Upcoming work in Oxford

Goings-on in May, June & July

Apr 15, 2025

I’ve been working with Mark Williams and the Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, for a few years, functioning as a composer-in-residence, after a fashion, and a General Presence in & around the cloister. This has yielded over an hour of new music, including canticles, a Mass setting, and a handful of anthems keyed to various feasts and seasons. In advance of a recording of the same body of work, the choir are performing an outlandish seven pieces this term.

I’ve also written a new anthem for New College, Oxford, under Robert Quinney, on a (surprisingly difficult to set!) sermon of John Donne. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find dates & times for these services, and if you happen to be in Oxford, please do stop by. It’s free, it’s beautiful, nothing is longer than an hour, and Evensong is one of the best things you can do to mark the transition from day into night. If you’ve never been to such a service, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Skip over all of the below if you just want to see what’s happening and where.

I’m just about to put a double-bar on the newest piece, a setting of Ascencio domini etc.1 (The Ascension of the Lord), one of the 14th century Wakefield (or Towneley) plays. I do a little jump cut at the end of the text, but here are the final lines of the anthem:

JESUS
And trowe2 truly
Mi dethe and rysyng,
and also myn upstevynyng3,
And also myn agane-commyng,
thay shal be saue suerly.
MARY
A selcouth sight yonder now is.
Behold now, I you pray:
A clowde has borne my chylde to blys;
Mi blessing bere he ever and ay.

As I was trying to figure out how to set these lines (and those of you who know me know full well how stoked I was about upstevynyng 🤤), I thought back to the first piece I wrote for them, Alma Redemptoris Mater, a setting of a beautiful text from the 15th century Selden Carol-Book:

Now is born that babe of blys,
& quen of Heuene his moder is,
& therfore think men that che is
redemptoris mater.4
Whan Ihesu was on the rode y-pyȝt5
Mary was sory of that syȝt,
Tyl that she say hym ryse upryȝt,
redemptoris mater.

That looks like this (and sounds like this, about two minutes into it if you don’t have four minutes for the whole experience):

And this is the newest piece:

There is something bittersweet about hitting “send” on this piece; it will be my last one for them, at least for a little while. I’m glad I figured out a way to make these two pieces — written four years apart — rhyme both textually and musically, and, I hope, theologically. I’m enormously proud of the organists and the Academical Clerks (which is to say the men and women of the choir), but particularly of the choristers, who have figured out my idioms and become fluent in their execution, and who have even developed subtle ways to offer criticism (“Sir, this one is much harder than the last … why?”). I have enormous gratitude for my old friend Mark Williams, the Informator Choristarum, for taking a risk on a multi-year cycle of new works. I’m wildly excited that they’re having the benefit of an airing this spring & early summer, doubly excited to spend a few days recording them, and trebly excited to release them into the world.

Photo: Hugh Warwick

The plan:

Sunday, 4 May, 6pm, Magdalen College
A Great Stone
Sunday, 11 May, 11am, Magdalen College
Missa Brevis
Sunday, 18 May, 5:45pm, New College
To Shutt Up This Circle (first performance)
Wednesday, 14 May, 6pm, Magdalen College
What Shall Be After Him?
Sunday, 1 June, 6pm, Magdalen College
When All is Endid Fully (first performance)
Thursday, 5 June, 6pm, Magdalen College
With Eys Lift Up
Thursday, 26 June, 5:45pm, Magdalen College
Magdalen Service
Saturday, 5 July, 6pm, Magdalen College
One Star

Nico Muhly

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