Score in preparation

Lullabies and prophecies seek to be powerful spells: a magic of singing a desired world into existence. Their strategies may contrast – gentle persuasion on the one hand versus a sometimes apocalyptic certainty on the other – but they both help us navigate a period of waiting, reaching out to draw near the arrival of some new way of being.

When you are with me things will be different: this yearning underpins both the sacred and secular texts in this piece. Such a wish may be expressed with tenderness, as in the Gaelic ‘songs of sleep’ (movements two and four), whose music borrows the shapes, if not always the actual melodies, of traditional folksong; and in ‘Caidil m’ulaidh’ (‘Sleep my darling’) draws the susurration of the caressing ocean into the enveloping harmony of a slowly rotating accompaniment.

In contrast to this intimacy, the prophetic act is often associated with a disconnect, being somehow out-of-time, a voice crying out in the wilderness. There is beauty here too, and while the English ‘songs of prophecy’ each explore a different character – a stately nobility in the first movement, an explosive ferocity in the third, and an incantatory, almost hypnotic stasis in the fifth and final movement – they share the feature of having multiple strands of music coexisting at different timescales. The first movement’s unified block chords splinter into a glowing mist of independent melodies; the third movement places very rapid choral triads against an extremely slow soprano duo that winds its way earthwards. In the final movement, three timescales intersect: a background of rhythmic chanting at high speed – almost like a flutter-echo of the slower iterations of the line ‘there shall be no more’ which lies at a middle tempo. Beneath these, slowest of all, the basses and tenors intone the actual content of the prophecy in warm, resonant chords: there shall be no night.

MS