Whisper of Winter

Kenneth Tay; Sandy Coffin; Katy Lavinia Cooper

Whisper of Winter

Kenneth Tay (Composer)
, Sandy Coffin
, Katy Lavinia Cooper (Conductor)

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Research output: Performances, compositions and other non-textual forms › Composition

Details

Commissioned by the University of Glasgow Spheres of Singing Arts Lab, this piece brings together a series of haiku written by my friend Sandy Coffin, alongside two of my own. Sandy has generously allowed me to set her poems, in which the turn from autumn toward winter is felt in the air. I hear this shift as a breathing gesture, where autumn gathers the year’s remaining warmth and fullness; winter answers as a long release, when the energy and harvest that has been stored is given back, perhaps as a final breath. My pair of haiku reflects on this cycle, connecting to ideas of pneuma, spiritus, and ruach, in which breath, spirit, and wind are conceptually intertwined.

The music broadly follows a ternary ABA form, where in the outer A sections, the tenors and basses of the double choir sustain an ostinato drone of interlocking fifths, creating a steady underpinning over which the treble voices develop the melodic ideas. At the centre, the double choir begins in canon, one bar apart, forming bitonal and overlapping chord clusters, like two streams of breath moving together.

Original language	English
Publication status	Published or Performed - 25 Nov 2025

Cite this

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title = "Whisper of Winter",

abstract = "Commissioned by the University of Glasgow Spheres of Singing Arts Lab, this piece brings together a series of haiku written by my friend Sandy Coffin, alongside two of my own. Sandy has generously allowed me to set her poems, in which the turn from autumn toward winter is felt in the air. I hear this shift as a breathing gesture, where autumn gathers the year{\textquoteright}s remaining warmth and fullness; winter answers as a long release, when the energy and harvest that has been stored is given back, perhaps as a final breath. My pair of haiku reflects on this cycle, connecting to ideas of pneuma, spiritus, and ruach, in which breath, spirit, and wind are conceptually intertwined. The music broadly follows a ternary ABA form, where in the outer A sections, the tenors and basses of the double choir sustain an ostinato drone of interlocking fifths, creating a steady underpinning over which the treble voices develop the melodic ideas. At the centre, the double choir begins in canon, one bar apart, forming bitonal and overlapping chord clusters, like two streams of breath moving together. ",

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N2 - Commissioned by the University of Glasgow Spheres of Singing Arts Lab, this piece brings together a series of haiku written by my friend Sandy Coffin, alongside two of my own. Sandy has generously allowed me to set her poems, in which the turn from autumn toward winter is felt in the air. I hear this shift as a breathing gesture, where autumn gathers the year’s remaining warmth and fullness; winter answers as a long release, when the energy and harvest that has been stored is given back, perhaps as a final breath. My pair of haiku reflects on this cycle, connecting to ideas of pneuma, spiritus, and ruach, in which breath, spirit, and wind are conceptually intertwined. The music broadly follows a ternary ABA form, where in the outer A sections, the tenors and basses of the double choir sustain an ostinato drone of interlocking fifths, creating a steady underpinning over which the treble voices develop the melodic ideas. At the centre, the double choir begins in canon, one bar apart, forming bitonal and overlapping chord clusters, like two streams of breath moving together.

AB - Commissioned by the University of Glasgow Spheres of Singing Arts Lab, this piece brings together a series of haiku written by my friend Sandy Coffin, alongside two of my own. Sandy has generously allowed me to set her poems, in which the turn from autumn toward winter is felt in the air. I hear this shift as a breathing gesture, where autumn gathers the year’s remaining warmth and fullness; winter answers as a long release, when the energy and harvest that has been stored is given back, perhaps as a final breath. My pair of haiku reflects on this cycle, connecting to ideas of pneuma, spiritus, and ruach, in which breath, spirit, and wind are conceptually intertwined. The music broadly follows a ternary ABA form, where in the outer A sections, the tenors and basses of the double choir sustain an ostinato drone of interlocking fifths, creating a steady underpinning over which the treble voices develop the melodic ideas. At the centre, the double choir begins in canon, one bar apart, forming bitonal and overlapping chord clusters, like two streams of breath moving together.

M3 - Composition

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