Walden Snow

This tiny, delicate piece has something of the Debussyian prelude about it. It deftly deals with that familiar theme of snow, not rising above a piano dynamic throughout. Butler effectively utilises the upper registers of the instruments to depict the lightness of falling snow and contrasts this with bass notes in the piano, no doubt alluding to the depths that snow can conceal.Walden Snow was written as a memento of the American town of Concord, Massachusetts which Butler had visited in the winter of 2003-2004. Home to the nineteeenth-century transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, it was the landscape that inspired Butler to compose this miniature. Walden Snow depicts Walden Pond and the surrounding woods, just outside the town.