"Blow, Winds, Rage, Blow!" for SATB chorus and orchestra by Meredith Brammeier

Performed by the California Polytechnic State University Symphony and Choirs, David Arrivee and Thomas Davies, conductors. Text from Shakespeare's King Lear:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks [weathervanes].
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers [heralds] of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. . . .

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed [full of holes] raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this!

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow!
. . . And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,
Crack Nature’s molds, all germens [seeds] spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man!