New Consortium: Secular winter songs for high school choir by Timothy C. Takach

Timothy C. Takach – biography
Reviewed as “gorgeous” (Washington Post) and “stunning” (Lawrence Journal-World), the music of Timothy C. Takach is rapidly gaining momentum in the concert world. Applauded for his melodic lines and rich, intriguing harmonies, Takach is a full-time composer and has written over 60 commissions for various organizations including VocalEssence, the St. Olaf Band, Cantus, Pavia Winds, cellist Kirsten Whitson, The Singers – Minnesota Choral Artists, and the University of Notre Dame DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. His compositions have been performed on A Prairie Home Companion, The Boston Pops holiday tour, multiple All-State and festival programs and at venues such as the Library of Congress, Kennedy Center and Royal Opera House Muscat.

Takach has been awarded grants from the American Composers Forum, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the Minnesota State Arts Board and Meet the Composer, and yearly ASCAP awards since 2004. He received a BA in Music Theory and Composition at St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, where he graduated with honors. Takach lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two sons.

www.timothyctakach.com

Proposed selected texts:

Winter Walk
Brian Newhouse

The longest night
The brightest moon
The sharpest sting of cold
The barest branch
The hardest earth
My breath the only cloud

And I am out walking to ask the winter moon:
Who will I be when the spring rains come?

The air so still
Smoke rising straight
The snowbanks sleep so deep
The quiet star
The silent night
A lone bird wakes and sings

And I am out walking to hear my heart,
And I am out walking to hear my heart.

Journal of a Prairie Year
Paul Gruchow

And there are the dawns and the dusks
when the snow is falling,
when the lights in the villages
take on a fat and gauzy glow,
when the whole prairie world, although dark,
seems somehow aglow,
when the sky above the storm
becomes the particular pale pink
of a prairie rose in bloom.
When the winter sky puts on that face,
the only possible response is to keep silent,
as before any many-splendored thing.

Blizzard
Juhan Liiv

A blizzard races a blizzard,
neither can defeat the other:
now one pulls ahead,
now it is behind the other.

I watch until my eyes tire,
the mind’s world enters my thought:
A blizzard races a blizzard,

Returning
Wendell Berry

I was walking in a dark valley
and above me the tops of the hills
had caught the morning light.
I heard the light singing as it went
among the grass blades and the leaves.
I waded upward through the shadow
until my head emerged,
my shoulders were mantled with the light,
and my whole body came up out of the darkness, and stood
on the new shore of the day.
Where I had come was home,
for my own house stood white
where the dark river wore the earth.
The sheen of bounty was on the grass,
and the spring of the year had come.