Evangelicals Now
Christian news worldwide
magnifying glass Search archives
home Home check the archives Archives Subscribe Subscriptions Advertising Information & booking of classifieds Adverts Find a local evangelical Church Find a church for the search engines and extremely curious! About us Contact us Site Map
Printable
Version

Cloudburst & other choral works

Beating Time

CLOUDBURST & other choral works
By Eric Whitacre
Polyphony: Stephen Layton, director
Hyperion. CDA67543. £13.99

If the pagan king Cyrus could be considered by the Lord as ‘my shepherd’ (Isaiah 44.28), can the music of an avowed non-Christian composer be a vehicle through which the Spirit of God can speak?

This is the question I asked after hearing this new release on the Hyperion label of Eric Whitacre’s choral music. His choice of texts and his style sound profoundly like ‘church’ music but he refutes this claiming, ‘I am not Christian … the poetry that I choose simply speaks deeply to me and I just do my best to illuminate the words with music’.

When the words in question are David’s lament over Absalom (2 Samuel 18.33), ‘My son, my son, O Absalom my son, would God I had died for thee’, Whitacre’s ‘best’ is phenomenally beautiful and profoundly moving. He wrote the piece for a dear friend who lost his son and has captured the heart of this Scripture, expanding it into a heart-rending expression of grief lasting for nearly 13 minutes and yet so intensely absorbing it sounds much shorter. It is the most beautiful classical direct setting of Scripture that I have encountered in 20 years.

There is much else for Christian listeners too. The opening track is one of E.E. Cummings’s three songs of praise, ‘I thank you, God, for most this amazing day’ (the other two are on the CD also!), and, though penned by an Islamic writer, the song ‘May these vows and this marriage be blessed’ could easily enrich musically any Christian wedding and give much to ponder upon for any married couple.

If all EN readers who buy it pray for the composer, perhaps by the time of his next album he may be a Christian as well as being enormously gifted by God as a composer?

Trevor Stammers