Today the sun may reach for its highest point in the sky in our hemisphere but it began its slow and virtually undetectable descent yesterday, Yes, the summer of 2020 is already aging. As we move into the season of growth and flower I am reminded of this quote by the English writer and poet, D.H. Lawrence:
The greatest need of man is the renewal forever of the complete rhythm of life and death, the rhythm of the sun's year, the body's year.
One expression of that complete rhythm is the full range of summer themes in the vast catalog of music we can explore. First, here is a tone poem, A Song of Summer, composed by Frederick Delius in 1931 and transcribed and arranged by Eric Fenby:
Seven hundred years earlier this was the sound of summer in England:
And finally, there is summer as the season of youth, the school break, the summer job, of free time and good friends, and for many what the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell called "friendship set to music."
Middle English
Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;
Ne swik þu nauer nu.
Pes:
Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!
Modern English
Summer has arrived,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow
blooms
And the wood springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!
The ewe bleats after the lamb
The cow lows after the calf.
The bullock stirs, the stag farts,
Merrily sing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing,
cuckoo;
Don't ever you stop now,
Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.
Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!
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