George Crumb’s The Sleeper

When the late mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani—a friend and advocate of composer George Crumb—asked him for a “short” song, he responded with The Sleeper. Crumb used a prepared piano and some daring vocal writing to vividly evoke the eerie mood of Edgar Allan Poe’s meditation on a deceased loved one. The singer whispers and slides through a rising and falling vocal line, while the pianist strums and plucks the instrument’s strings to create haunting effects, including the conjuring of a bell tolling at midnight.