Thea Musgrave at 100: Choral
For the Time Being: Advent (1986) 23 min
Narrator + SATB (unaccompanied)
Text by W.H. Auden
A setting of the first section of W.H. Auden’s 1945 poem, in a continuous ~25-minute span.
On the Underground Set No. 1 – On Gratitude, Love and Madness (1994) 10 min
On the Underground Set No. 2 – The Strange and the Exotic (1994) 5 min
On the Underground Set No. 3 – A Medieval Summer (1995) 10 min
SATB (unaccompanied)
There is one unexpected pleasure taking the London Underground (and, more recently, also the New York City subway): one's eye may alight on a poem placed amongst the pervasive and numbing advertisements, and, for a moment, the imagination takes wing. — Thea Musgrave
These three distinct but related sets include texts by James Berry, Sheenagh Pugh, W.B. Yeats, Stevie Smith, Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickinson, Robert Herrick, Edwin Morgan and Geoffrey Chaucer.
Rorate Coeli (1973) 11 min
SATB (unaccompanied)
Text by William Dunbar
It was powerful, unusual music that had the chorus at times variously sounding like a choir, a mob, an army, and a fractious parliament… the work’s drama was always palpable. — M.L. Rantala, Hyde Park Herald
The Voices of Our Ancestors (2014) 30 min
Narrator, SATB, hn.2tpt.tbn.tba/org
This piece takes as its text eleven ancient poems translated to English from Vedic, Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Persion, Chinese, Latin, Greek and Egyptian.
Voices of Power and Protest (2006) 20 min
SATB (unaccompanied)
A dramatic concert work for unaccompanied chorus.
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