• Philip Grange
  • To the Borders of Sleep (2010)
    (First Known When Lost)

  • Peters Edition Limited (World)
  • Bar + pf
  • Baritone
  • 12 min

Programme Note

1. First Known When Lost
2. The Signpost
3. Melancholy
4. Roads
5. Lights Out

To the Borders of Sleep comprises five songs which set poems by Edward Thomas, and which are laid out to suggest a journey such as the poet himself often enjoyed and wrote about in his books such as The Ickneild Way. The journey starts with an encounter with the destruction of the natural environment and is followed in song two by vacillation as to which direction to take. The middle poem explores the melancholy brought on by a rainstorm, while the fourth muses on the poet’s love of roads. This brings the work to its destination, “the borders of sleep” of the fifth poem. On one level the journey could be viewed as literal, while on another it could be seen as a metaphor for the poet’s search for personal oblivion which he finds in the “unfathomable deep forest” of poem five.

Philip Grange