Graduate Student’s Original Composition Debuts in Duke Chapel Service

This past Sunday during the Duke Chapel weekly worship service when the choir rose to sing the anthem after the sermon, the composer of the song was in their midst. A tenor in the choir and a music composition graduate student at Duke, Chris Williams wrote the piece, “Endless Radiance.” Watch the Duke Chapel Choir sing the anthem:

“I don’t think I have ever sung in a performance of a piece that I wrote,” Williams said after the service on February 12. “It was amazing; it sounded like nothing else.”

Originally from Australia and a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Williams has composed music in a variety of genres. He wrote “Endless Radiance” at the invitation of Duke Chapel Music Director Zebulon Highben.

“Duke Chapel has a long history of highlighting the creative work of our Duke community,” said Highben, who conducts the Chapel Choir and is also an associate professor of the practice of church music at Duke Divinity School. “When I learned that Chris had interest and experience in writing for voices, it seemed like a great opportunity to feature him and his compositional voice."

"It’s a gorgeous piece on a potent text," Highben said. "The choir has been excited to prepare it.”

As Williams was composing the anthem, he said his experience as a Chapel Choir member helped him.

“It was a piece where I knew the ensemble so well, so I knew what I wanted to do with each of the parts,” Williams said. “More importantly, I know this space really well, and so I could imagine this piece from the start sounding in this incredible acoustic.”

“There are a few moments where I have the whole choir dissolve and just have these single lines [of melody],” he said. “It’s really simple, but I know in this space all you need is a single line for it to start resonating.”

The anthem takes its lyrics from a prayer by the thirteenth-century Persian mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī. It reads:

O Love, O pure deep Love, be here, be now,
Be all—worlds dissolve into your
stainless endless radiance,
Frail living leaves burn with you brighter
than cold stars—
Make me your servant, your breath, your core.

“This sense of timelessness and richness of all the words and ideas, I responded to,” Williams said about the prayer. “There is a concision to the text, which means you can play with it musically.”