Trio #1 for violin, clarinet and piano, the third movement- "Sunny Days”

“Sunny Days” was the subtitle I gave my first trio for violin, clarinet and piano because it was written for a trio of Russian-Americans who called themselves “Sonsa,” the Russian word for “Sun."  Three of the four movements are sunny enough but the third movement, by contrast, expresses what is felt on a rainy day.

So far as I know, these feelings have never been more beautifully expressed than in a miniature essay, “Rain on the Roof” by the 20th-century American writer Odell Shepard.  Six-paragraphs long?  Read it while you listen to the music.  I’ll quote it entirely:

        A million little silver feet are dancing delicately to the music of the wind three yards above my head.  At every moment their rhythms and their figures change, their tempo changes from slow to swift, from allegro to a stately-stepping andante.  The room is resonant with their tiny tramplings.  It reverberates like a great hollow drum under numberless muffled drumsticks.

        How instantly the sense of shelter, one of the oldest of human emotions, is lifted to the pitch of glee by this patter of rain-drops!  The breath-catching delight that our forefathers felt, many ages ago, in huts of piled stone roofed with boughs, when they heard the many feet of the rain just above them and knew that they were warm and dry -- this comes back to us in force today, after all our centuries of comparative comfort.  Probably there is no other feeling in which we come closer to them; none that carries us nearer to a realization of those interminable centuries during which the weak and naked human animal held out somehow, kept alive and not quite hopeless, against wet and cold and hunger and darkness and the creeping terrors of the dark.  Shelter!  Four walls and a roof that shed the rain, that break the wind, that keep the warmth in and the wilderness out!  Have we forgotten how good these are?  Divorced and estranged from the elemental, ignorant or forgetful of the long effort by which the simplest of our comforts have been won, have we lost for a time almost completely this ancient sense of shelter?  When the dance of silver feet begins along the roof, we remember again those ages that have no history except such a revived writing on the palimpsest of the heart.

        Foxes have holes in the earth and the birds have nests where they rear their young, and why should a man’s dwelling be less natural than theirs?  To me, at least, this revelry on my roof brings the sky and the outer world more near, even while it deepens the sense of seclusion.  I am closest to Nature while walking in the rain or against a driving storm of snow, but the present experience comes next to that.  It makes me feel no longer a spectator.  I am in the workshop.

        For this is what I am thinking:  a minute ago the raindrops now musical above me were riding high over hill and forest, playfellows of the wind.  What journeys they have made in coming here, and how long they have been on the way! -- sinking down to the rocky bases of the planet, lying still there in the dark for weeks or months or years, bubbling forth again to the light in springs of the mountain and of old worn pastures, washing the roots of grass and trees, climbing to the stem of a brier rose to issue in the breath of a blossom, shining in the dawn as dew, sparkling in brooks and darkling in rivers, tossing on the sea, drawn up into clouds and blown over deserts and farms and cities -- and then falling at last with a dance and song to cheer a solitary man.  Every drop that I hear, though young as the morning, is also very old.

        I think how the summer shower will bring refreshment to this gray pasture and to that ferny lane, to the thirsting columbines on their rocky knoll and to the browning meadows by the stream.  I imagine the swift patter of drops on the leaves of the maple or dimpling the surface of the lake.  I see how they will glisten in the feathered grass and deep in the hearts of roses when the sun shines again.  Thus the rain that shuts me in may really set me free.  Fancy spreads her wings when she hears this music.  The space and freedom of the day are brought into my cabin.

        But the sound of this elfin drumming is best to hear when I am falling asleep.  Not only does it assure me of safety but it leads my thought away until it is lost in the land I knew when a child.  I may have supposed I should never come there again -- for a long way it is and winding, with many intricate turns among the shadows -- yet I can still win back to that land on any night when the rain is on the roof.  No guide can lead me to a fairer place or to one I have longer loved.  There is no faint memory of childhood that the rain has not kept fresh.  And while I am listening to it, no rich man in the world is lulled by a more somnolent music.  No king falls asleep to a drowsier minstrelsy.

                — from The Cabin Down the Glen, by O.S., 1935

To hear the third movement from my Trio #1 for violin, clarinet and piano, subtitled "Sunny Days”  beautifully played by violinist Paul Patterson, clarinetist Tony Costa and pianist Phil Amalong, click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/sunny_days_III.mp3

To see a PDF of the score, click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/sunny_days_III.pdf