There Will Come Soft Rains (2017)

When I was commissioned to write a piece for the Oklahoma Youth Orchestra, I knew I wanted to create something that explored a wide range of sounds and that told a clear story.  While this piece does tell a hopeful story, a large chunk of it is decidedly darker than what I’d originally intended.

I began sketching There Will Come Soft Rains shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, around the time of his attempted travel ban.  I was feeling particularly hopeless and cold (those Oklahoma winters are no joke), and all of my output had a dreary, cynical quality to it.  During this period I was able to sketch out what would become the middle portion of the work – wherein dark themes grow more and more menacing until they ultimately bring everything crashing down – but it didn’t sit right to have the finished product be something entirely defined by its bleakness.  I hit a roadblock for quite a while here.

 About two weeks before the deadline (see: way too close), I rediscovered Sara Teasdale’s stunning poem There Will Come Soft Rains [War Time], a piece that envisions a time after the chaos and destruction we’ve wrought on the world, where robins sing and fly and war is a distant memory.  It was through this poem that I found the inspiration for the main theme and heart of the piece.  The main theme is a hopeful, fluttery thing, constantly pushing itself upwards towards a higher plane.  It is hazy and lacking confidence in its first iterations, gets lost and beaten as the piece progresses, and by the end it soars skyward, reaching its full, radiant potential.  It represents an ideal worth striving for, the promise of a better tomorrow.

Forcing myself to face my anxieties about the present moment and to imagine a time after – when corrupt politicians are held to account, when wars are done, when children can pursue an education without the fear of lone shooters looming over their heads - was an enormously cathartic experience. Composing this piece helped to pull me up out of an incredibly dark place, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to have written it and to everyone who pushed me to finish it.  It is dedicated to the brilliant Dr. Eric Garcia, artistic director and conductor of the Oklahoma Youth Orchestra at the time, and to my composition professor Dr. Edward Knight, without whom this piece wouldn’t exist, and I wouldn't have a clue.

There Will Come Soft Rains is written in a [highly] modified 5-part Rondo form:

A: introduction of the main theme.  A hazy, far-off ideal.  Hopeful and passionate, but directionless and lacking confidence.  Susceptible to manipulation.

B: introduction of the two subordinate themes.  Playful, impish, and insidious, these two do their best to act upon and lull the main theme into a false sense of security.    I used the two eels from Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) as major points of inspiration for these two themes.   

A’:  Bastardization of the main theme.  Drunken and sullen, the main theme lets its guard down and becomes an object of ridicule.

B’: Chaos, panic, malice, and destruction.  The subordinate themes reveal their true wicked nature.  The main theme snaps to its senses and tries to escape, but is firmly caught in the trap.  The piece implodes in on itself, things get broken.

A’’: Rebirth.  A resplendent, joyful, and soaring return of the main theme.  Where the poem kicks in.

There Will Come Soft Rains
(War Time)
Sara Teasdale, 1884 - 1933

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
 

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
 

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
 

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.
 

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly;
 

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Performance history

• World premiere performance by the Oklahoma Youth Orchestra, Dr. Eric Garcia, artistic director / Sunday, May 7th 2017 - Putnam City North High School, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

• Performed by the Oklahoma Composer's Orchestra, Jamie Whitmarsh, artistic director / Thursday, May 25th, 2017 - Wanda L. Bass School of Music, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma