On 23 May Rakhi Singh and Festival Voices performed Tom Coult’s O Euchari at Kings Place. The 8-minute piece, which reimagines a chant by Hildegard von Bingen for violin and choir, appeared as part of a programme curated by Ben Nobuto, showcasing music from Pérotin to the present day.
O Euchari was premiered in 2024 as part of Mystic Ritual at the Aldeburgh Festival – an evocative concert designed around the fading evening light of Blythburgh Church. It appeared as the second panel of Coult’s diptych O Ecclesia, O Euchari, complementing an earlier reworking of her music for the same forces by Coult, premiered at Wigmore Hall. The chant is presented in full, though very freely adapted – stretched, compressed, and multiplied to fit its new clothing. The violinist intones Hildegard’s melody, while the voices provide soft halos of sound to surround its lyrical line.
In May and June the Marian Consort, conducted by Rory McCleery, return to Coult’s music with two performances of Souling, a 5-minute work for unaccompanied voices, at the Dunster Festival of Music (23 May) and Orkney’s St. Magnus Festival (22 June). The motet premiered in May 2025 with ORA Singers and Suzi Digby at Manchester’s Stoller Hall.
Souling was written as a companion and a response to William Byrd’s Justorum Animae. The piece reflects on All Saints’ Day (the mass in which the Byrd is sung), All Souls’ Day, and All Hallow’s Eve – three days related to the dead; Coult’s choices of two texts reflects the thinning of the boundary between living and dead associated with that time of year.
The first is part of the Lyke-Wake Dirge – a ballad about watching over the dead before their funeral, and of the soul's difficult journey towards the afterlife from purgatory. The second is a rhyme about 'souling' – children going door-to-door, when the spirits are afoot, to ask for offerings (‘soulcakes’).The first parts adopts more homophonic and prayer-like textures as mourners watch over the dead. The second suggests the scampering of the ‘souling’, sprite-like children with playful, staccato vocal writing.