Commissioned by Balliol College to commemorate the death of Banjamin Jowett

  • SATB
  • 19 min

Programme Note

Composed for Balliol College, Oxford, this is a substantial showpiece designed for non-professional choirs who can share in the poetry and amusement it finds in picking its way through an early sixteenth-century commonplace book preserved in the college library. The main thread comes from the mysterious Corpus Christi carol, sounding out of a tangle of other notes and jottings: odd little rhymes, mnemonics, an arithmetical puzzle, horticultural advice, recipes, and more than one intervention by the cat and the mouse.