Eric Whitacre's popular composition called Sleep began life as a different work. He had been commissioned by the Austin (Texas) ProChorus to create a choral setting of Robert Frost's idyllic poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"; the piece was to be in memoriam for the parents of one of the choir's longtime singers. Whitacre joyously took up the commission and produced a carefully crafted setting of Frost's text. Unfortunately, the piece hit a major legal snag. The poet's estate had apparently released a number of Frost's texts into the public domain for musical settings in 1997, but had later retracted rights for this single work.

Whitacre found he did not have the legal right to publish music based upon it. As an interesting exercise in poetic "parody," he asked his friend and frequent collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri to write a new poem in the same meter, this time to fit Whitacre's music rather than the other way around. In addition, he required the new poem to reflect (as in a dream) some of the dramatic suspension of time in Frost's poem, and some of the same specific concepts, such as the conclusion on "sleep" and perhaps the well-known rhyming phrase "dark and deep." The result is Silvestri's poem "Sleep," and Whitacre's music that may be sung to it.

The current poem offers a fascinating synergy between text and the tones Whitacre created with another text in mind. The opening verse remains largely consonant, though hints of the dark woods and sleepy poet tinge the harmony with sharpness; Frost's word "stopping" and Silvestri's "resting" both get a brief rhythmic pause. The close of the second stanza, which had been the "darkest evening of the year" and now is "my limbs seem made of lead" arrives through very pungent dissonances into a texture featuring darkly open fifths. The night noises (or horse's harness) both occur in a kind of musical suspension, followed by gently drifting mists of cloud and easy wind, which do not settle except for a time on an unresolved chord inversion. "Dark and deep" recurs in both poems and is set quite literally; both speakers have upward leaps of thoughts that subside at last into a deep sleep. Whitacre's climax to both poems returns to the drifting harmonies of snowy dreams and fades away in innumerable rockings back and forth from consonance to the cold dissonance of the empty woods. Sleep was part of Whitacre's novel efforts to place an international "virtual choir" on the web.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi