Faculty of Fine Arts and Music
Summer occupies a surprisingly small place in the orchestral imagination. Winter has storms and Christmas; spring has awakening; autumn brings harvest, melancholy and departure. Summer, by contrast, often appears indirectly—as heat, evening, landscape or memory.
Gershwin’s Summertime became perhaps the season’s most familiar American expression, while Barber found summer in the remembered voices and warm night air of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Delius gave us A Song of Summer and Summer Night on the River.
Still’s Summerland belongs naturally in this slender company. Perhaps summer resists composition because its characteristic activity is precisely the suspension of activity: long days asking little of us.
This is the second movement of William Grant Still’s *Three Visions*, composed in 1936 and originally written for piano. Set between the troubled atmosphere of *Dark Horsemen* and the luminous *Radiant Pinnacle*, it imagines a place of repose beyond earthly difficulty.
The music moves slowly, carried by long melodic lines and harmonies that seem to suspend ordinary time.
Still later arranged the work for other instruments, and it has proved especially adaptable to strings and wind ensembles. Its warmth is neither idle nor sentimental. There is movement beneath the stillness: a summer landscape understood less as a season than as a state of rest.
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