On Sunday afternoon, as the Blue Angels were cross-stitching the sky above Lake Washington then hurtling off to turn and regroup, they passed a few times over a church named St. Joseph on Capitol Hill, inside which the choral group The Esoterics were rehearsing for a two o’clock concert. As timing had it, the air show would finish up just as the group launched–in front of about 60 listeners–into Thomas Jennefelt‘s “Music for a big church; for tranquility” (“Musik till en stor kyrka; att vila till” in Swedish).

You might suppose this was a study in contrasts, but it’s also a lesson in unexpected correspondences. The Esoterics, led by Eric Banks, are an adventuresome group; their last concert visited ancient Persia and this time it was contemporary Sweden. Jennefelt the composer was born in 1954. And the descriptive vocabulary of flight–the leaping, soaring, and mid-air acrobatics–is shared in part with singing. Voices ascend and descend, with as great a requirement for accuracy and coordination.

As it turned out, Jennefelt also likes, occasionally, to counterpose against a sweet vocalic burbling a soprano pitched to just under and off a shriek, not that different from how the FA-18 Hornets on their solo runs play off the formation.

St. Joseph is a big church, right enough. The stone bats sound back and forth interminably, perfectly suited for “Music for a big church,” which erupts like a fountain of fast-paced, rhythmic vocables. In time, the church filled with the sound, like water flowing into a pool, and wavelets and reflections appeared.

For the seven-part Villarosa sequences, Jennefelt created a language that is a choral cousin to Sigur Rós’ Hopelandic, something that looks on the page like an online translator seized and began drawing from Latin, Italian, and Swedish.

Jennefelt says, “Certain words can still suddenly become meaningful, more from a musical, not from a semantic perspective. I want to find a musical way forward through the text. Despite this yearning my pieces, oddly enough, get more and more theatrical. Words, it seems, always breed drama.”

The first sequence, “Aleidi floriasti,” begins: “Lao Ah Lao tidi Veni / Alora quam vidi fallavi rosa.” The second sequence is titled “Saoveri indamflavi.” In practice, Jennefelt is correct, you don’t hear sentences, just collections of words that seem to evoke sense without actually making it. The pulsing, iterative rhythms of minimalism ebb and rise throughout the sequences, and you begin to hear that as an environment within which the chorus sings, at times sweetly, meditatively, or in thundering outburst–though it’s all chorus, you have to remind yourself. Moods change within sequences like quicksilver.

In my mind’s eye, I pictured a slightly more austere church than St. Joseph, contrasting with this melting-and-renewing effusion of vocal color, invisible brambling roses of the ear, pace Rilke. In fact, The Esoterics were so dressed as to support the impression of music visible, smears of color under the light falling in. By 3:30 p.m. it was all over, but the dully overcast, still, humid day had undergone an almost molecular shift, and the light on the way back home seemed to shine down Swedish alleys.