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50 Words for Rain

A piano demo of a choral piece. Bernie Sherlock, director of Irish Youth Choir, asked me if I'd be interested in writing a piece for their Summer 2025 programme. It would need to fit their concert theme of "Elements" (fire, earth, wind, etc), and be in either English or Irish, but apart from that I had free choice. My first thought was to write something about rain, and since this would be a tight deadline, I didn't have time to wait for my second or third thoughts to come along. Initially, I thought of setting a passage from Flann O'Brien's satirical Irish-language novel "An Béal Bocht", where the narrator is hearing from his grandfather about how much worse the rain used to be in the old days: the descriptions grow increasingly ludicrous, from people who went their whole lives never knowing how it felt to be dry, and eventually to a time when only a few people survived the constant onslaught. O'Brien uses a memorable phrase to describe this worst of all rain: "céasadh spéire", or "sky-crucifying". Upon re-reading the passage, I thought it might not be ideal after all -- it's quite dense text, and getting copyright clearance might also be an issue. But O'Brien's way with words gave me another idea: how many ways are there in Irish of saying "rain"? As it turns out, quite a lot. It's like that old myth about "eskimo words for snow", except in our case it's actually true. My text takes a bunch of these words and expressions (there are plenty of others which I didn't include).