All Through the Night

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All Through the Night for guitar was written for Aaron Larget-Caplan’s New Lullaby Project.  It was composed primarily in late 2023 and completed in February of the following year.  As a new father, lullabies have been an important part of my life since my son was born.  I’ve already written a few (Berceuse for piano or strings and Theron’s Lullaby for Concert Band) but this one came to life in a different way.  One night, my wife, Diane, and I were reading books to our son, Theron, before putting him to sleep.  One of the books was a collection of well-known nursery rhymes and lullabies (without music notation) and when we got to a lullaby called “All Through the Night” I realized I wasn’t familiar with it.  Diane, who has a beautiful voice but is not a trained musician, had heard it before but couldn’t remember how it went, so she composed her own tune for it on the spot which I thought was really nice.  Later, we looked up the original tune for it which is the Welsh folk song “Ar Hyd y Nos” which I actually know as the hymn “For the Fruit of All Creation.”  The interesting thing is that Diane’s tune keeps the same rhythm of the original and only changes the contour of the pitches.  My setting of Diane’s tune first combines it with a simple accompaniment that unfolds at a different rate than the tune, and ends with both melody and accompaniment rendered in dreamy harmonics.

Premiered May 8, 2025 at Jacob Edwards Library, Southbridge, MA by Aaron Larget-Caplan.