For medium voice and viola. Duration - 7 minutes.
I’ve been a fan of Rebecca Morgan Frank’s poetry for a long time, and I’ve been lucky to collaborate with her for years. Her works are replete with detail and power, and “Song of the Rattling Pipes” practically begs to be set to music. Using wonderfully evocative imagery, Morgan conjures up a sound world that is both charming and menacing. This work is my own attempt at bringing that world to life, where creativity can commune with or be a shelter from our daily lives.
***
Sometimes the house around her sings back,
oil heat clanking against the steel
in low industrial tones- a workers’ march,
a miners’ rag, muffled mutinies.
She answers, words drumming
their way into the plumbing
of her body, her veins a vessel for song,
blood-coursed vowels, consonance
carrying her up out of her body,
as if she were not pinned
beneath another’s weight.
Steam whistles and spouts the melody
of her chorus: A apocalyptic,
B bayou, C cerebellum, D detritus-
she falls into the alphabet of possibilities-
F fallacy, G Galapagos, H hovering-
letters an incantation, a portal from her body,
rhythm lifting her up in a circle
of sound: Z zinnias, A arabesque,
B braille, until the house falls into silence, the lull
where the sun waits for the sleeping world.
-“Song of the Rattling Pipes”
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Commissioned by Megan Ihnen.