The Story of Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep”

In a sense, Mr. Whitacre has already done my work for me. You can read the charming story of his writing this piece to the words of the Robert Frost poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then finding out that the poem was no longer available for use, putting the song “under his bed,” and then getting his friend Charles Silvestri to write new lyrics, by going to his website and reading the story here. I’ll give you just a taste here to whet your appetite for the whole thing:

This was an enormous task, because I was asking him to not only write a poem that had the exact structure of the Frost, but that would even incorporate key words from “Stopping,” like ‘sleep.’ Tony wrote an absolutely exquisite poem, finding a completely different (but equally beautiful) message in the music I had already written. I actually prefer Tony’s poem now.

After you’ve read the whole story on Whitacre’s website, you must, must, must watch his TED Talk below in which he explains how he came up with the idea of a “virtual choir” for his music. You’ll get to see what an unpretentious person he is and get a look at the world premiere of the virtual choir performance of “Sleep.”

I first wrote this material in connection with a concert by my own choir in March 2017 but then revised it in October 2020. How different the world looked as I revisited this material! For one thing, we were in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. For another, Whitacre’s idea of a “virtual choir” had gone mainstream, especially since regular concerts had ground to a halt. Without his initial inspiration the choir performance landscape would be much poorer these days. My own chorale has now participated in a couple of virtual performances for our Christmas 2020 online concert.  Before I plunge into the meaning of Silvestri’s lyrics I want to say a few words about the experience of being in a virtual choir. You’d never think as you watch singers in their little individual windows how difficult the whole thing is. You have to have yourself centered in the video and looking straight into the camera, but you also have to be able to look at your music if you haven’t memorized it. I’ll post a very funny video at the end of this post that gives you an idea of the joys and travails of doing this. I just about gave up a few times for the two little 3-minute pieces we’d been asked to do but finally pushed through. Now I’m looking forward to doing it again, and doing it better. Hopes of our having an in-person season at all this year are fading, although it’s possible that we’ll have one in May. So I’ll probably get another shot at it.

Okay. On to the words of this gorgeous piece. As noted above, Silvestri was asked to write words that fit into the Frost poem’s metrical structure and also included the idea of sleep. Frost’s poem doesn’t actually dwell on that subject; if you read it as a whole you’ll see that it’s actually talking about not sleeping. The speaker has “miles to go before I sleep.”

Silvestri takes the story a step further, with his speaker having reached his bed. But complications arise even there. That state between being awake and asleep can be disturbing because one is in an in-between, or “liminal” state:

A thousand pictures fill my head.
I cannot sleep, my mind’s a-flight;
And yet my limbs seem made of lead.

Modern psychology has examined this state of mind:

There is a brief time, between waking and sleep, when reality begins to warp. Rigid conscious thought starts to dissolve into the gently lapping waves of early stage dreaming and the world becomes a little more hallucinatory, your thoughts a little more untethered. Known as the hypnagogic state, it has received only erratic attention from researchers over the years, but a recent series of studies have renewed interest in this twilight period, with the hope it can reveal something fundamental about consciousness itself. (“The Trippy State Between Wakefulness and Sleep”)

Sleep can also be seen as a picture of death. There’s an echo of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in this line from Silvestri’s text::

What dreams may come both dark and deep . . .as I surrender unto sleep

vs. Hamlet’s soliloquy on the pros and cons of suicide:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

Since the TED talk doesn’t give the entire performance of “Sleep,” here’s the full version:

And, just because I ran across it on YouTube, here’s the original version of the song with the Robert Frost lyrics. (Somebody said in the comments that perhaps the Frost estate isn’t aware of YouTube.) In an ironic twist of fate, the Robert Frost estate released “Stopping by Woods” in 2019, but by then it was too late for Whitacre. He was fully committed to the Silvestri version. But here’s this performance online, which was performed from the original commissioned piece, and now it’s perfectly legal, so all is well:

And here’s the video about the trials and tribulations of being in a virtual choir:

Here’s the original poem by Robert Frost:

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