The BBC Singers presented a special concert of new sacred music at Canterbury Cathedral in 2000; the theme was the seven sacraments of the Christian Church. Most Christian denominations worldwide acknowledge at least two central sacraments—Holy Communion and Baptism—as sacred acts of worship in which an outward rite represents the manifestation of a deep spiritual change in human lives. Catholic Christians and other closely related denominations number the sacraments at seven, encompassing the gamut of a Christian life: Baptism, Confirmation, Confession, Communion, Marriage, Ordination of clergy, and Extreme Unction (at death). For this particular celebratory concert, Rutter was "assigned" the sacrament of Marriage, and he chose a complementary pair of texts. The men's voices sing three sets of Latin responses from the Catholic service of marriage. The texts, which occur after the exchanging of rings, ask for God's formational presence in the lives of the couple, for His help and salvation to each, and His protection "as a tower of strength" to them. The women's voices punctuate these Latin entreaties with verses from a passionately intimate poem by little-known Jacobean poet Francis Quarles. Their verses walk the thin line first explored by the Medieval Church in the Song of Solomon between erotic coupling and the spiritual connection between Christ and His church; every verse takes a new image to link the bride and groom as more completely embedded in one another.

The dichotomy of texts finds its proper setting in each sections' music. The men's voices throughout mimic Gregorian chant: they sing their Latin text in almost unmetered rhythms, most melodies beginning with incipits involving an upwards melodic third stepwise (as if a chant incipit), though the overall melodic mode is decidedly chromatic. In their very first verse they merge into a "Kyrie eleison" similarly somewhat nontraditional in its harmonies. The male voices nonetheless serve as a harmonic foundation as the women begin their first verse of the texts of mystical and erotic union; their music seems to bridge the gap between quasi-organum and more modern melodic shapes. Similarly, in the second verses each section fills the same role: men echoing the Church's heritage of chant and women building a lyric structure upon them. Only for one moment in the third verse do the women's voices shift the texture: they experience a suddenly naked counterpoint while singing a metaphor of sturdy elm and entwining vine; after this almost erotic vision the regular and closeted musical roles return, down to a final Kyrie, and Amen.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi