Augustine, in his exposition of the 99th Psalm, called wordless, jubilant singing “a song of joy without words”, “the voice of a heart dissolved in joy”. Caroline Shaw’s and the swallow sets a different psalm, the 84th, but it lives close to that idea: short pieces of text are repeated and turned over until they become as much sound as sentence. VOCES8’s new film from the VOCES8 Centre in London catches that quality with real care.
Shaw wrote the piece in 2017, and the Netherlands Chamber Choir gave the first performance on 11 November that year. It is scored for eight voices, and VOCES8 sing it with exactly eight singers, so each line rests on a single voice. The ensemble’s own note explains that Shaw saw the sparrow finding a house and the swallow her nest as “a symbol of the universal desire to find safety and protect one’s family”, and Guy Rickards, in Gramophone, linked the music to “the humanitarian crises in Syria and on the USA’s southern border”.
Natasha Loges, in BBC Music Magazine, heard the setting open “with warm, consonant harmonies” before it “unfolds into the highest reaches of the choir’s range”. Here “how beloved” returns more than once, and “my soul” and “my flesh” are repeated in turn before the music settles.
Then comes the finest stretch of the performance. The sound thins to the softest point of the whole performance just before “the sparrow found a house”, so the sparrow verse grows from almost nothing. Its quick, repeated fragments gather into the broadest swell of the film around “where she may raise her young” (2:14). The climax belongs to the nest, not to the journey, and the nest is the image Shaw herself singled out.
The pilgrims’ verse follows more quietly. Lester Hostetler’s 1949 handbook to the Mennonite Hymnary glosses the vale of Baca as “a waterless, barren valley” that “became, to the devoted pilgrim, a place of springs and refreshment”. “They pass through” comes back as a refrain, and VOCES8 let it rise steadily, as though the walkers were gaining ground.
In the closing lines the texture changes again. VOCES8’s note says that here “the choir evokes the sound of gentle autumn rain”, and the final half-minute does return to a stream of short, quick attacks before one last swell and a quiet final chord. Sound itself carries the image here, much as Augustine’s wordless singer carried a joy “too great to put into words”. The film handles the ending well: the camera dissolves from a close-up to the whole line of eight (3:38) and holds them as the chord fades.
Visually the film is simple and right for the music. The eight stand in a single row at music stands in a dark, wood-panelled room, with small lights glowing behind them, and the editing moves between close-ups and wide shots, so we see both the individual voices and the ensemble.
Reviewing Ars Nova Copenhagen and Paul Hillier’s Naxos recording, Ivan Moody in Gramophone praised writing that explores “long-resonating chords to create an atmosphere of warmth and hope”. Listeners who know that version will find VOCES8’s one-voice-to-a-part reading a fine companion: clear, patient, and shaped around the swallow’s nest. VOCES8 deserve warm thanks for this performance.