Pied Beauty

A few weeks ago I spied a call for scores with a theme of nature, one or two parts and accompanied by piano. I asked on Twitter for suitable texts, preferably not too church-y because the context wasn’t a liturgical one. One text that caught my eye is “Thaw” by Edward Thomas; I will post about it separately once it is complete.

I believe Pete Phillips is the person who first suggested this text by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I liked it a lot but it still feels too theist for the call for scores, so I decided to set it for SATB instead. The page on ChoralWiki will take a while to be visible to non-editors, but there is a .pdf file and the usual MIDI robots.

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

As usual, this work is licensed under CC BY-SA: this means you can use it for free, even in a commercial context, but you must attribute me. So go forth and print, record, arrange and so on to your heart’s content!

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