Score and parts for hire

Sleepsinging is a trance-like duet, inspired by music of Henry Purcell, and created specifically for the wonderful singers Christopher Lowrey (countertenor) and Nick Pritchard (tenor). It’s about a meditative state, mindful attention to the detail of sound, and about the physicality of Nick and Chris as they sing.

The process of composing this piece was very collaborative, making use of something I call ‘automatic singing’. I asked Nick and Chris each to sing along to music in headphones—specifically, to two songs from Purcell’s Fairy Queen: one song by personified Night, and one song by personified Sleep (please see the beautifully enigmatic text below). Nick and Chris mimicked the song while carrying out a body-scan meditation, a meditation exercise commonly found in mindfulness practices. I then recorded their singing, and asked them once more to sing along—this time to their own voice, again and again, in a re-iterative process that introduced a hypnotic repetition into the melodic line.

I used this collaborative process as a way to discover what the music can be—to explore the features of Purcell’s melody, and also to amplify the relationship of the music to the physical sensation of the body from the inside. I recorded these singing experiments for my own use, and then wrote them down in music notation—from there, the piece as you will hear it tonight was created—for performance by the singers, strings and continuo

Cassandra Miller