Winter Lullaby
For score and parts, click here for CMC link to Winter Lullaby.
Title: Winter Lullaby
Year Completed: 2010, revised 2019
Duration: 4:10 mins
Instrumentation: marimba and voice (arrangements available for alto or soprano)
Credits:
Premiere: Calgary, Jennifer Humphries-Micaleff and Linda Wang, January 2014
Program Notes:
Winter Lullaby is a song for the winter season. It was inspired by listening to the ice of Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada with a hydrophone (underwater microphone). The singer is singing to a frozen lake, and makes promises about the spring break-up of ice.
Text (by Carmen Braden):
Sleep sweet, safe under your blanket of ice and snow.
The sky has gone to school and soon will return having learnt
a brighter blue. So
sleep till the spring sights make the scales fall off your sleepy eyes.
Soon the sun will set fire to candles of ice. They will burn through the
night and into your hair. They will transform your cold cage of
grey and blue and black and white
into a flaming funeral, adrift on the stars’ mirror.
The sky has gone to school and soon will return having learnt
a brighter blue.
Wait till the warm water wakes your wintry wings.
Then one day, one quiet
red morning when the stars have looked their fill
and disappeared along with the dark,
then you will open your many eyes
and see that you are once again free.