Souling, a new motet for unaccompanied choir by Tom Coult, will premiere on 29 May at Manchester’s Stoller Hall with ORA Singers conducted by Suzi Digby. The 5-minute piece was commissioned by The Cuthbert Family on behalf of ORA Singers and Suzi Digby OBE.
The work was composed as a companion and response to William Byrd’s Justorum Animae. Coult chose to write a piece reflecting upon All Saints’ Day (the mass in which the Byrd is sung), All Souls’ Day, and All Hallow’s Eve – three days related to the dead. Coult’s choices of two texts reflects the thinning of the boundary between living and dead associated with that time of year, which although presented in a liturgical choral context have their roots in pagan and pre-Christian habits of mind. The first is part of the Lyke-Wake Dirge – a ballad about watching over the dead before their funeral, and of the soul's difficult journey towards the afterlife from purgatory. The second is a rhyme about 'souling' – children going door-to-door, when the spirits are afoot, to ask for offerings (‘soulcakes’).
These find expression in the character of the work’s two parts. The first adopts more homophonic and prayer-like textures as mourners watch over the dead. The second suggests the scampering of the ‘souling’, sprite-like children with playful, staccato vocal writing. A haunting solo soprano launches the coda – a waif-like urchin with thin-soled shoes begging for a penny.
In the same concert ORA Singers also perform Jonathan Harvey’s Dum transisset sabbatum, a 5-minute motet for unaccompanied choir whose melismatic outpourings are drawn from the music from Harvey’s church opera Passion and Resurrection. Like Coult’s Souling, it examines crossing the threshold of the living and the dead – the sunlit morning when Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Salome, enter Christ’s empty tomb, ready to anoint his body.