SLEEPERS AND DREAMERS

"Sebastian Currier's 'Sleepers and Dreamers,' impressed as a strong, colorful and ingeniously crafted addition to the contemporary choral-orchestral repertory.…'Sleepers and Dreamers' deserves the widest possible audience, and, if there's any justice in the classical music world, will travel far beyond the city that gave it birth. ……..From the gentle electronic pulsations and wordless choral murmurs that begin the piece, to the lapping waves of voices, orchestra and synthesized sounds that close it, "Sleepers and Dreamers" suspends the listener into a dream world like no other, at once weird and beautiful….."

-Chicago Tribune

                                                  Program Note

Sleepers and Dreamers is a work for chorus and orchestra which explores the mysterious nature of sleep.   We spend nearly a third of our lives sleeping.  Over a lifetime, it is a vast expanse of time for which, aside from the occasional dream remembered,  we have little conscious awareness.  Sleepers and Dreamers imagines this remote world within us.   

In the first part of the piece, Sleepers, we experience sleep from the outside.  Sleep is observed, considered, analyzed.  "The sleepers' eyes dart. Their limbs and faces twitch.  Their eyes beat beneath their lids."  It is the world of science, rational thought, daylight.  

In the second part, Dreamers,  night falls and we enter the strange, remote, world of sleep.   The chorus sings without words, conjuring the oblivion of deep sleep.  This is interrupted  by short fragmentary dreams, each from a different dreamer.    

Phillip dreams that a locomotive is coming towards him and he can't escape.  Leah dreams she is swimming in the air.  Susan confronts a bat the size of a boy.  All are locked in sleep, remote from even themselves, yet what they dream reflects the desires, fears, anxieties, pleasures of all of us.

Sleepers and Dreamers takes us on a voyage from the normal world into the distant, inaccessible world of our sleeping selves.  The text for the first section, Sleepers, is by Sarah Manguso.  The second section, Dreamers, uses first hand dream accounts from various individuals from different walks of life.  

Scoring

3(III=picc).3.3(II=Ebcl, III=bcl).3(III=dbn)-4.3.3.0-perc(2):vib/marimba/glsp; SD/cym(M)/tom-t(low)/4tgl(low, medium low, medium high, high)/brake dr/BD/guiro/bell tree/tamb/cow bell/high hat-pft(=digital kbd sampler)-strings 

This work requires additional technological components and/or amplification. . 

Territory

This work is available from Boosey & Hawkes for the world.

World Premiere

7/6/2012 Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago, IL
Grant Park Orchestra / Grant Park Chorus / Carlos Kalmar