They come down one at a time. You can brush them away, but still they come. If it’s cold enough, they start to pile up, gathered together by the wind in the corners where they catch, and then, all of a sudden, it’s not just a snowflake, it’s snow. Lying crisp and deep and even and getting into your shoes.

© Mariia Tagirova/Shutterstock

American composer Carl Schroeder wrote a choral work about the journey of a snowflake as it descends from the skies.

Carl Schroeder: 2 December Carols – Snowflake Song (Kiev Chamber Choir; Kiev Philharmonic Orchestra; Robert Ian Winstin, cond.)

More floating snowflake music comes from Peter Broderick.

Peter Broderick: A Snowflake (Peter Broderick, piano)

Now that it’s on the ground, we have snow to deal with. The Russians are masters of the snow song.

Georgy Vasil’yevich Sviridov: Sneg idyot (Snow is Falling) – Snow is Falling (Rimsky-Korsakov College of Music Female Choir; St. Petersburg Radio and Television Children’s Choir; St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra; Yuri Serov, cond.)

Mikhail Vrubel: The Snow Maiden, 1895 (Ryazan, Russia: Ryazan State Regional Museum of Fine Arts)

In his opera, The Snow Maiden, the Snow Maiden leaves her parents and goes to live in a village. Everyone seeks to find her a husband, but once she finds her love, she melts – the power of love is the key to her death. Her groom drowns himself. The upside is that the 15-year-long winter that afflicted the village has now ended.

Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky: The Snow Maiden, Op. 12 – Act I: Entr’acte (Arkady Mishenkin, tenor; Elena Okolysheva, mezzo-soprano; Moscow Capella; Moscow Symphony Orchestra; Igor Golovschin, cond.)

Dan Evmark brings out the melancholy of the totally white world

Dan Evmark: The First Snow (Dan Evmark, piano)

And, then, for those who want the joy of snow in their hands, there’s the snow globe: a clear globe containing a miniature scene that becomes a snow scene when you shake the white particles into action.

Matt Herskowitz: Snow Globe (Matt Herskowitz, piano)

English composer Herbert Howells used the poetry of John Buxton for Walking in the Snow. Our poet is walking in the woods, where the evergreens throw blue shadows across the white snow. All is silence, all is still, nothing moves, not even the wind. It’s only the snow’s brilliant crystals that catch the sun and twinkle with light. He dreams of his beloved and hopes that the brilliant light will become jewels in her hair.

Herbert Howells: Walking in the Snow (Ikon; David Hill, cond.)

German composer and performer Reentko Dirks creates his Memory of Snow as a work for guitar.

Reentko Dirks: Memory of Snow (Reentko Dirks, guitar)

Sometimes, one has the inspiration to carve one’s own life into the white world. The British composer Alex Davies, under the pseudonym Goldbæk, gives us a Dancer in the Snow.

Goldbæk: Dancer in the Snow (Goldbæk, piano)

We’ll close with American composer Joan Tower, who looked at all the different kinds of snow in her work Snow Dreams. ‘There are many different images of snow, its forms and its movements: light snowflakes, pockets of swirls of snow, rounded drifts, long white plains of blankets of snow, light and heavy snowfalls, etc. Many of these images can be found in the piece, if in fact, they need to be found at all. The listener will determine that choice’.

Joan Tower: Snow Dreams (Bonita Boyd, flute; Nicholas Goluses, guitar)

There are many kinds of snow in the world – some languages are said to have many different words to describe the white stuff, depending on whether it’s falling, fallen, or on the ground.

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