Eternal Winter has been among the most widely performed of the composer's works for soloist(s) interacting with computer-generated sounds, having received over 100 performances in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

The title and musical qualities of the piece were suggested by a winter landscape by Sesshu Toyo, a fifteenth century Japanese painter. In Sesshu's hanging scroll, stark, geometric images of a house, mountains, windswept trees and a brook are set off in high relief against blurred images and textures. The composer has attempted to convey some of the same powerful sense of solitude, of mystery and expanse, of icy beauty but also unleashed energy, within the interwoven trombone and tape parts of this composition.

The computer part was realized on a Sun-3 system at the Eastman Computer Center by means of Csound (Vercoe) and score11 (Brinkman), the CCSS soundfile programs (Gross), linear predictor programs, and various utilities written by the composer and other staff members at the Center.

PDF score excerpt
This is score page 5 of Eternal Winter. The mp3 excerpt from this piece begins at letter E in this score excerpt.

MP3 audio excerpt
This excerpt begins (somewhat abruptly) at letter E, page 5 in the score, about two and a half minutes into the piece. The excerpt is taken from a pre-release edit of John Marcellus' compact disc recording of the work. It features several of the extended techniques used in the work: lip trills, slide "glissandi" on a single note (varying the timbre rather than the pitch), singing and screaming into the instrument while also playing notes, brief melodic lines or rips, and so on.
Duration : One minute 16 seconds; size 2.3 MB ; encoding 256 kBit true stereo

Eternal Winter was written for, and premiered by, trombonist John Marcellus. Composition of the work was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It has been performed by about 18 other trombonists as well. Two commercial compact disc recordings of this work are available. Albany Records cd Songs, Dances & Incantantions, catalog number TROY583 includes a performance of Eternal Winter by John Marcellus. Capstone recording number CPS-8603 includes a performance of the work by trombonist Paul Hunt.

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