Rain Makes Its Own Night

Rain Makes Its Own Night (2018) was one of five pieces commissioned by five choirs which were to be performed in a special project of Choral Canada funded by the Canada Council’s New Chapter program. Each choir was instructed to commission a work that represented their region of Canada with the common theme of water. My birthplace, Vancouver, is extraordinarily beautiful, but it is very wet. Just ask anyone there. It rains a lot and the air is often heavy with moisture. When Morna Edmundson, artistic director of Vancouver’s Elektra Women’s Choir introduced me to Canadian author Anne Michaels’ 1985 poem, Rain Makes Its Own Night, its beautiful sensuality immediately caught my imagination. The harmonic overlaps and glissandi in the opening bars are intended to evoke the moist Vancouver air. My musical imagery parallels Anne’s poetic imagery of rain. The listener is meant to feel the rain through the falling musical gestures found throughout the piece. – Alexina Louie Rain Makes Its Own Night Rain makes its own night, long mornings with lamps left on. Lean beach grass sticks to the floor near your shoes, last summer’s pollen rises from damp metal screens. This is order, this clutter that fills clearings between us, clothes clinging to chairs, your shoes in a muddy grip. The hard rain smells like it comes from the earth. The human light in our windows, the orange stillness of rooms seen from outside. The place we fall to alone, falling to sleep. Surrounded by a forest’s green assurance, the iron gauze of sky and sea, while night, the rain, pulls itself down through the trees. Anne Michaels, text used by permission of the author.