The eminent Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s 1922 choral work “Springtime on Funen” had long been on University of Vermont choral director Nathaniel Lew’s bucket list. When Lew decided to program it for the UVM Concert Choir’s spring performance, two humorous things occurred to him: Vermont happens to have its own Danish American composer named Nielsen — Erik Nielsen; no relation, but still — and “we don’t have spring,” Lew said with a chuckle about the state’s mud season.
So, with the music department’s permission, the impish Burlington conductor commissioned Erik to write a companion piece to Carl’s, titled “Mud Season in Vermont.” The choir will sing both Nielsens’ compositions at “Spring Serenade: Mud Medley,” a free concert open to the public, on Tuesday evening, April 14, at the UVM Recital Hall. The Catamount Singers, a more select group of mainly music majors also under Lew’s direction, will present a separate program at the same concert.
Erik, a Brookfield composer with a catalog of nearly 200 works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, soloists and more, has written prolifically for chorus, though never before for a UVM one. He was writing mainly choral pieces when he first moved to Vermont in 1988. Among his major works are two operas, A Fleeting Animal and Aliceheimer’s, and he is working on a third, Fireburn, about the 1878 labor uprising in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, when the territory was owned by Denmark.
Erik’s great-grandfather moved to St. Croix as part of the Danish army. His son, Erik’s grandfather, moved to the U.S. as a teenager. Nielsens, Erik added, are as common in Denmark as the name Smith in America.
When Lew requested “Mud Season in Vermont,” specifying only the title, Erik recalled thinking, “Well, this should be fun.” He added: “If you live on a dirt road, which we do, you need to maintain a sense of humor during mud season. Sometimes you go down the road, and there are ruts 18 inches deep. It’s a fact of life here.”
You need to maintain a sense of humor during mud season.
Erik Nielsen
Erik listened to Carl’s “Springtime on Funen,” a piece rarely performed in the U.S., before beginning his composition. (The Dane’s six symphonies are better known here.) Carl set his 18-minute choral work, which includes a children’s chorus and many solo parts, to a prize-winning poem by his contemporary, Aage Berntsen. The composer described his piece as a “light mixture of lyricism and humor.” It celebrates the signs and activities of spring — green grass, dancing, moon-gazing — on the Danish island of Funen, where he grew up.
Erik could find no comparable poem about mud season, so he created his own. “I’m not really a poet, but I’m not bad at doggerel, which is what this is,” he said. In one verse, he ribs “folks from Jersey who would make us all uptight / by paving everything in sight.”
The six-minute piece is “lighthearted” and “jazzy” in its rhythm and chords, Erik said. In fact, the jazzy piano accompaniment is “all over the keyboard,” as Lew described it, so the conductor recruited Tom Cleary, a UVM jazz piano and improvisation artist and teacher, to play it. Eun Hee Park, the concert choir’s classically trained accompanist and an organist, will play the rest of the program.
The students are currently mastering the rapid key changes of Erik’s piece, said Lew, who also serves as choral conductor at the Opera Company of Middlebury and artistic director of Counterpoint chorus. Meanwhile, the group will sing Carl’s piece — which has become the national composer’s most popular choral work in his homeland — in English translation, with the choral sections taking most of the solo parts.
Among the program’s other spring-themed works is “Maple and Mud” by Vermont composer Carol Wood, of Saxtons River. The idea behind that piece is that Vermonters “have to contend with two gooey substances” during mud season, and “one offsets the other,” Lew said.
For Erik, the season and the right attitude toward it are forever encapsulated in a photo published in the White River Valley Herald on April Fools’ Day in 1993, showing a car marooned nearly to the roof in mud while a tow-truck driver attempts to attach a hook.
“Turns out the junkyard guys had cut off the roof of a car and inserted it in the mud,” Erik said. “You’ve gotta have a sense of humor, because winter is long” — and just when it seems to be ending, the mud arrives.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Springtime for Danes | UVM Concert Choir performs classic and new seasonal works by Carl and Erik Nielsen”
Related
This article appears in April 8 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
