This is a setting of the Magnificat, the poem found in the first chapter of St Luke’s gospel, where it stands as Mary’s response to the news that she is to bear a son — Jesus — and that her barren kinswoman Elizabeth bears a child (John the Baptist).

When I made the Advent retreat during which my Osterley Suite I was sketched, I had with me some musical fragments of what was eventually developed into this Magnificat. That was to prove quite a difficult retreat, but it seemed right to return to this territory nine months later when I was approached to write something for the Loki Ensemble's concert in the 1999 Kingston Early Music Festival.

The piece itself takes the form of a paced journey through the text, esting some time with each line before moving on. There are many cross-connections between the different ideas in the text, and some of these have echoes in the various cross-quotations between different sections.

Although Luke's gospel places the Magnificat before the birth of Jesus, the text itself has echoes of Hannah's response to becoming pregnant with Samuel, and it seems easier to see it not as the spontaneous comments of a pregnant teenager, but as as the mature reflections of Jesus’ mother, who had “treasured up all these things in her heart”; and looks back over the turbulent and often painful years of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension, and the birth of the community which bears his name. The serenity which is in the Magnificat is the serenity of one who has been through great darkness. To feel its serenity and brightness one has also to feel that darkness — both Mary’s and one’s own.