Summer is a work I composed in 2011 specially for a concert of my choral and vocal music. It uses a beautiful poem by Jean L. Connor, a wonderful Vermont poet who is still with us at the age of 101 as of this writing in summer of 2020. Here is the poem:

SUMMER

Every solstice

should be as this one, suspended

between evening

and the slow coming on of stars,

the great bear first, then the jeweled

crown. Let every solstice pause,

linger in a meadow, imagined

or real, blue with lupine,

the fields wide, the self small,

a place afloat between this

fixed earth and the transparencies

of clouds. Give silence room,

there anger seeps away. Out of the hidden,

fireflies may come to semaphore

a blessing. Beneath the deepening sky,

bright wands and an old cartography of peace.

Poem taken from A Cartography of Peace, published by Passager Books, 2005. Copyright 2005 by Jean L. Connor. Used with permission of the poet.

This performance is by Voces Dulcissimae, conducted by Larry Hamberlin