In a way, Herbert Howells enjoyed three separate careers as a musical composer. He was touted before the First World War as a rising star in a variety of media, fell out of prominence (and compositional energy) in the 1920s but later returned to English fashion especially in church music, and established a wide popularity in America in the 1960s. Much of this American stature arose due to his requiem on the death of John F. Kennedy, Take him, earth, for cherishing. Starting very soon after this 1964 tribute to the assassinated president, three major American churches commissioned liturgical music from Howells: St. Paul's Chapel at Columbia University, St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Dallas, and the National Cathedral in Washington, which commissioned the last music Howells composed in his long life. M. Searle Wright (1982-2004), an American organist with impeccable credentials (student of T. Tertius Noble, president of the American Guild of Organists) was serving as director of music at Columbia University's St. Paul's Chapel in 1966 when he asked Howells to compose a piece of English liturgical music for his church. (It must be noted as strange—or delightfully generous—that a composer of Howells' stature took the commission for basically whatever money the church could find to pay him.)

Overall, though the musical style follows much of Howells' characteristic mildly dissonant idiom, the mood is quite extroverted. The Te Deum opens over a fundamental pedal point, with two long-breathed contrapuntal lines above it. Higher parallel angelic choirs proclaim the seraphic hymn "Holy, holy, holy," and lead briefly into major-mode tones. The Trinitarian doxology that follows in the text features chromatically tinged but chant-like unisons. The second movement, as it were, sings a hymn of praise to Christ and includes a number of text-driven contrasts: the right hand of God, the (musically sparse) humility of the Incarnation in the Virgin's womb, a surprising harmonic shift on the "opening of heaven to all believers," and a contrapuntal upward spiral of the believers to the saints (Michelangelo's very image). The final petitions serve musically for Howells as a third movement, led by soli and homophonic chant-like prayers. A more torturous cry for freedom from sin, a series of intertwined melodies crying both praise and mercy, gradually resolve to the assertion, "O God, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded," and it is only on the very final chord that the harmony settles.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi