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When David heard that Absalom was slain [motet for double chorus a cappella]

Comments on the Mass for eight parts have a bearing also upon the textural and polyphonic concerns of this motet, commissioned for concert performance by the St Louis Chamber Chorus. Its British director, Philip Barnes, frequently presents programmes juxtaposing modern and 16th-century settings of one text. At its première in Christ Church Cathedral, St Louis, Missouri on April 2008, the work was paired with the setting by Thomas Weelkes.

First compositional ideas may take an improbable form; here, a cinematic one. The informing image was of the King in some crowded place, oblivious as grim tidings inexorably closed in upon him. Beneath this lay very distant recollection of the 1949 Warner Brothers / Raoul Walsh film White Heat. Seated in a gaol refectory, a criminal psychopath (portrayed by James Cagney) asks after his mother. News of her death is whispered along the length of the immense table, apparent by lip-reading as it approaches its recipient. The fitful workings of memory had separated character from identity, blurring into archetypes of human experience and lending an unlikely pathos. The idea was transplanted by detaching ‘Absalom’ and ‘slain’ from their textual place, then having them loom ever more ominously from the general rumour, at the same time conjuring an increasingly insistent B flat: an eye of the storm.

The music otherwise acknowledges early 17th-century antecedents, especially the setting of the same words not by Weelkes but by Thomas Tomkins; yet it goes further in reflecting an imagined scenario. The King’s controlled ascent towards his chamber gives way to naked grieving almost before the door closes upon his retreat. Numbness and tender retrospection alternate with upsurges of raw emotion, the last echoing and exceeding the music’s first climax before a hushed epilogue that serves to consign narrative and lamentation to a far-distant past.