Three Contemporary Catholic Composers Set the Song of Songs

Choral explorations of a mystical text from the Old Testament

I was born in Chicago (Arlington Heights, to be exact) on March 22, 1971, and was baptized shortly after at the parish of St. James. My mother and father met, married, and had all six children in Chicago, before my dad’s company transferred him to Manhattan when I, the youngest in the family, was a year and a half old — leaving me the only one who could remember nothing of the Windy City. But somehow, even if it’s only in my imagination, there’s something special about going back there, as I often do for travel and, as it happens, for concerts at St. John Cantius.

This past August, I had the distinct privilege and joy of working once again in person with His Majesty’s Men, who sing marvelous concerts every summer in the Chicago area under the direction of Richard Childress. The ensemble loves to sing new music, which we composers appreciate a lot!

His Majesty’s Men has, at this point, commissioned me to write two works for them. In 2023, it was a setting of the Stabat Mater, which you can listen to here. In 2024, it was a setting of words from the Song of Songs or, as I prefer to call it, the Canticle of Canticles.

This year’s very interesting concert program involved several works linked to this inexhaustibly rich, mystical and mysterious poem of the Old Testament: John Tavener’s “The Village Wedding” (beware, it will lodge in your soul the most unshakable earworm in the entire classical repertoire); Howard Skepton’s peculiar minimalist nugget “The Song of Songs”; and three world premieres: Mark Nowakowski’s “I am a Flower of Sharon,” Nick Lemme’s “Surgam et Circuibo,” and my “Ego Dilecto Meo.”

What made the trio of premieres even more special is that I’m friends with both of the other composers, Nicholas Lemme and Mark Nowakowski, and we were all born in the same decade — I at the beginning of it (1971), they toward the end (1978).

Today, I’d like to share with you how three living composers of (more or less) the same generation approached the task of writing a choral work drawing from the same book of the Bible. We all chose different verses and each of us has a distinctive “voice” in our work. I hope that you will listen to their motets and then find insights into the music in the composer’s comments about their pieces (which I requested and received from them).

I’ll start with Nicholas Lemme, then move to Mark Nowakowski, and conclude with my piece.

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Nicholas Lemme, “Surgam et circuibo”

Text: Song of Songs 3:2

Surgam et circuibo civitatem
per vicos et plateas,
quaeram quem diligit anima mea,
quaesivi illum et non inveni.
Quaeram quem diligit anima me.

(I will rise and go about the city,
in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves.
I sought him, but found him not.
I will seek him whom my soul loves.)