Sure on This Shining Night
Like other vocal groups across North America, the Chamber Choir of Grand Rapids is getting ready for a concert in the spring. We’ll present it on April 28 at the First United Methodist Church in Grand Rapids. Among the lovely and challenging songs we rehearse each week is “Sure on This Shining Night” by Morten Lauridsen.
Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888), oil painting by Vincent van Gogh , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Along with “O Magnum Mysterium,” discussed in a previous post, Lauridsen’s setting of “Sure on This Shining Night” is one of my favorite choral pieces. I’m particularly fond of a recording by The Singers, conducted by Matthew Culloton, with the composer at the piano. Be sure to listen for the continual ebb and flow in Lauridsen’s piano accompaniment as he employs rubato to give expressive shape to the melodic line. This reflects his indebtedness to great American Broadway composers such as Jerome Kern and Richard Rogers, a link Lauridsen emphasizes in his video about this piece.
Starmade Shadows
Like memorable tunes from Broadway musicals, Lauridsen’s lyrical setting mixes weeping with wonder, loneliness with acceptance, longing with consolation. The text calls for such colors (I’ve inserted numbers to indicate sections in Lauridsen’s setting):
(1) Sure on this shining night
Of starmade shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.
(2) The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
(3) Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far alone
Of shadows on the stars.
Photo by Martin Mertenat on Unsplash
This text comes from the middle of a longer three-part poem by James Agee titled “Description of Elysium” and published in his Permit Me Voyage (Yale University Press, 1934), pp. 13-15. The poem’s first part describes Elysium, the timeless and blessed springtime realm of the dearly departed where “Whole health resides with peace.” The third part, by contrast, paints an apocalyptic and wintry picture of unending death “Rattling merely on the air / Of hornleaved holly.”
Suspended between ethereal Elysium and earthbound dying, the lines to “Sure on This Shining Night” hover between hope and despair. In a post on his Modalities blog, Albert Blackwell describes them as lying “between inaccessible innocence and goodness on the one hand, and quaking fear of self-destruction on the other. So, too, Agee finds himself, and the human race.”
There’s an ebb and flow, like Lauridsen’s rubato, to this song within a longer poem. Looking up on a brilliant springtime “shining night,” we see “starmade shadows,” even while we trust that kindness keeps watch. Looking around in “high summer” as autumn approaches, we feel “all is healed.” And yet. In solitary wandering, between promised life and unending death, we “weep for wonder”: there are shadows on the stars.
Composition
Agee’s text is compressed and enigmatic. A good way to make sense of it is to sing or listen to Lauridsen’s choral setting. The entire piece is in D-flat major, a key with five flats that composers often use to create lush and expressive music. In choral music, for example, think of the “Nunc Dimittis” from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, Op. 37 and Gabriel Fauré’s “Cantique de Jean Racine”; in popular music, Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” and U2’s performance of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”; in the piano repertoire, Chopin’s Nocturne in D-Flat, Op. 27 and Debussy’s famous “Clair de lune”; in the symphonic literature, the second (“Going home”) movement of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony No. 9 and the Adagio movement that ends Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Staying in D-flat major throughout the piece, Lauridsen continually shifts meters, tempos, and dynamics and varies the number of voice parts and melodic lines to tell an evocative story.
First a gently rocking piano introduction opens section 1. Then all the men sing a contemplative and flowing melody that securely begins and ends on D-flat. The melody spans an octave and a half, yet it sits comfortably in both tenor and bass vocal ranges, creating a relaxed sound across unexpected jumps. When this melody ends (minute 0:42—0:55 in the recording I’ve linked), we sense both yearning and peace: a high D-flat floats on “shin-ing” for an entire measure, a brief pause follows, and then, an octave lower, we hear a restful “night.” Next all the women take up the same melody, singing above two distinct countermelodies interwoven in the tenor and bass lines.
Now comes a three-bar piano interlude (minute 1:30) introducing the new melody of section 2, the second stanza in Agee’s poem (from “The late year lies” through “Hearts all whole”). Whereas the melody in section 1 began and ended on a lower D-flat, this new melody centers on D-flat an octave higher. Its upward brightness prevails when all voices, in full six-part harmony, triumphantly recapitulate the phrase “Sure on this shining night” (at 2:18). They sing it emphatically three times, with the sopranos reaching a high A-flat the third time. Coming right after the words “Hearts all whole,” this recapitulation provides the piece’s climax.
Photo by Jaanus Jagomägi on Unsplash
Quickly, however, it subsides into a brief third section (at 2:44) where a simple two-phrase soprano melody sounds interior and withdrawn, lonely in its wandering and weeping. Then comes a beautifully hushed coda, again to the words “Sure on this shining night.” The basses quietly sing the men’s original melody from section 1 while other voices pass melodic fragments around. All finally land on a quarter-note rest and then sustain a simple D-flat chord on “night,” slightly unsettled by tenors who wander around the third of the chord. Now the choir sings one last “Sure on this shining,” in their only unaccompanied passage (at 4:28); their rich harmonic texture then peacefully resolves to a unison D-flat “night,” as the piano repeats two measures from its initial introduction and fades away.
Resonance
If you want to understand Agee’s poem, attend to the nuances of Lauridsen’s setting. It might sound simple—that’s part of its attraction—but it is in fact wonderfully layered, and it rewards repeated performance and listening. We have here a richly soulful song about the world in between, the world where all of us live, a world of shining nights and starmade shadows, of withering winter and healing summer, of weeping and wonder, a world where together we often wander far alone.
Attend also to the resonances this music stirs up in your own experience. For me, “Sure on This Shining Night” indelibly links to the life and loss of our second dog, a beautiful Golden Retriever named Hannah Estelle. I write about this in my memoir To Sing Once More; its final chapter, called “Spirit Traces” (pp. 61-62), interweaves references to Lauridsen’s song. In fact, originally I planned to title the entire memoir “Sure on This Shining Night.”
Hannah Estelle overlooking icy Lake Michigan in early March 2015
During the four months between our learning, in high summer 2018, that Hannah had serious bone cancer and her leaving us by euthanasia on the Winter Solstice, this choral gem offered comfort and compassion. In the months that followed, as I walked alone, it helped me embrace Hannah’s continued presence in my life, her spirit traces.
Remembrance
When the Chamber Choir of Grand Rapids began rehearsing this piece last month, I gave Kara Stevens, our conductor, a copy of my memoir. I knew she’d take an interest in how the last chapter cites “Sure on This Shining Night.” Recently, Kara told me that Louisa, her eight-year-old daughter, had asked her mom what she was reading. Kara explained it was a book by a choir member about his dog who had died. Then Louisa asked, “Was the dog a he or a she?” A she, Kara replied. That satisfied Louisa, and away she went.
“Hannah healed.” Colored drawing by Louisa Stevens, February 2024
But a little later Louisa returned with a fuller response. She had created a colorful picture of Hannah healed. Hannah’s food and water bowls are full. She has a halo and angel wings. And, if you look really closely, there’s a hint of happiness on her face. In the words of our song, “All is healed, all is health.”
Anyone who has lost a loved one, whether human or otherwise, knows that the sorrow of loss never goes away. And yet. Sometimes our shadows do appear on a shining night.
