O nata lux

(2026)

for SATB choir

Written for The Founder’s Choir of Royal Holloway

  • Performed by The Founder’s Choir of Royal Holloway and Daniel Ayers (Conductor) on 29 June 2026 at Budapesti Árpád-házi Szent Erzsébet Plébániatemplom, Hungary

  • Thomas Tallis' O nata lux (c. 1565) ends on a suspended chord of quiet radiance. This new setting of the same text begins from that same chord, as if Tallis is still in the room.

    Where Tallis prays toward the light, this work imagines what it sounds like to stand within it. The voices reach out from the opening chord like beams of light in the night sky: appearing, dissolving, returning.

    -njd.

  • SATB choir (divisi)

  • O Nata Lux, de Lumine,
    Jesu redemptor saeculi,
    Dignare clemens supplicum
    Laudes precesque summere.
    Qui carne quondam contegi,
    Dignatus es pro perditis,
    Nos membra confer effici
    Tui beati corporis.

    Anon.

  • 2’30

score sample