The Bequest

Description

Voice, Flute — The Bequest, for soprano and flute, was inspired directly by the poem.xa0 Virginia Horner’s elegiac words to her children about giving up ambition and expression as a rite of motherhood spoke volumes to me in 1978 when I first read it, and it still does today.xa0 In setting the poem to music, all I did was “accompany” the voice with the flute; until the end, when the child “takes” the flute from the mother. xa0The ensuing singsong tune (which is really another version of the principal melody) “separates” the flute from the singer, who is left to muse wordlessly on her loss.