Composed for Flute Choir: Piccolo, 4 C Flutes, 2 Altos, 2 Bass and Contrabass.

The inspiration is Grandma Moses and her paintings indigenous to New England. She lived in the Cambridge Valley of Western New York between the Adirondack Mountains and Green Mountain Range of Vermont. Sugaring Off was a 1943 oil painting produced at age 83 and signed "Moses". It is the artist's interpretation of maple syrup season with people busy at various tasks, set in a typical Moses winter setting. The figures are getting ready to pour syrup on snow for children, take empty buckets to hang on taps driven into maple trees, or carry full buckets with a yoke towards a bonfire to boil the sap down into syrup, known as sugaring off. The subject of this painting had been a recurring theme since 1939 and became a bestseller for the artist. Jim has a print of one which is titled Yellow Woods (referred to in the Robert Frost Poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”). It depicts snow and the sugaring off theme. The piece was commissioned by Cindy Ellis, Director of Laguna Flutes.

This is a digital version of the piece that you can download as a PDF and print .