A 4,000-year-old lullaby inspires Freya Waley Cohen's new piece for sister Tamsin as part of Lullabies programme with Cordelia Williams

Lullaby (noun) - A song sung to children to soothe them to rest. Also, any song which soothes to rest. (Oxford English Dictionary online)

Inevitably the idea of a lullaby is immediately associated with children but it can extend to any song related to rest and night. At the Southbank Centre's Purcell Room on Saturday 6 June, violinist Tamsin Waley Cohen and pianist Cordelia Williams are exploring lullabies, explore pieces associated with the atmospheres of night, slumber and dreams.

Central to the concert is a new piece by Freya Waley Cohen (Tamsin's sister), Sweet as plum wine written for the performers. The piece is based on a 4,000-year- old lullaby text found etched on a Babylonian stone tablet in Akkadian cuneiform:

Little one, who dwelt in darkness
Now you’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

Freya Waley Cohen explains what came next:

"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."

The remainder of the programme moves from Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel to the famous Brahms lullaby, to Fritz Kreisler's arrangement of Dvorak's Songs my mother taught me, to music by Schubert and John Cage!

Back in 2024, I chatted to both Tamsin Waley Cohen about her work at the Two Moors Festival [see my interview] and to Freya Waley Cohen about her Spell book [see my interview]

Before the concert there is a talk Night Music: The Creative Power of Parenting, when Tamsin Waley-Cohen, Cordelia Williams and Octavia Bright discuss how parenting has affected their creative practices.  

Full details from the Southbank Centre website.