Poem by Erin Lynch
Performed by the Columbia Bach Society conducted by Sofia Ouyang.
This is an arrangement of the first movement of Hard Weather for Chorus and Orchestra.
Hard Weather is a cycle of ten songs, each setting various parts of the poem Hard Weather by Erin Lynch. As a whole, Hard Weather explores the melting of glaciers around the world due to climate change, and how this affects the surrounding ecosystems through the eyes of the creatures, both human and non-human, that interact with the glaciers. My parents were avid mountain climbers, and so throughout my childhood they took me on hikes up to the glaciers on Mount Rainier and elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, and I was always fascinated by the immense scale and interconnectedness of the glaciers and their ecosystem. They expand, contract, grow, and shape the cliffs and alpine landscape around them; their melting serves as the springs of creeks that grow into huge rivers stretching hundreds of miles to the ocean; and these rivers in turn give water and life to the world around them. It is this scale and connectedness that I attempted to evoke in this song cycle.
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