There is something entrancing about watching clouds. As they gather, dissolve and reassemble, they seem to fold the wind into shapes that hold for just a moment before slipping into something new. This evening’s programme takes these processes of unfolding and refolding as its guiding image. Two contemporary works — Caroline Shaw’s How to fold the wind and Aaron Jay Kernis’s Ecstatic Meditations — sit at the centre of the programme, framed by Tudor polyphony from John Sheppard and John Taverner, with twentieth-century alleluias from Randall Thompson and Jake Runestad.

The dialogue between these worlds is closer than we might first imagine. In musical terms, folding is an inherently contrapuntal idea. Sixteenth-century English composers built their large-scale liturgical works with plainchant at their centre, a stable melodic foundation laid out in long notes. Around this, the other voices spin, repeat, imitate and answer each other in turn. A musical phrase begun in one voice is taken up by another, tucked underneath, lifted above and then returned in a slightly altered shape. Melodic materials are folded across the ensemble like cloth being shaken out and gathered in.

These Renaissance forms often depend on literal repetition as well, with verses recurring in constantly evolving contexts and chant alternating with polyphony — the same architecture viewed from fresh angles. As we will hear, the composers of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries have inherited and reinvented these techniques, using them to create structures that loop back on themselves before opening outward.

The programme begins with the first of two settings of ‘Libera nos, salva nos’ by John Sheppard, who spent the 1540s as Informator Choristarum at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a Gentleman in the choir of the Chapel Royal. Both settings are likely products of Sheppard’s Oxford years; the college statutes required this prayer to the Trinity to be recited twice daily. In the first, Sheppard places the chant (unusually) in the lowest voice, resulting in an extremely slow rate of harmonic change. The effect is serene — listen for how the upper voices seem to hover in suspended motion above the bass line. The second setting, which we hear later, is also scored for seven voices but feels more urgent. Shorter melismas press the text forward, until the invocation ‘O beata Trinitas’, when the note values broaden and the texture begins to descend in long, yearning arcs.

At the age of thirty, Caroline Shaw became the youngest composer ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music, awarded in 2013 for her Partita for 8 Voices. A founding member of the American vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, she has written and produced for a remarkable range of collaborators, from Yo-Yo Ma to Rosalía. How to fold the wind (2019) was co-commissioned by Chamber Choir Ireland, Carnegie Hall and Ars Nova Copenhagen. Shaw drew inspiration from Japanese origami, and employs speech, inhaled notes, wordless melodies and unconventional vocal effects, folding them together until the individual voices coalesce into a kind of organic architecture — like a paper crane assembled from the breath.

Among the most important English composers of the early sixteenth century, John Taverner spent the first period of his career at Cardinal College, Oxford (now Christ Church). His two settings of the Easter responsory ‘Dum transisset Sabbatum’ share the same chant in the tenor but unfold quite differently. We hear the second setting first. It is compact and sectional, with sharper structural blocks and more pronounced moments of arrival at key words. The first setting, heard later in the programme, is the more ambitious — its polyphony unspools continuously with shorter note values, as the harmony blooms gradually beneath the floating upper lines. To hear the two in the same programme is an opportunity to appreciate a great composer reworking the same materials and discovering quite different possibilities within them.

Randall Thompson wrote his Alleluia in five days at the request of Serge Koussevitzky, for the opening of the Berkshire Music Center in July 1940. The score is reported to have arrived in the conductor’s hands barely an hour before the premiere. With World War II raging and France recently having fallen to the Nazis, Thompson resisted writing a fanfare and instead produced this contemplative meditation. It builds in a series of carefully paced waves toward a single radiant climax before retreating into stillness, presenting a study in the wide range of meanings that the word alleluia might carry.

A more inward sense of intensity drives Ecstatic Meditations by Aaron Jay Kernis, who also won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998. Composed in 1999 for Philip Brunelle and the Plymouth Music Series, Kernis’s work sets four texts by the medieval mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, translated by Jane Hirshfield. Kernis’s neo-romantic language is lyrical and harmonically rich, as he moves between sustained, open sonorities and sudden surges of intensity, mirroring the inward fervour of Mechthild’s verse.

The Emmy-winning Minneapolis-based composer Jake Runestad wrote his Alleluia in 2013 for Brady Allred and the Salt Lake Vocal Artists. After an energetic opening — complete with driving rhythms, hand-claps, glissandi and propulsive metrical shifts — a reverent central section with soaring lines and lush harmonies emerges, before the exuberance of the opening returns in a final unfolding and outpouring of praise.

David Lee