Sleep (arr. Jim Clements): Full Orchestra Conductor Score & Parts

Clements' orchestration honors Whitacre's expressive intent while opening the piece to orchestras that may lack a strong choral program. The Grade 3 scoring makes this profound work genuinely accessible; your orchestra can achieve the emotional sweep of the original without requiring virtuosic facility or unusual instrumentation.

A gradual emergence from stillness into luminous sound. The piece unfolds like a slow awakening, beginning in hushed contemplation before building toward moments of genuine lyricism and warmth, all without losing its meditative center.

Orchestras seeking substantial concert repertoire that resonates with audiences without demanding extreme technical demands. This arrangement works equally well for honors orchestras at the high school level and community ensembles looking for meaningful programming beyond standard pops fare.

• Shape the opening with patience. The piece's power emerges from restraint in the early sections, so resist the urge to accelerate or crescendo before the harmonic progressions naturally push forward.
• Balance the string sections carefully during the rising passages. Whitacre's voice leading often places crucial melodic material in inner voices rather than the first violins, requiring deliberate attention to sectional blend.
• Conduct with minimal baton movement through the sustained passages. A still, centered gesture communicates more effectively than busy conducting when asking musicians to sustain soft, floating sonorities.
• Breathe with your ensemble at phrase endings, even when the score doesn't explicitly mark breaths. This shared air creates the intimate quality that defines the work's character.

Reserve this for a moment when your program needs to shift emotional gears. Pair it with a contrasting work on the same concert to make its introspective quality register more vividly, or feature it as the closing piece of a concert to leave audiences in reflective silence.

• Maintaining pitch center and uniform vibrato in sustained, soft passages
• Reading and responding to precise dynamic gradations (ppppp through forte)
• Blending without losing individual voice clarity in divisi sections
• Maintaining rhythmic precision while conducting in expansive, non-metric gestures
• Interpreting rubato and phrase breathing as an ensemble unit