Our choir is performing Eric Whitacre's "Sleep", and the story behind it is pretty fascinating: https://ericwhitacre.com/music-catalog/sleep
Basically, it was originally setting of Frost's Stopping By Woods, only the estate wasn't allowing people to use the text, so he asked a friend to write new lyrics with the same meter and it turned out pretty great.
Interestingly, Stopping By Woods went into the public domain in 2019, so one could conceivably perform the piece with the original words, but only if Whitacre allowed it? I'm not really sure how that would work legally, to be honest.
#EricWhitacre #ChoralMusic #RobertFrost #PublicDomain #Copyright #CharlesSilvestri