In Sleep I Find You
Written for the USC 2016 Writer-Composer-Singer Workshop
Instrumentation Soprano and Piano
Texts (used by permission of author) Liz A. Johnson
Duration 5'
Program Notes
In sleep I find you was born out of collaboration with writer Liz Johnson, whose haunting poem "Idyll" is the basis of this musical setting. Liz paints a surrealist landsacpe, imagining a distant winter forest filled with snow. In foggy slumber, the poem's subject floats through this cold, isolated world as she dreams. At the end of the poem, the subject calls out to her partner directly - she has been searching, we now see, this whole time - and the music gently hovers, a cathartic blanket wrapping the subject who continues drifting in sleep.
– Daniel Temkin
Texts for “In Sleep I Find You”
In Sleep I Find You
L.A. Johnson
I dreamt tonight of a glass-bottomed boat
floating through a pine forest.
Needles pierced above and below
my reflection in the lake surface.
In the veil of snow, no sound
except the quiescent tones of winter,
the roots of vegetables bursting
inside my finger joints.
Only the moon watches now.
Speak to me, use your drowsy voice,
I cannot hear you anymore—in sleep
there’s everything I need to tell you.
Copyright © 2020 of Daniel Temkin Music (BMI), All Rights Reserved.