Lux Perpetua

This work is the result of a composition process spanning 29 years. I wrote the final movement, In paradisum, as a stand-alone anthem back in early 1990, during the Christmas break of my second year of undergraduate studies in engineering at Durham University. For some reason, which now escapes me, I believed that it would not be a popular or easy piece to perform, so I put it away “in a drawer” and didn’t think about it for many years. Nineteen years, to be exact.

In 2009 some friends of mine very kindly put on a concert of my music in celebration of my 40th birthday. I was asked by one of the two conductors if I had any unperformed scores that I would like to hear and in response I dug up a copy of the In paradisum setting. The concert was well received and the piece was performed several further times over the following years. A recording of the premiere performance of In paradisum was played as the closing music for my mother’s funeral in 2012 and the piece was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 2015.

I started to receive requests along the lines of “when are you going to write the rest of the Requiem?”. Each time I politely declined, pointing out that the In paradisum setting was a single musical utterance and I had no plans to add any further movements to it.

The only other text of the Requiem Mass that I had ever considered setting to music was the Lux aeterna — like so many composers I felt drawn to express these words of heavenly light in musical form. In early 2017, out of the blue, an idea occurred to me about how to proceed: I could write a set of additional movements, culminating with the In paradisum, which were both a Requiem and also a set of hymns of light, the Lux aeterna fulfilling both functions as the penultimate movement. Composition proceeded during 2017 and 2019, leading to this nine-movement work: the four even-numbered movements are hymns of light (O nata lux, O lux beata Trinitas, Holy is the true light and Lux aeterna) interpolated between movements from the Requiem mass.