Any composer interested in vocal and choral music is both inspired and nourished by poetry. Second only to music, words are my great love, and from my earliest years I have enjoyed seeking out poetry that seems to invite musical setting. This album brings together some of my recent choral music where the words provided the first inspiration and the music followed.

I’ll make me a world
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an American poet, writer and civil rights activist of predominantly Caribbean heritage. His poetic account of the biblical story of creation captivated me many years ago when I first encountered it in an anthology of Christian verse edited by the English poet Charles Causley—of whom more later—and I made a musical setting of it for children’s choir which, perhaps providentially, did not satisfy me. I laid it aside, but with a mental note to try again later. The opportunity to do so, but with the fuller resources of two soloists, adult choir, and orchestra, came about in 2023, by which time I was perhaps better equipped for the task. Two generous benefactors, Nathan and Marilyn Hayward, expressed a wish that I would write a new sacred choral work of about twenty minutes duration, for performance in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral by the Bach Choir—I have the honour of being their president—and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – who have recently accorded me the title of their Artist Laureate. I felt I was writing for friends, a pleasure crowned by being granted my cherished colleagues Melanie Marshall and Roderick Williams as the two soloists. In the vast space of St Paul’s Cathedral a large chorus is called for, but for the more intimate medium of a recording, I was delighted to be able to call on my own much smaller choir the Cambridge Singers. The music of I’ll make me a world is at least partly inspired by the music that James Weldon Johnson would himself have known in 1920s America: blues, gospel, jazz, Broadway, and probably the new sounds of the young George Gershwin. These styles seemed to spring naturally out of the text and to be the right ones to bring it to life. My intention was to allow my own style to absorb them, with a due sense of reverence and respect.

London Town
London Town was written in 2019 in celebration of the 80th birthday of June Keyte, a dear friend and the inspirational director of Children’s International Voices of Enfield, a family of choirs based in that north London borough. She and her husband, the distinguished baritone Christopher Keyte, suggested a work celebrating London itself, an idea which, as a Londoner, I was very happy to adopt. In seeking texts, I thought it would be refreshing to commission some new ones from a young poet in addition to choosing familiar ones I already had in mind by Wordsworth, Kipling, and Raleigh. Delphine Chalmers, a first-year English literature student at Oxford, had recently come to my attention with texts she had provided for my composer colleague Bob Chilcott, and she wrote two richly imaginative poems for me, one celebrating the bells of London, the other (Mind the gap) taking us on a time-travelling train ride through London past and present. I confess to writing the words of London Zoo myself, recalling my own visits there as a child. The resources available for the 2019 premiere were a mixed youth choir, a younger children’s choir, and piano. For this recording I have recast the piano accompaniment for an instrumental ensemble drawn from principal players in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and allocated the mixed-choir part to the Cambridge Singers. Sadly, June Keyte died in 2021 and Christpher Keyte in 2024, but I am delighted that I was able to call on the Taplow Young Voices, directed by another luminary of the children’s choir world, my friend Gillian Dibden, to take on the role of the children’s choir.

Dancing Tree
Dancing Tree (2024) came about as a result of a rather different invitation, this one from the St Charles Singers, a chamber choir based in Illinois. I have enjoyed guest-conducting this excellent choir on a number of occasions and Jeff Hunt, their founder-director, is a good friend. He shares my love of poetry, and was happy to accept my suggestion of a cycle of Charles Causley settings, with harp accompaniment. Charles Causley (1917-2003) was a Cornish poet and schoolteacher who had a lifelong love of the folklore and legends of Cornwall, and also possessed the rare gift of writing for children but not writing down to them. His poetry—generally expressed in deceptively simple words, always with a touch of the unexpected—is highly musical, perhaps reflecting Causley’s experience playing for a time in a local dance band. Sometimes whimsical, sometimes mystical, sometimes speaking with the voice of folk poetry or even nursery rhyme, Causley is a gift to any composer.

Three Shakespeare Songs
The Three Shakespeare Songs for unaccompanied choir started out as just one Shakespeare song, Be not afeard, written in 2017 for my good friends the King’s Singers. With only minimal adaptation it became a mixed-choir piece, but I felt it needed two companions to make a set of three. In 2022 I turned to a sketch of O mistress mine that I had never worked up, and wrote Sigh no more, ladies to complete the set—joining a long procession of composers who have found inspiration in Shakespeare’s timeless texts. The complete set was premièred by the dedicatees, Mark Ford and the Purcell Singers, in that year.

When music sounds
When music sounds is a setting for mixed choir and piano of a lovely poem by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) which—strangely, in view of its subject matter—has as far as I know never been set to music before. I wrote it in 2022 at the request of a good friend (how often that seems to have been the case!), Philip Brunelle, founder-conductor of VocalEssence, an important Minneapolis-based concert organization. 2022 was Philip’s 40th anniversary season, and I thought that a gentle ode to music itself might be appropriate. For no reason I can explain I started to hear Bach’s C major Prelude from Book I of the ‘48’ in my head, and I made it the basis of my setting, distanced as far as it is possible to go from C major in our system of tuning by writing it in G flat major, one of my favourite keys.

John Rutter © 2025