Welcome to the Boosey & Hawkes Choral Explorer page. Here you can find out about our latest choral releases and listen to audio clips.

Please contact [email protected] to request more information about any of our choral music or to sign up to our choral e-newletter.

Karl Jenkins’s most recent large-scale work for soprano, baritone, choir and orchestra, One World, will be recorded and released by Decca Records on 3 June 2023. The work examines how the babel of languages has often caused cultural divisions, and how we need to seek unity through a new creation, peaceful and egalitarian, respecting ecological issues and universal human rights. The album will pull together long-term collaborators and friends of Jenkins, including the Stay At Home Choir, which is dedicating its latest virtual singing project to rehearsing and recording two movements on the album during September. They invite singers of all abilities worldwide to get involved. On the day of the album’s release, One World will receive its concert premiere in Hannover by the World Choir for Peace under the composer’s direction.
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In the coming months, audiences can also look forward to a new short work for chorus and orchestra, This Faithful Life. Setting texts by Grahame Davies, the piece celebrates HM the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. It is premiered in the opening concert of this year’s Swansea Festival (29 Oct).

Boosey & Hawkes is pleased to present new recordings of the latest additions to our Contemporary Choral Series. New Choral Music: Christmas 2 is now available on all major streaming platforms and highlights the best of our recent Christmas choral catalogue.

Featured in our Christmas 2 album is Grace-Evangeline Mason’s A Winter Carol, which was initially written for the readers of BBC Music Magazine. The three-verse carol is suitable for any developing or intermediate choir with lighter, fast-moving passages and call-and-response patterns between the upper and lower voices.

> Watch and listen to our score video for A Winter Carol

The album also features Rhiannon Randle’s Rejoice!. The composer said of her new carol: “From the jubilant Bachian counterpoint in bars 103-113, the anthemic atmosphere of congregational carols in the refrain, to the chiming chords at bar 61 (Meno mosso) reminiscent of Christmas Day bells - Rejoice! has all the flavours of beloved, traditional Christmas carols, served with a fresh excitement.”

> Watch and listen to our score video for Rejoice!

New Choral Music: Volume 2 (featuring non-Christmas music) is soon to be available, and features works by Becky McGlade, Kim André Arnesen, Karl Jenkins and Kerensa Briggs. Arnesen's Till death us do part for SATB choir and piano is highly emotive, setting a Charles Anthony Silvestri text about wedding vows and fulfilling these sooner than expected. Briggs’s Ave Regina caelorum is a reflective setting of one of the Marian antiphons (‘Hail, Queen of Heaven’). A continuous, largely homophonic choral texture underpins the work, with rich harmonies and gentle dissonance.

Our latest contemporary choral publications are all available from The Shop at Boosey.com as print editions and Digital Downloads.

British composer Ben Ponniah, a recent addition to our Contemporary Choral Series, combines his love of jazz harmony, minimalism and film music to yield fresh and engaging choral music. His music has been performed in cathedrals and chapels around the world, as well as being broadcast on radio, including by the BBC Singers on BBC Radio 3. It also features on a number of CDs including Celestial Dawn (Signum Classics) by The Pembroke College Girls’ Choir and Marvellous Light (Regent Records) by The Choir of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has been described by BBC Music Magazine as "a name to watch" and by Choir & Organ as “a fresh talent on the choral scene”.

Ponniah's work for a cappella SATB Choir, O Magnum Mysterium, is now available for upcoming Christmas programming. The work uses pitches derived from Scriabin’s ‘Mystic Chord’ to reflect the mystery surrounding the miraculous birth of Jesus.

> Watch and listen to our O Magnum Mysterium score video

Seeing the Star, Ponniah’s work for SSATB a cappella choir, is a thank you to St Mary-le-Tower Church, where the composer sang as a young chorister. In the piece, the wonderment of the Wise Men is captured, as they look up at the star on their journey to the baby Jesus. The soprano part (which includes some divisi) is initially characterised by widening intervals, to reflect the upward gaze of the Wise Men. Ponniah said: “In Seeing the Star, I explore using tone clusters to add further brightness, warmth and colour to my harmonic language – I am particularly pleased with the shimmering starlight effect in this composition”.

Discover Ponniah works