Lullaby (noun) – A tune sung to kids to assuage them to relaxation. Additionally, any tune which soothes to relaxation. (Oxford English Dictionary on-line)
Inevitably the concept of a lullaby is instantly related to kids however it might prolong to any tune associated to relaxation and night time. On the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room on Saturday 6 June, violinist Tamsin Waley Cohen and pianist Cordelia Williams are exploring lullabies together with items related to the atmospheres of night time, slumber and desires.
Central to the live performance is a brand new work by Freya Waley Cohen (Tamsin’s sister), Candy as plum wine written for the performers. The piece relies on a 4,000-year- previous lullaby textual content discovered etched on a Babylonian stone pill in Akkadian cuneiform:
Infant, who dwelt in darkness
Now you’ve come and seen the solar.
Why the crying? Why the concerns?
What has made your peace undone?
You’ve gotten roused the family spirits
You’ve gotten scared the guardian gods
‘Who has roused me? Who has scared me?’
‘Little child woke you up!’
Might you agree into slumber
Candy as plum wine, deep as love
Freya Waley Cohen explains what got here subsequent:
“I memorised this textual content and began to sing it to my daughter at night time. A form of lullaby improvisation that shortly settled right into a set melody. This melody is what you hear on this piece, and the piece is each a setting of my private model of this lullaby, and a response to the traditional textual content itself.”
The rest of the programme strikes from Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel to the well-known Brahms lullaby, to Fritz Kreisler’s association of Dvorak’s Songs my mom taught me, to music by Schubert and John Cage!
Again in 2024, I chatted to each Tamsin Waley Cohen about her work on the Two Moors Competition [see my interview] and to Freya Waley Cohen about her Spell e book [see my interview]
Earlier than the live performance there’s a speak Evening Music: The Inventive Energy of Parenting, when Tamsin Waley-Cohen, Cordelia Williams and Octavia Vibrant talk about how parenting has affected their inventive practices.
Full particulars from the Southbank Centre web site.
