“Now Winter Nights Enlarge” is a setting for SATB chorus on a poem written by Thomas Campion (1567-1620), an English poet and a composer of madrigals, masques, lute and sacred songs. He was born in London, attended Cambridge University, and then trained as a lawyer, yet he did not obtain either a university degree or a lawyer’s credentials. He did eventually receive a medical degree in 1605. For the next fifteen years he was a prolific composer and author of volumes of poetry and music. “Now Winter Nights Enlarge” first appears in Campion’s “Third Book of Ayres” published in 1617. The poem explores the long winter hours of winter and makes them expansive, warm and candlelit, full of the various ways that we find to enliven them, as we stay warm waiting for the sun to return.

Winter is my favourite time of year, and this work seemed a fitting vehicle to explore this love. Stay warm.