The Rainy Day (2024)

This work originated as a composition project for my undergraduate music history course. I chose to set the text of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Rainy Day,” a poem with many elements that lend itself well to a musical setting of the text: a regular, three-stanza structure that parallels a familiar musical form; vivid imagery that can be easily represented through instrumental and vocal ornaments; and a shift in mood that enables musical contrast within the piece. Most curiously, the order of the verses can be manipulated without significantly altering the emotional shape of the poem, and doing so can create a unique narrative that helps illuminate the themes of the text.

I structured my setting of “The Rainy Day” into a modified bar (AAB) form with added introduction, transition, and coda passages. The A section is in C minor, which modulates to E-flat major for the B section. The first two stanzas of the Longfellow are gloomy and somber in mood, and the third stanza is hopeful and optimistic, so this choice of keys was very natural. However, within each formal section I did not set the text in the order that Longfellow wrote them, and I instead changed the order of the verses based on how I thought the language could reflect musical motion.

The main sections of the lied contain a recurring rhythmic ostinato in the piano part that also serves to outline harmonic motion. The lied begins with a series of ornamented quarter notes that descend into this ostinato, which is meant to give the impression of the start of a rainy day as more raindrops generate a constant noise of rainfall. The constant repetition of this ostinato helps support the static nature of the text that comprises these major sectional forms, and this repetition is only broken to make way for text that is more active in nature.

Another theme that is briefly alluded to in “The Rainy Day” is fate, expressed through the idea that it is the fate of everybody to face some rain in their lives. Longfellow includes this line in the last stanza of the poem, suggesting that the poem’s speaker comes to the realization of fate’s role while reassuring himself of the brighter side of life that awaits him. In contrast to that interpretation, I thought it would be more emotionally charging to have the narrator start with a pessimistic resignation to fate, which then becomes a triumphant acceptance of fate when things get brighter. This is why I included the verse “Thy fate is the common fate of all” in the C-minor sections of the lied, which fit perfectly with my aim of featuring stative-verb verses in that section. With the rearrangement of the verses, I’ve molded Longfellow’s themes into a narrative of somebody who is distraught about their fate before realizing that, in the greater scheme of life, this fate can be overcome but never suppressed.