You Must Sleep, but I Must Dance (2010)

---

The title of this piece comes, via Cormac McCarthy, from the 19th-century German poet Theodor Storm. In fact, in his poem ‘Hyacinths’, Storm wrote, ‘Ich möchte schlafen, aber du mußt tanzen’, which is the other way round: ‘I would sleep, but you must dance’. But it was McCarthy’s inversion of it in Blood Meridian that popped into my head one morning in mid 2010 as I was pushing my baby daughter’s pram through the streets in an attempt to get her to sleep. (Now that she is a toddler, it is Storm’s original line that seems the more apt.) The piece is in four connected movements, which might be thought of as ‘sleep’ – ‘dance’ – ‘sleep’ – ‘dance’, though there is no real program behind the music.