As spring inches toward us, deep In my earthworm heart I’m thinking about music and the rain.
More specifically, I’m thinking about Music and the Rain, my song cycle of poems by Michael Dennis Browne for baritone and piano, which will be featured in a Schubert Club Courtroom Concert at Landmark Center in St. Paul on May 7.
Michael Dennis Browne holds a special place in Minnesota’s literary community and in the hearts of its readers. In a 39-year career at the University of Minnesota, Browne directed the creative writing program and was a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. His verse, published in a dozen volumes, has won two Minnesota Book Awards. If you’ve heard Michael read, you know how his voice enhances the English language. He is an organist’s son, which helps explain why his words flow like water and are often floated by music. As he observed at the UM’s annual Pankake Poetry Reading in 2015:
When you write words for music, it’s like building a boat, not a house. You build it strong but buoyant, so when the music comes it will lift it. If you write too heavy, like in a sense a regular poem, it will just get flooded. So there’s an art to writing lighter and strong at the same time.
Michael Dennis Browne and DET at the premiere of “Give Her the River”
Indeed, Michael’s most recent book is Build Me a Boat: Words for Music 1968—2018. You will have heard his lyrics in musical works with his frequent collaborator, the late Stephen Paulus: “Pilgrim’s Hymn,” from the opera The Three Hermits, the oratorio To Be Certain of the Dawn, and “The Road Home,” written for the Dale Warland Singers and sung at more than one presidential inauguration. Read a selection of Michael’s poems here.
This is not the first time I have set Michael’s words. In 2013 I composed a choral version of “Light Upon the Water.” I set his picture book Give Her the River for the 125th anniversary of Thursday Musical in 2017. Incidentally, I will perform that work with soprano Erika Lantz and friends in the upcoming Songs of Hope and Healing in Excelsior on March 26, 2026.
Every musical encounter with Michael’s work is special. The selection of poems here is my own, selected from Chimes: selected short poems, and The Voices. Michael imagined the title poem in conversation with his wife Lisa:
When I’m with you
I like to listen
to music and the rain
The most dynamic song in the cycle is “Dream at the Death of James Wright.” You might say that I met Michael through Wright. My cycle, Blessings: 5 Poems of James Wright was commissioned for an event hosted by Michael in 2000 celebrating the gift of the poet’s papers to the University of Minnesota.
The poignant penultimate poem, “Voice Lesson,” was written “in memory of Krista Sandstrom,” a singer and Minnesota Chorale member who was was killed by a drunk driver on the way to a voice lesson in 2017.
all the years are a voice lesson
there is so much to sing
we need every instrument
Hold Michael in your thoughts and prayers at this time; he is ailing and in hospice. “My body is inflicted but my soul is well in tune,” he wrote in December.” In January he followed up with a tercet:
in these times
whose music
do we need to be?
Music and the Rain will receive its premiere on May 7, 2026 at noon by baritone Rod Kelly Hines of Cantus with pianist Casey Rafn. Then Hines and Rafn will join soprano Joni Griffith in Lonely Hearts, a light-hearted cycle to poems by Wendy Cope. The popular Courtroom Concerts are free, but the room fills up fast. If you attend, get there early!
PS. Michael Dennis Browne died on Sunday, March 29 of heart failure at a hospice in Edina. He was 85 years old.