White Ash was initiated by a longer-term study of the bassoon with Darrel Hale (which led to Escher Keys in 2021). It is the third piece I composed for Megan Ihnen, and was the first for Darrel. Inspired by motherhood, register and poetry, it is part of a series of songs for mezzo, Megan Ihnen and instrumentalists including One Voice with viola (2016) and its sister piece The Clockmaker’s Doll with sax (2018). White Ash premiered April 1, 2019.
Duration: 8 minutes
The Mothers by Rebecca Morgan Frank
It is supposed to come naturally.
The way you love a boy whose father held
a gun in his own mouth, as his mother
shouted, grab it and run! And the gun cracked
against the creek rocks, then washed away.
If I had a baby, I would hold it close, erase
the cuts that severed us. I would spoon
it stories and know my love was guzzled
whole, to be spit into the future like a tin can
hurdled across the lot. Something to be
excavated, examined. Every blizzard buries
something we’ve left, or worse: what we never
had. The white ash of love is no different.
Listen, I say, and the baby nods. Sleep,
and I’ll tell you another one.
Press:
- “White Ash (played by the incredible Megan Ihnen and Darrel Hale as a part of the song cycle Galatea’s Dream) is a haunting meditation on motherhood based on the poem (by Rebecca Morgan Frank).” 50 IDRS, celebrating 50 years, volume 44
- “… her deeply conceived musical creations mirror loneliness and the artist’s antidote for despair, which is beauty in words and music. Something profound about the human condition troubles and inspires Gibson, and everyday words like “time,” “space,” and “breath” acquire metaphysical overtones. What she has accomplished, especially in Galatea’s Dream, is equal to Britten’s songs set to the sonnets of John Donne. Beyond the limits of spacetime, something invisible hovers, and it is up to us to name it as terrifying or divine.” Fanfare review