Will Dawes on Divine Light and the Indian choral tradition

Among the crowded field of collegiate choirs, that of Somerville College, Oxford, stands out particularly for the special circumstances and building in which it sings - the non-denominational chapel, constructed with the specific intent to accommodate faith traditions ranging far beyond the traditional Anglican liturgy, naturally affords an opportunity for the choir itself to likewise look to wide-ranging influences for its musical diet. 

Their 2022 Christmas album 'Dawn of Grace' offered some hints of this, particularly in the work Star of Rohini that played on the links between the birth-stories of Jesus and Krishna, both heralded by annunciatory stars. 2025's 'Divine Light' takes the idea much further, with an entire album of pieces by Indian composers or reflecting Indian styles of music, religious traditions, and texts. 

Conductor Will Dawes explains more about this unique collection of music, and how it reflects Somerville's deep and long-standing connection to India.

Somerville is pretty unique among Oxbridge college chapels in that it is non-denominational - what does a normal week look like for the choir, in the absence of the (otherwise almost ubiquitous) tradition of evensongs from the Book of Common Prayer?

Yes, unlike almost every Oxbridge College Choir, we don’t participate in regular religious services. Instead, we offer Choral Contemplation each Sunday evening in term. The structure is very similar to Evensong – instrumental music before and after, and then thematically chosen words and music, sometimes accompanied by one person offering their views on something. It’s an event open to all, whether you’re a member of college or not. We have a midweek rehearsal when we look at music for Contemplations over the term as well as the music which we’ll sing at recitals elsewhere in Oxford, college functions, recordings, tours etc.

Are these works that you have already been weaving into services and liturgy at Somerville, or was there quite a lot of new material for your singers to ingest in preparing this album?

One of the many advantages of Contemplation over Evensong is that we can perform secular works on a regular basis. We managed to perform a lot of the repertoire on the album over the preceding terms, including one piece from the Six Seasons by Vanraj Bhatia each week to slowly get our mouths used to the Hindi text, but inevitably, there were some works that we hadn’t performed in public before recording. We were lucky to have several speakers of Hindi in the choir, and it was getting used to this wonderfully colourful language that was one of the main challenges. It was quite odd to be constantly asking the choir to have a lower soft palate as a default! 

The college’s connection with India goes back a long way and is still evolving and deepening - how much of a part did that play in the genesis of this recording?

Absolutely. We have such strong links with India and are very proud of that. Since the College’s founding in 1879, we have welcomed a number of Indian scholars as students. This includes Cornelia Sorabji, India’s first female High Court advocate, Catherine Duleep Singh, daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Confederacy (Sarkar-I-Khalsa) who went on to help Jewish families escape the Nazis, and Indira Gandhi, the first and only female prime minister of India.

In 2013, we opened the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, which today is the largest scholarship-awarding body for Indian students in the UK, comprising over 50 scholars alongside pioneering programmes such as the Savitribai Phule Scholarship, the UK’s first scholarship programme for first-generation Indian students and students from Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi backgrounds.

The College Choir was the first Oxford College choir to visit India in 2018, and revisited in 2023 to mark the 5th and 10th anniversaries of the OICSD. I’ve always wanted to have a strong college stamp for our recordings, and after our album of Christmas music only by women composers, this felt like the right next step.

There’s a lot of Tagore poetry set by the various composers featured here - what is it about his writing that you think draws so many people to put it to music?

For the album, I didn’t just want to focus on composers who are either Indian or who have Indian heritage, but also to devote a good amount of the track list to some of the great texts which emanate from that great country. Rather than spreading things wide, Tagore stood out as one of the best options. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel prize for Literature, he has a very distinct cultural and intellectual identity, and he visited Oxford on several occasions on his European tours. So much of his work is set to music – I had a lot of music to choose from! His writings are so vivid, full of character, colour, and beauty. I can imagine that composers love him for that, especially as the themes of reform, social values, interconnectivity are still absolutely relevant today.

Rajasekar’s Light Eternal sees the choir join forces with an Indian instrumental ensemble - how readily do the tuning systems and general soundworlds of the Western and South Indian musical traditions work together?

Whilst planning the album, I considered a great number of pieces which fuse together a non-Western instrumental ensemble with a choir (including works by Richard Allain, Roxanna Panufnik, etc) and each time the sound created is enchanting. Whilst each musical language has a distinct identity, the two sound-worlds fuse together quite brilliantly. Nirmala’s playing on the album is sensational and the purity of tone created from her playing of the Saraswati Veena was so easy tune to. So yes, it definitely works. 

There are those who would say that much of this music rightfully belongs to the traditions that created it, not to a predominantly white Oxford choir; what one person sees as joyfully inclusive might seem appropriative to someone else. How do you resolve paradoxes like that?

That’s a really good question and one that I’m glad you asked! Universities are somewhere where we should share ideas, and challenge prejudice. We’re approaching this music not to stamp our authority on it, but to widen our students’ horizons with an attitude of learning and humility. 

One of the early ideas for a title for the album was ‘East meets West’ as all of the music chosen had links to both India and the Western world. Much of it was written for a Western choir or was written with Western musical styles in mind, or both! 

There are three pieces that stand out in that regard: I first enjoyed singing The Six Seasons when I was a sixteen-year-old baritone in the National Youth Choir. The composer, Vanraj Bhatia, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, then at the Paris Conservatoire with Nadia Boulanger. The work is an example of intercultural choral music, and possesses elements of both Western and Indian musical languages. It’s horizontally Hindustani but vertically structured for SATB being strongly polyphonic.

Shruthi Rajasekar is the only composer who has appeared on both of our recent albums and I was singing with Ora when we premiered the piece a few years ago. The combination of Western professional choir and the Mridangam and Saraswati Veena (the latter played on both occasions by Shruthi’s mother, probably the best player on the planet) gives a wonderful fusion of styles. 

Finally, Reena Esmail’s Tuttarana is regularly sung by American collegiate choirs. The title is a combination of the Persian word Tarana and the Italian word Tutti, giving us a joyful combination of both meanings, literally an explosion of rhythmic syllables for all to sing. I really hope it’s taken up by choirs in the UK much more soon.

As the ‘faith landscape’ of the UK evolves and becomes more fluid, do you anticipate the works on this album being taken up by other choirs in a sacred or spiritual context, not just as concert works?

I do hope so! This is wonderful music, and with a progressive outlook, there are surely plenty of opportunities to listen to music like this and have a spiritual experience.