Sleep

Sleep grew from a commission for Eric Whitacre to set Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” for a cappella chorus. Whitacre laboured to do justice to what the poem’s creator described as “my best bid for remembrance”. Having finished the piece and attended its premiere in 2000, the composer discovered that the Frost estate had recently imposed an outright ban on musical settings of the poet’s evergreen verse, and was told that his work must not be performed again until the text fell out of copyright. So Whitacre approached his friend Charles Anthony Silvestri to craft new words to replace those by Frost. Silvestri’s text echoes keywords from “Stopping by Woods”, notably “dark and deep” and “sleep”, yet projects contrasting imagery of inner thoughts and feelings. Sleep uses frequent divisions of four-part mixed choir to enrich the music’s texture and, above all, craft powerful passing dissonances to build and release tension. The work, chosen by the composer for the second of his Virtual Choir projects in 2010, creates a sense of anticipation that finally dissolves into security with hypnotic repetitions of “sleep”.