Clouds  18947

‘I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky:
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.’
(Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Shelley’s poem The Cloud, which opens this edition of Words and Music, immortalises the cloud cycle in almost divine terms.  There is a mysterious quality to clouds, particularly in the way they catch the changing light and mood of each unique day from sunrise to sunset, constantly metamorphosing through a rich palette or whites, greys, golds, oranges and reds.  When Henry Thoreau reflects on the majesty of a crimson cloud at sunset, he asks: ‘what sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination?’

Shelley’s beguiling image of The Clouds sets in motion a continuous trail of clouds across the programme from Edward Thomas’s The Clouds that are so light to the gentle rain clouds of Robert Frost’s poem Lost in Heaven and Rilke’s ‘labourers of rain’.  Alexander Posey and Shakespeare write about storm clouds, Sandburg about the fog, and Ellen Palmer Allerton’s poem Trailing Clouds describes how the lifting of clouds at sunset are like ‘light at eve / After rain’ for those that grieve.

Clouds have been used in literature as far back as Aristophanes’ drama, The Clouds, from which we hear its Chorus of Clouds over Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds.  Clouds provide writers with a versatile metaphor for many things: the solitude of Wordsworth’s famous walk through a field of daffodils, the ancient cities of William Sharp’s Clouds built again in the heights of heaven, the darkening clouds of friendships sounded as in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 33 and 34, the soft fabrics of Julia’s Bed in Herrick’s poem, or the white napkin in Derek Walcott’s, and the love songs of Rilke and Brecht that end the programme.

The music is of two main types, the first being generally soft and floating in a way that sounds fitting with the image of clouds scudding gently across the sky, like Bliss’s Elements, Jarnafelt’s Berceuse and Elgar’s Sospiri, and the second characterising rainfall, like Westhoff’s Imitazione de liuto and Bartok’s 4th String Quartet.  There are songs about clouds too from Einsamkeit from Schubert’s Winterreise, which echoes the sentiments of Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud, Dorothy Squires singing The Little White Cloud that Cried and Vaughan Williams’ The Cloud Capp’d Towers.  In the same way that clouds move seamlessly across the sky, each piece follows from the last as if in one continuous movement from the first note of Eric Whitacre’s Cloudburst that begins the programme to the last note of Elgar’s Sospiri at the end.

The Cloud Appreciation Society encourage us to ‘look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with [our] head in the clouds’, so how do we imagine that world to be?   This programme is an aural impression of that cloudy world through words and music.

Elizabeth Arno (producer)[/rtoc]