September Moon (aka Full Moon Outside My Window)
UPDATE 9/19/2018: The title of this song is actually “September Moon” according to the composer, Chandler Yorkhall. The title of this post now reflects that.
Check out this haunting round I recorded last weekend:
Here are the lyrics:
Full moon outside my window this warm September night
Pulls me into wakefulness far too early.
I’d rather be sleeping, the day’s already too long for me.
I’ll just wait for dawn.
The voices on this recording are me and Irene Ravitz, a 14 year-old girl with a bell-like voice. She and her mother, Marika Partridge (the long-time producer of All Things Considered), taught it to a group of us last Friday at a party at my mom’s house on Whidbey Island that morphed into a wild jam session.
I loved this tune as soon as I heard it. It was the first thing out of my mouth when I woke up Saturday morning, and it kept repeating all day in an endless loop. So I fired up GarageBand that evening and laid it down, lest I forget how it went. After dinner, Irene and Marika came over again for another singing session. So I pulled Irene aside and recorded her singing it once through as well. Then I just copied and pasted the clips of our voices onto several separate tracks, staggering our voices to create the round. Finally, I added a little reverb, exported as an MP3, and voila! Enjoy!
[Photo credit: www.flickr.com/photos/gnuckx/4836489480]
Foglio's Field Notes 
Great round! Can I get a copy of the recording to learn by? Who wrote it?
Kris Gannon
July 7, 2010 at 4:10 pm
i know Irene from camp this summer and i miss her singing me to bed with this song=] ,great recording!
kennedy
August 27, 2010 at 8:08 pm
Lovely. Thanks for sharing, Leif.
Louise Mangan
September 25, 2010 at 8:11 am
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jlfhtguuys
December 16, 2011 at 3:45 am
I’m so pleased to have found this round. I learned it this past week at a camp in New Hampshire. A young woman, age 17, taught an impromptu chorus of about 50. She was extraordinary and sounds much like Irene. Thanks so much for “putting it out there”!
Suzie
Bethesda, MD
Suzie
August 8, 2011 at 11:00 am
I was taught this in 2003 at Farm and Wilderness Camps in Vermont. It was wonderful to have the memory revived again! The recording is absolutely beautiful. Do you know who actually wrote it?
Bekah
October 2, 2011 at 5:36 pm
It was written by Chandler York, an alumni of Oberlin College. he wrote it while at Oberlin, while living in a co-op called Old Barrows (probably sometime in the early 2000s?)
Sonya
March 10, 2012 at 10:32 am
@Sonya: Is this the Chandler York you mean? https://www.facebook.com/chandler.yorkhall. According to Facebook he’s an Oberlin grad, born in 1978.
leifutne
September 22, 2016 at 10:59 am
So beautiful but who wrote it?
ivypearl28
September 18, 2018 at 12:28 pm
Hi Ivy. It was written by Chandler Yorkhall https://www.facebook.com/chandler.yorkhall. He confirmed it for me last year after I contacted him through Facebook. The title of the song is actually “September Moon.” I should probably update that.
leifutne
September 19, 2018 at 1:21 pm