In 1999 I was commissioned by Northern Arizona University to write a set of choral works commemorating the 100th anniversary of their school of music. I chose three of my favorite E.E. Cummings texts and started writing.

Writing a commissioned work can be tough, especially if it is for a big, glorious occasion, and my first reaction is almost always leaning towards grandeur. I mean, for God’s sake, the school has been around for a hundred years, the least I can do is write something that will really bring the house down. This is exactly the mentality I was trying to force upon this set, and exactly the kind of thing that tends to get me all tangled up.

I will wade out is the first in the set of Three Songs of Faith, and was a joy to set to music. The text is so passionate, so sensual; I found it to be the perfect opening to a cycle of pieces about my own personal faith.

In hope, faith, life, love the original poem is actually quite long, with sounds of clashing and flying and singing, and calls for music that is vibrant and virtuosic, a real show piece. The more I thought about faith, however, the more introspective I became, and I modified the poem entirely to fit that feeling. I took only the first four words (hope, faith, life, love) and the last four (dream, joy, truth, soul) and set each of them as a repeating meditation. Each of the words, in turn, quotes a different choral work from my catalog, and its corresponding musical material comments on the word I set (i.e. the word “life” quotes the musical material from Cloudburst, where the text is “roots, trunk, branches, birds, stars”). Because I wrote it last, the middle movement even quotes the first and the last piece in this set on the word “soul.”

When I originally premiered i thank You God for most this amazing day with Northern Arizona University back in 1999, I made a lot of changes during the few days I had with the choir before they first performed it. One section I didn’t change, and that I loved, was the text “now the ears of my ears awake, now the eyes of my eyes are opened.” For that first performance in 1999 it was just a simple chant-like round, and I felt that it elegantly set up the next section, a cluster-y meditation on the word “opened.” Then, literally the night before I sent back the final proofs for publication, I freaked. I thank you God was the third in a set of three pieces, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could tie the whole set together by quoting the beginning of the first piece, i will wade out, at the end of i thank You God. So I quickly rewrote the “now the ears of my ears” section, echoing the first leaps in i will wade out, and sent it off to the publisher. I can remember feeling actual pride – a very ‘scholarly’ pride – for so brilliantly and effortlessly manipulating motivic material.

The piece was published, and a year later I heard the new version actually performed. I was horrified. Page 12 was ridiculously difficult, and I could see the otherwise excellent choir sweating just to make it sound natural. Much worse, though, was this: it completely masked the meaning of the words. The text just became lost in the ‘clever’ writing, and the most important sentence in the poem just vanished in a fog of academic writing and… pride.

I conducted that version for years, trying every way I could think of to make it work. It never did, not even once. So when it was going to be recorded by the British ensemble Polyphony, I sent them the original version of i thank You God. That’s the one they recorded, and that’s the one I’ll do from now until the end of time. It’s so much more simple, and humble, and to my ears, the meaning of the text now explodes off the page. It was a great lesson for me, and I think of those measures every time I start to ‘overthink’ while I’m writing.

-Eric Whitacre

Don't miss Pacific Chorale's performance of Three Songs of Faith on Saturday, March 21, 2026 in Newport Beach.