Commissioned by Tamsin Waley-Cohen, with the support of George and Odette McGinnis, this Lullaby was composed in 2026 and first performed on 6th June 2026at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London by Tamsin Waley-Cohen, violin, and Cordelia Williams, piano.
When Tamsin asked me to write a piece for this concert, she shared with me this 4000 year old lullaby text which was found etched on a Babylonian stone tablet in Akkadian Cuniform:
Little one, who dwelt in darkness
Now yo’ve come and seen the sun.
Why the crying? Why the worries?
What has made your peace undone?
You have roused the household spirits
You have scared the guardian gods
‘Who has roused me?’ ‘Who has scared me?’
‘Little baby woke you up!’
May you settle into slumber
Sweet as plum wine, deep as love
The text itself rocks from tenderness to attempts to tease or scare the baby (depending on the tone of voice), and is viscerally reminiscent of those nights with a newborn where you rock and shush and sing, and the hours march on and time warps. In those moments I found that the veil between myself and reality would start to thin, and all the things I thought I’d understood about time and what it is to be this animal called a human would transform, all while wrapped in the most transcendent, shimmering, tender intensity of love.
I memorised this text, and started to sing it to my daughter at night. A sort of lullaby improvisation that quickly settled into a set melody. This melody is what you hear in this piece, and the piece is both a setting of my personal version of this lullaby, and a response to the ancient text itself.