynne’s "Piping Robin"), whose invocation of spring's arrival is set (somewhat counterintuitively) to a gothic, Elfman-esque fanfare. A noticeable stylistic shift into murkier waters occurs in the sixth movement (set to a typically enigmatic text by Emily Dickinson); here, the robin's joy only serves to deepen the poet's sense of grief and alienation.

In March 2025, my wife and I returned to our home in Ottawa after spending six months in the hospital, where my son had just received (and was recovering from) a life-saving liver transplant. The bewildering transition back into the rhythms of 'normal' life was eased, somewhat, by my reading of Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space," a treatise on architecture and its meanings. This work inspired me to bookend my song cycle with contrasting poems that deliberately share similar musical grammar; the first about the sacredness of the 'house' (as a metaphor for the familiarity of home), and the last about a paradisical space that lies just beyond the shores of our perception.

Commissions and Awards

• Commissioned by the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra and the Winnipeg Sonora Voices.

Performances

• April 13, 2026 - Manitoba Chamber Orchestra and Winnipeg Sonora Voices, conducted by Anne Manson and Valdine Anderson. Westminster United Church, Winnipeg, MB