It is a telling paradox that Benjamin Britten's music is at once so difficult even for experts to technically analyze and so easy for the untrained but intent listener to grasp on a more intuitive level. In an era of music history shaped by revolutions in compositional procedures (serialism, indeterminacy, early minimalism), Britten demonstrated the lingering potency of music driven at each step by expressive nuance rather than process. While Britten's famous operas, like Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, demonstrate this quality on levels both broad and small in the context of narrative, Britten's lesser-known choral works apply this acute sense of mood in a more concise, iconic fashion—crystallizing and refracting the emotional particularity of a text through music. This ability lends itself well to sacred music especially, and, as demonstrated by the short choral work from 1963, A Hymn of St. Columba, Britten's church music conveys a powerful emotional and devotional focus. Of course, apocalyptic tone conveyed by the text of this piece lends itself to a kind of anxiously awestruck piety well suited to Britten's harmonic language. The Latin text, attributed to the sixth century saint of the work's title, describes the horrors and torments to be suffered by the wicked on judgment day. The angst of awaiting judgment and anticipating deliverance is conveyed in large part by the curious rumbling in the organ pedals, an odd semitone ostinato that casts a long shadow over the rest of the musical texture. At the same time, St. Columba's invocation to the "Regis regum rectissimi" serves as at the beginning of the first stanza and the end of both subsequent verses. These words are set to a bold but serene rising line—the kind of pictorialism in which Britten occasionally but convincingly indulged. While the first verse features the full choral texture above the pedal ostinato, the tumult of the second verse is contrasted by the thinner sonorities. The pedal ostinato eerily returns, but as a transient figure that mysteriously wanders through the upper register of the organ before assuming its position at the bottom of the ensemble for the piece's forceful conclusion.

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