O Clap Your Hands is one of Orlando Gibbons’ larger scale anthems. Premiered in 1622 during his Doctoral ceremony at Oxford, the setting of Psalm 47 exemplifies the “learned devices” of 16th-century counterpoint, passing phrases of imitation between two choirs. Particularly amusing is the varying length of these imitations, the longest being “God is gone up with a merry noise,” contrasting the shortest, “Sing praises.” It is easy to imagine these volleys between the two choirs, facing one another in the vast Westminster Abbey where Gibbons served as senior organist.

O Sapientia is the first of seven Advent Antiphons composed between 1995–9, the texts of which are most familiar today as the seven verses of the hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The core of Polish composer Paweł Łukaszewski’s musical language is what he calls “renewed tonality”—the use of common-practice harmony augmented with non-functional progressions between distantly-connected triads. This innovative mode of harmonic expression (which is on full display in the slow sections of this piece) coupled with his dynamic metrical patterns bends the ear across unexpected turns in his music. A slower-moving but extremely high melody surrounding a quick ostinato forms the most sonically-charged of his antiphons.

American ensemble, Chanticleer, commissioned close[r], now by Ayanna Woods in 2021. The source text for the piece is an L.A. Times editorial from March 2020, charging theaters and performing arts venues to “close, now.” Woods extracted letters, words, and phrases from the article to create an erasure poem, a modern poetic genre. The result is a piece that confronts the changes we had to make to connect to one another during the pandemic. The GRAMMY-nominated piece uses choppy and pointillistic fragments as well as sounds of mumbling behind masks before culminating in a final post-Covid resolution: “come back to life.”

American composer and Baritone, Shavon Lloyd, was the winner of the inaugural Orpheus Chamber Singers Student Composition Contest in 2019. Since then, he has continued to compose, conduct, and pursued a Masters in Vocal Performance at The Juilliard School. Lloyd speaks of his interpretation of Ben Johnson’s poem from the early 17th-century as a transition from Winter to Spring, darkness to light, or even sadness to happiness. So Breaks the Sun celebrates this binary, contrasting slower, lush sections with a hopeful, driving ostinato that surfaces throughout the piece.

Neslegtais gredzens is a cycle of three Latvian folk pieces by Juris Karlsons. Rotaļa means “the unclosed ring” and refers to a children’s dancing game in which the group joins hands and forms a ring or circle. The piece is built around an extremely fast pattering of “digi-digi-dogo-di” like the sounds of an engine. Separate parts are heard shouting “Vidu!” meaning “to the middle!” as an instruction for the next participant to take their place in the middle of the circle. The piece captures the childlike playfulness and playground pandemonium with a whirlwind of extremely quick text and sixteen parts.

–Cody Conway