In Competition No. 3021 you were invited to compose terrifying lullabies.

Lorca wondered why ‘Spain reserved the most potent songs of blood to lull its children to sleep, those least suited to their delicate sensibilities’, but the Scandinavians set the bar pretty high too: the unsoothing–sounding ‘Krakevisa’, from Norway, tells of gruesome uses for the carcase of a crow: ‘… from the entrails he made twelve pair of rope/ and the claws he used for dirt-forks.’