A Glorious Creature (2023)

A Glorious Creature is an ecstatic and bright setting of a particularly beautiful extract from Thomas Traherne’s Christian Ethicks or Divine Moralitie. The text itself is very musical, and proposed to me a piece with both highly contrapuntal writing, unison writing. It begins with four giant crescendi all originating from middle C on the words “the sun” repeated over and over. I took as a prompt the text “every grain of dust, every sand, every spire of grass” to write an elusive & chromatic line which slithers through all of the voices. The text “Yet the Sun is but a little spark…” suggested an intimate quartet of voices singing in rhythmic unison, who are gradually overtaken by the same material in the first part of the piece, but here, “the soul” is the text repeated. The piece comes to a climax with canons, patterns and abstract text setting in equal measure before fading away. I discovered, after nearly a decade of collaboration with Peter and The Tallis Scholars, that I’d written them a large amount of relatively morose music, including one piece about literally freezing to death on the tundra. A Glorious Creature was meant to be a fiery and warm response to the other works in this catalogue.

 – NICO MUHLY