Composer’s Note:

The text for Winter Garden was written by my daughter, Micki LeMieux, a well-known sculptor in Chicago, an avid gardener, and a developing poet. The text includes various ideas and emotions centered around gardening, from an intimate and personal point of view. The focus is on a gardener’s reflection on winter, neither sad nor empty, but a “dream of frozen awareness “and a “promise of spring growth.”

The piece is unified by a note series that contains sets of quartal harmonies and major 7 tertian harmonies, all rather consonant.