You’ve been talking in your sleep - David Biedenbender

David Biedenbender’s you’ve been talking in your sleep was commissioned by the PRISM Quartet and is inspired by the curious and often surreal phenomenon of sleep-talking. While working late into the night, the composer would sometimes hear his wife speaking aloud in her sleep — not in recognizable words, yet not mere nonsense either. Out of these strange, dreamlike utterances grew the idea for a musical dialogue between clarity and incoherence, between the waking self and the unconscious voice of sleep.

The quartet embodies this dialogue in constantly shifting textures and tonalities. At times the music feels grounded in more stable, modal harmonies; at other moments it slips into ambiguity, built from symmetrical scales and chromatic fragments that obscure orientation. The rhythmic surface mirrors this tension, moving fluidly between steady pulses, irregular meters, and moments of suspended time.

As the piece unfolds, the four instruments converse like fragments of a dream: some voices speak with directness, others answer in half-formed echoes, until the distinction between sense and nonsense blurs completely. In this way, you’ve been talking in your sleep transforms the private, ephemeral sounds of the dream world into a vivid and expressive musical landscape.

(Program note written by Don-Paul Kahl, based on texts by David Biedenbender)