Wells Cathedral first introduced girl choristers to the ranks of its resident choir in 1994.
Our faith is a light was commissioned to mark the initiative’s tenth anniversary. Bingham chose for her text words from
Revelations of Divine Love by the fourteenth-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. The imaginary landscape of her work is also furnished with details from the early history of the present Wells Cathedral, which grew up in the late twelfth century to the north of a Middle Saxon cemetery. ‘It was over the dead that that mighty façade rose … with its hymn to [the] Madonna: Regina caeli laetare, alleluia’, recalled Edward Hutton in his
Highways and Byways in Somerset of 1912, whose work also notes the daily singing of a Mass to the Blessed Virgin at Wells. ‘Thinking back to the twelfth century when work began on the cathedral led me to another blend of composer and female voices—Hildegard of Bingen and her nuns’, observes Bingham. ‘This anthem is in some ways my homage to Hildegard’s ecstatic melody. To suggest the stretching out of nearly a thousand years, the organ often has rising or falling staccato chords, ticking like the cathedral’s famous medieval clock.’
from notes by Andrew Stewart © 2013
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