Snow descends with moonlight

At dawns pale light
I mistook it for the lingering moon of early morn,
so radiant was the snowfall blanketing
the village of Yoshino.
Sakanoue no Korenori, Hyakunin Isshu No. 31
The poem opens with a gentle invocation of morning's hush a world still touched by moonlight, suspended between night and day. As the verse unfolds, it anchors us in the renowned landscape of Yoshino, only to reveal in its closing line that all is quietly veiled in freshly fallen snow. The transformation is subtle yet profound: what we believed to be light from the heavens is, in fact, the earthly glow of snow beneath our feet.

In composing this work, I sought to render the hushed presence of snowfall through a constant thread of eighth-note pulses soft and barely perceptible, like snowflakes settling upon the ground. The harmonic language shifts delicately between major and minor, each hesitant chord suggesting the tentative steps of a traveler leaving fleeting prints upon an untouched landscape.

Yet even those footprints do not remain. A new flurry begins to fall, gently obscuring all traces of passage. And so the piece, written in C major a key without sharps or flats, like an unwritten page comes to a close with the world wrapped in stillness and light, as if snow had covered not only the ground, but sound itself.