Rarely does William Walton wax as philosophical and transcendental as in his work for a cappella chorus, Where Does the Uttered Music Go? The piece, which sets a specially-conceived text by John Masefield, was composed in 1946 for the unveiling of a window at London's St. Sepulchre's Church installed as a memorial to Sir Henry Wood (the beloved British conductor who inaugurated the famous BBC Proms concerts from Royal Albert Hall). Though lasting less than six minutes in performance, the piece nonetheless assumes a monumental quality, Walton's rich and mysterious harmonies swelling and contracting with dramatic effect.

Masefield's poem, which meditates upon music itself and its power to transfix and transform its listeners, provides Walton with ample poetic inspiration. Perhaps in this work as much as in any other piece in his oeuvre, Walton demonstrates his ability to exploit not just a wide variety of colors, but of textures and shades as well: his pensive unisons are balanced carefully with expansively rich chords and polyphonies—at one point dividing the choral ensemble into as many as 16 separate lines. In setting the opening stanza, the ensemble quickly separates into various divergent lines, which finally reach homophonic consensus when in Masefield's poem music causes "separate spirits [to] understand." Likewise, when "The Man of Music touche[s] our minds with rapture," Walton's chorus erupts into a rich and complex polyphony of melismas to "utter everlasting thanks." This finds contrast at the end of the subsequent stanza, whose "emptiness" and "solitude" are rendered with stark unisons. Such variegated textures appear vertically as well—as in the crystalline ending, where all voices fade out save a high, fragile, sustained note in the sopranos.

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