‘summer snow’ (2025)

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Instrumentation:
Clarinet in B♭, violin, cello, fixed-materials track
Duration:
6.5 minutes

Electronics:
The fixed-materials track and a click track are required to perform this work. Contact for more info:

info@cole-butler.com

Commission/premiere info:
First performed by Ensemble7Bridges at a Durham University composers’ workshop.

Composer’s note:

summer snow is based on a poem my mum wrote for me before I left for university. Its central image - the white petals of hydrangea flowers falling like snow each summer in our garden - blends the antonymic warmth and light of Summer with the stillness and dissolution of Winter. This fusion of opposites, of presence and absence, summer and winter, suggests they are not binaries but interwoven cycles of change and return. Musically, this idea is expressed through gradual accumulation and erosion: textures bloom and melt, motives recur in altered forms, and sounds drift in and out like seasonal memory.

A fixed-media track threads throughout the piece, grounding it in personal sonic landscape constructed from field recordings from my hometown: seaside waves, garden birds, and the voice of my mum reciting fragments of her poem. These elements evoke a layered, immersive soundworld, simultaneously intricate and expansive.

Drawing inspiration from composers like Paul Novak, Gerard Pesson, Sylvia Lim, and Hildegard Westerkamp, summer snow explores acoustic delicacy and environmental sounds in tandem. A recurring clarinet multiphonic, inspired by Sciarrino, serves as a sonic talisman that anchors repetition and transformation. In its form and feel, the piece reflects on time, memory, and the beauty of cycles that define our inner and outer worlds. Across the piece, the four seasons can be tracked - musical homophones, like the repeated creaking/cracking sounds in the fixed-materials track, interweave ideas from the poem (creaking hinges of “the swinging bench”) with seasonal change (ice cracking and melting away).

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