A Mind of Winter | music by Isaac Cohen

Описание: A Mind of Winter (2021 – 2022, rev. 2025)
Music by Isaac Cohen
Poem by Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)

Caleb Mayerhoff, conductor

Choir:
Bernadette Alejandro
Isaac Cohen
Julia Drover Crane
Jordan Oney
LayVon J. Scott
Nicolas Taccetti
Zachary C. Thompson
Marissa Emmie Torii Williams

In late 2021, I decided to write a piece about winter, as there was a chord change that kept coming back to me that seemed wintry. After searching, I found Steven’s “The Snow Man,” a poem that speaks of the mindset a person must have to truly appreciate winter. I chose to write the piece in Dorian, as one of the two vibes it gives me is winter (the other is hope, which I use in my setting of “Phases,” another of Stevens’ poems). I got so engrossed in writing it that I almost forgot to use the chord change that had inspired the whole thing, but I remembered just in time to use it as the ending.
My interpretation of “The Snow Man” is that the mindset it describes is universal and can apply to anyone, rather than referring to a specific “Snow Man”. To that end, and to be gender neutral, I decided to change the title to “A Mind of Winter,” after the first line of the poem (as “A Snow Person” doesn’t have a great ring to it), and did likewise with the use of “himself” towards the end of the poem, changing it “themself.”

Poem:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

--
in "THE HEART OF THE WOODS: from laughter to tears"
February 28th, 2026
Howard Hanson Recital Hall, Eastman School of Music

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