O Great Beyond was commissioned by JAM (the John Armitage Memorial) and first performed by the BBC Singers and Nicholas Cleobury on July 8th, 2016, as part of the JAM on the Marsh festival. The text is taken from The Gardener, a collection of verse by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Published one year after Tagore's Nobel Prize-winning collection of spiritual poems, Gitanjali (1912), The Gardener contains poems that were written much earlier in his career. Tagore retrospectively described this collection as the "lyrics of love and life." The musical narrative of O Great Beyond is meant to mirror the stages of love portrayed in The Gardener, culminating in the desire for a "Beautiful End" in the final movement.-Thomas LaVoyÊ