Frost Nips The Pines, All Is Lost To The Cold: A Song History

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"Frost Nips The Pines, All Is Lost To The Cold" belongs to Ellen Pratt's Ensemble Arrangements For The Mountain Dulcimer, Volume 8, which sets it for five dulcimers, each part written for DAD tuning.[1] The table of contents shown on Pratt's own store page puts the piece in 4/4 time and on pages 33 through 37 of the book.[2] That same contents page marks two of the volume's twelve titles as traditional and credits a third to M.E. Williams, dated 1905, yet attaches no composer's name to this piece, while the store description calls the book a mix of original and traditional arrangements.[2] Who wrote the tune is therefore not stated in the sources consulted here.[1][2]

Snowy woods of tall mottled tree trunks, with a figure carrying a bundle of branches among the trees

Henri Rivière, The Woods, Winter, color lithograph, 1898. Shown for its snowy woods; it has no connection to the piece.

Pratt, according to her DulcimerDownloads profile, took up writing dulcimer music in 2004 and shifted toward multi-part pieces once she became a member of a dulcimer orchestra in northeastern Connecticut.[3] The same profile credits her with ten volumes of ensemble tablature, along with a compilation she prepared for the First National Dulcimer Orchestra, and notes that she has taught at festivals across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.[3]

What the title refers to is left unsaid in both the DulcimerDownloads listing and Pratt's store page, and neither one names a recording of the piece.[1][2]

Our book that contains the song "Frost Nips The Pines, All Is Lost To The Cold"

Sources

  1. Ellen Pratt: "Ensemble Arrangements For The Mountain Dulcimer, Volume 8".
  2. Ellen S. Pratt: "Ensemble Arrangements for Mountain Dulcimer Volume 8".
  3. DulcimerDownloads: "Ellen Pratt".
  4. Image: Henri Rivière, The Woods, Winter, color lithograph, 1898. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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