The Shadow of the Sun (2026)

The Shadow of the Sun is a multi-movement exploration of how poetry, art, and especially glass can act as a membrane between the visible world and the divine. The piece is in seven sections, with texts ranging from the 16th-century writer William Gager, an anonymous 17th-century poem in praise of the stained glass in Christ Church Cathedral, the hymns of Charles Wesley, and the poetry of George Herbert. A recurring theme, both textual and musical, is that windows, poems, and paintings can frame and focus the sacred, but never fully capture it.

Setting text in a declamatory way — where everything is audible and clear, often with one note to a syllable — felt too concrete and obvious in many places, where the words, to me, suggested a necessary abstraction. An obvious example of this is the very beginning of the first movement, where the text “Behold the Dove” is delivered simply and forcefully, and then immediately refracted and put through a process of canons and polyphonic manipulation. The second movement introduces single-note drones with shifting vowels, as subtle changes in light can change the mood in a space. The third movement deploys wordless pulses and hymn-like settings in equal measure, pitting imagistic clarity against the (perhaps) more poetic elements of pulse and tone.

Although reflection and refraction through repeated cells are a key driving force in the music, longer lyrical solo lines offset these mechanisms, notably in the fourth movement, when the text is fully fragmented in the choir, with each half singing a syllable at a time, whereas a solo baritone and treble naturalistically sing the text ending with “…behold without a veil thy face.” The fifth movement pits two solo voices (singing in rhythmic unison), against wordless drones in the rest of the choir, only joining together on the text “’Tis the same body but in better cloaths.” The sixth movement is the simplest, where the text “[man] is a brittle crazy glass” suggested a flickering motif which forms the engine of the section. After a bit of six-part polyphony (a nod to Taverner), the seventh movement gathers all of the various techniques together, and ends with a vision of the night sky.

NICO MUHLY