“Songs of Rain” invites listeners to contemplate our complex relationship with precipitation across global landscapes and musical traditions.
The journey begins with Gabrielle Pietrangelo’s “Rainwater Spiritual,” a desert dweller’s celebration of rain as “a blessing from the sky,” inspired by the African-American spiritual “Oh Freedom” and commissioned for Brad Lancaster’s rainwater harvesting work. Host Bart Everson explores contrasting perspectives through Black Dog String Quartet’s nuanced “Rain and Shine,” which transcends simplistic emotional associations with weather, followed by a rare 1995 ambient piece “Statue” from The Tranquility of Music’s “Rainstorms” album. The first set concludes with Gaia Consort’s philosophically rich “Secret of the Rain,” which balances mystical revelation with embodied skepticism. After the break, listeners experience the East Asian monsoon through Junkyard Shaman’s expansive 23-minute exploration “梅雨” (Plum Rain), created by a Finnish composer living in Japan who contrasts his homeland’s “brief sparks of life that slowly decay into darkness” with Japan’s perpetual cycles of renewal. The hour concludes with Antônio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina’s 1974 Brazilian masterpiece “Águas de Março” (Waters of March), once voted Brazil’s greatest song—a fitting finale to this global meditation on water’s spiritual and ecological significance.