I wrote this setting of the Surge, Illuminare (Isaiah 60: 1-6) a few years back, using the text from the Canadian Psalter as my starting point. It's a tricky four-part setting, despite being mostly homophonic. It's in three broad sections:
First (after a brief introduction) is the main theme of the work, in commanding repeated unisons ("Arise! Shine!") and warm lyrical lines ("For thy light is come") leading through the text to the part about the nations coming to the light and the kings to the brightness.
Secondly, an imitative a capella segment, which eventually moves to a hymn-like setting with instrumental interjections. This leads to a key change down a half step from C to B major and a small recap.
The third segment begins with a recapitulation of the primary theme and text, and moves back from B to C into a new music segment with the text "The sun shall be no more thy light by day." The conclusion rounds out the theme with a final statement of the words "Arise! Shine! for thy light is come."
Surge, Illuminare! by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Available here in PDF form.
I intend to present it to my church choir at this week's rehearsal as our anthem for Easter Sunday, giving me six weeks to get it ready (and to arrange it for the trumpet player, hopefully) if they agree to sing it. Here's hoping!
This work also exists in open score, if the compressed two-staff choral part is bothersome.
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