Eric Whitacre claims that his choral composition This marriage is a "small and simple gift to my wife on the occasion of our seventh wedding anniversary." Yet musicians often deprecate such personal offerings. Richard Wagner gave a tiny little orchestral concert on the steps of his villa, conducting the Siegfried Idyll literally on their staircase for his wife on their anniversary. Whitacre composed for voices (as with most of his works), but selected a text from the 13th century Persian poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Rumi's work had profoundly been involved in the Renaissance of Persian literature (his father was a famous Persian scholar), but has also been translated into numerous foreign languages; despite his "exotic" roots, he was declared the most popular poet in America in 2007. This poem on marriage, as translated into English, asks for the marriage in question to offer to the world a number of blessed tastes, from sweet milk to date palms and halvah. In the poem, each sweet signals a different physical blessing of the marriage.

Whitacre's music for the song departs somewhat from his common harmonic practice of creating rich and luscious tone clusters, though the fundamental oscillation between tonic and subdominant chords remains. Nearly every chord he writes for This marriage is a completely consonant major or minor sonority, only tinged for brief moments by voices that sing a quick neighbor note or escape. Yet the progressions are not traditionally tonal—they proceed rather in chains of thirds, in modal echoes, and subtly nontraditional parallel motions. The effect is ruminative, reminiscent of choral chant, and still beyond what our ears expect to hear; the music has nearly ideal purity of harmonic tone, but a vaguely distant, archaic, and exotic sound. Rumi's text images are clearly present: sweet milk, wine, and halvah sing forth and the "fruit" like a date palm arrives on a suddenly lush flatward progression. The marriage should be "full of laughter," and the voices leap up to a higher parallel chord. For the final lines of Rumi's poem, Whitacre takes a predictable but strangely moving approach. The poet said, "I am out of words to describe how spirit mingles in this marriage," and the choir, after admitting speechlessness, drifts into a wordless vocalization that echoes some of the third-based and modal parallel chords the composer had earlier used to evoke the mystical fruits that true marriage of souls brings forth.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi