Christopher Churcher on Moonrise

Christopher Churcher's name is one of those that's suddenly starting to appear everywhere; he's leapt straight from studying as an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford into a career as a composer. Choral and vocal music has always been a big strand in his work (though, as he explains, far from the only one), and a new album on Resonus Classics showcases his compositions for voices. 

Pride of place goes - no, no, that's too obvious. A prominent place on the album (!) goes to Churcher's three Pride Motets, a triptych of texts planted firmly in the soil of queer lived experience. From an astonishingly frank and open Elizabethan love-sonnet from a male poet to his beloved, to an excerpt from Jay Hulme's heady Jesus at the Gay Bar, to e e cummings' inimitable stream-of-consciousness style in my heart, the three motets form the emotional core of the album. Also included are two settings of traditional Latin sacred meditations, a trio of affectionate reflections on well-loved Christmas carol-texts, and more.

Christopher explains more about the works on this album, and how it all came together.

You mention in the album’s accompanying notes that at the ripe old age of 21, you’re now already ‘looking back’ somewhat on a compositional career that began four whole years ago. How has your style changed since you first started writing in your mid-teens? Do you have inklings of ways it might evolve further in the future?

I know, it does sound faintly preposterous to be “looking back” on anything at the age of 21! But composing has been part of my life for quite a long time now. I started writing music when I was around ten or eleven, and the album begins with what I think of as my first “proper” piece, written in 2021, and goes through to works from 2025. So in a way it does cover almost a quarter of my life, and it feels like closing a really formative first chapter as a composer.

When I first started writing, I was doing a lot of harmony exercises and pastiche. I spent years writing fugues, chorales, string quartets in the style of Mozart and Beethoven, that sort of thing. That was incredibly useful, but it wasn’t really until I came to university that I began to find a voice that felt genuinely mine. A big part of that was discovering John Adams, and then the wider American post-minimalist world: Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, David Lang, and others, and I increasingly see my music as part of a musical lineage connected to this tradition. In that sense, I think pieces on the album like the first of the Pride Motets and O Nata Lux probably point most clearly towards where my music is headed stylistically.

Looking forward, my only concrete aim is to write music that people feel welcomed by. I want people to feel moved, heard and understood by my music. I want it to feel emotionally honest. On a technical level, I’m currently quite focussed on ideas of structure and proportion. A lot of the pieces I’ve written so far clock in at around the four to six minute mark, and I’m keen now to stretch that out into larger structures. I’m working on a commission this summer which is an eighteen-minute choral and orchestral work. I hope that will help me start thinking on a broader scale, and working with larger musical architectures.

Many composers feel moved to write new music to time-hallowed Christmas texts that many of us have been singing since childhood. Your three Wintersongs are unusual in that they intentionally play on that nostalgia. How did you go about writing them, and how easy was it to ‘unlearn’ the implications of those existing well-known settings?

There is a lot of wonderful new Christmas music being written at the moment which sets newer, or more unusual texts, and I love uncovering new Christmas gems. But with Wintersongs, I set out to do something slightly different. They were an exercise in what you might call “restorative nostalgia”—revisiting a past memory and somehow refreshing it for the future. Christmas is such a nostalgic time of year, bound up with familiarity, tradition, and ritual. So, I loved the idea of taking texts that many people already know and love, and breathing new life into them.

Sometimes when you hear a new Christmas piece, there are two kinds of newness to process at once: the newness of the music and the newness of the text. With these pieces, I wanted to keep the texts familiar and allow the music to refresh them. I hope the result is that people hear words they know very well, but perhaps see them through new eyes. The difficulty, of course, is that some of those existing settings are very deeply lodged in the ear. I didn’t want to fight against that, but also not be trapped by it either. I wanted the pieces to acknowledge that shared memory without becoming an exercise in imitation.

Of the three Pride Motets, the first is perhaps the most astonishing, at least in terms of its text. The scholarly argument about some of Shakespeare’s love poetry being addressed to a male lover goes back and forth, but Barnfield’s Sonnet 16 by contrast is completely unambiguous. How was he able to get away with writing so clearly and openly about same-sex love in the Tudor era?

It’s such an amazing poem. I think one could very easily listen to the first Pride Motet and assume the words were written within the last hundred years. When you look at Barnfield’s original Elizabethan language it’s such a revelation. It never ceases to amaze me that this body of work exists; Barnfield’s poetry openly eroticised male beauty in a way that was nothing short of extraordinary for the period. There is a lot we don’t know about his private life, his patrons, his career etc. but we do know that the legal context of his work was extremely dangerous: the Buggery Act of 1533 made sex between men a felony punishable by death. So the fact that these poems exist at all is remarkable.

Part of the answer of how he got away with it seems to be his literary framing. Barnfield often wrote in the pastoral mode, setting his poetry in a classical or mythical setting. When challenged about the homoerotic nature of his writing, he could appeal to the explanation that, for example, he was imitating Virgil’s Eclogues, paying homage to an inherited literary tradition of homo-romantic desire, rather than writing as personal confession.  He also wasn’t writing in total isolation. In his writing, there are links to, and echoes of, contemporary writers like Marlowe, Spenser, and Drayton, who also engaged with same-sex attraction in their work. And then, of course, there’s the ongoing debate around Shakespeare. 

So, this context likely gave Barnfield a kind of buffer, although only up to a point. It's thought that he didn’t manage to escape controversy entirely, as his literary career was very brief. Although he lived until 1620, after the 1590s Barnfield more or less disappears in the written record. Some scholars have suggested that controversy around his poetry may have damaged his standing, though the records are thin. I think it’s just such a gift that we have his work today as a testament to the beauty and fragility of queer lives nearly half a millennium ago.

The affirming, nurturing text you’ve used from the end of Hulme’s Jesus at the Gay Bar is very much a sentiment that many queer people will need to hear, particularly when reframed as a motet, with all the institutional baggage that that implies. But the poem opens with Jesus energetically bopping with the best of them! Did you worry it would spoil the feel of the piece to include those earlier lines?

Ha! It’s a very good question. There’s a simple practical answer, which is that the second motet came out of a commission from York Minster Choir for a Queer Compline service during Pride in 2023. They specifically asked me to set the final reflection from the poem: “My beautiful child, there is nothing in this heart of yours that ever needs to be healed.” But, I love the rest of Hulme’s poem. When the Pride Motets were premiered as a full cycle at Somerville for the first time, I actually read "Jesus at the Gay Bar" before the choir sang the second motet, stopping before that final italicised reflection. Then the choir came in with the words I had set.

Maybe, in a way, it is a shame that I never set the whole poem. It matters to me that it is explicit that the words of the second Pride Motet are the words of Jesus, God, or however you see it. I came up through cathedral singing and grew up around religion, and my dad’s side of the family is very Catholic, so it took me a long time to shake off the heavy baggage of shame and wrongness that can be placed on queer people in that kind of environment. I now fundamentally believe that no all-loving Creator would have made queer people imbued with a simple, natural desire to love one another, only to see that love as less than any other. That is really what the second motet means to me.

The album itself traces the contours of both the hours of a day and the seasons of a year. Was that always the plan, or did it just fall into place that way?

The whole programmatic “journey” of the disc was very consciously planned in one sense, but also came about by complete luck. When I first started putting a tracklist together, I instinctively knew that Wonder had to open the album and Echo had to close it. Then Everything is Going to Be All Right, with its imagery of sunrises and sunlight, felt as though it belonged somewhere in the middle. That immediately started to suggest a shape to the disc, beginning with the first light of dawn and ending with the close of day. Once that frame was there, the rest of the album began to fall into place. The Pride Motets, with their themes of joy and being written for the month of June (Pride month), seemed to belong after Everything is Going to Be All Right. The Christmas pieces then seemed to sit naturally before that. After that, there were still a couple of gaps. O Nata Lux, for example, was written only around four or five months before the album was recorded, partly to sit towards the rear end of the album, fitting into the world of evening and closure. So this theme of light was something I noticed quite early in the process and then fell in love with. Once I saw the idea emerging, I started shaping the album around it more consciously.

I’ve only ever encountered you as a choral composer, so my perspective might be incomplete. How interested are you in non-choral writing? Is there chamber or instrumental music out there too, waiting to be performed and recorded?

I’m really glad you asked, because I definitely don’t want to be pigeonholed as a choral composer alone. Of course, choral music is very important to me. I have a background as a singer, and I’ve developed a close relationship with Somerville Choir at university. Being in the UK, because of our extraordinary choral tradition, it can also sometimes be easier to get things performed by choirs than by other kinds of ensembles. So in some ways it has just worked out that way. But I’m very interested in non-choral writing, and I’d love that side of my work to become better known. One of my best-known pieces is actually a solo organ prelude, called This Shining Night. I’ve also written for string quartet, bassoon and piano duet, and orchestra. There’s more non-choral music on the way as well. I’m currently working on a commission for the American horn player Steven Cohen, a piece for horn and piano, and I have a piano sonata in the works for Piers Lane, which should be finished in early 2027. 

As a singer, I suspect there may always be a vocal sensibility to my writing. Music often tends to have a lyrical and melodic quality. But I’m very keen for that voice to spread into all sorts of areas, not just choirs, much as I love writing for them.