Eric Whitacre

THANK YOU all for your responses. Can’t tell you how helpful it was for me to hear all of your choices, and your arguments for and against each of the images.

‘The tree’ image is the one that most people liked, which is nice, because it was my favorite as well. For me, it captures a number of themes from the pieces on the disc – “light, warm and heavy as pure gold“; “silence and solitude“; “and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes“.

Mostly, though, it was the first lines of The Stolen Child that leaped into my mind when I first saw the cover:

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

I feel that the image is the leafy island that beckons children with the promise of magic and immortality, depicted exactly the way a child might imagine it. By using this picture I’m hoping the cover will create a very specific mood, one of wonder and awe, melancholy and longing. Hopefully, then, the music inside will be a perfect match.

THANK YOU again, everyone!