Thomas Clark – composer / digital artist

Tag: My November Guest

  • Autumn Rain

    2024 . . . flute and viola (alt. clarinet) . . . 5:30

    In Robert Frost’s poem “My November Guest,” an exquisite expression of loss and sadness, four phrases stood out expressing the gray beauty of November:

    “these dark days of autumn rain” . . . “my sorrow when it’s here with me”
    “the bare, the withered tree” . . . “the sodden pasture lane”

    Autumn Rain Music was originally composed in Ann Arbor for oboe and piano in 1971. Decades later in San Marcos, in 2017 the music evolved into an elegy for unaccompanied English horn, and now to this duo arrangement, heard here with sound-synthesis enhanced background.

  • Autumn Rain

    Autumn Rain

    2017.    English horn.      Duration: 6:40.   

    Written for my colleague Ian Davidson of the Texas State music faculty and Pleasant Street Players. Autumn Rain is inspired by Robert Frost’s poem “My November Guest,” an exquisite expression of loss and sadness.

    In four movements:

    I. “these dark days of autumn rain”

    II. “my sorrow” (remembering Lidice)

    III. “the bare, the withered tree”

    IV. “the sodden pasture lane”

    The second movement’s memorial to the atrocity of Lidice quotes the Czech national anthem Kde domov můj (“Where My Home Is”).

    To request performance materials and permission, email BMI-affiliated composer Thomas Clark, tc24@txstate.edu