Eric Whitacre

The “thin place” is a Celtic Christian concept but most of us know the feeling. It’s a place on Earth that feels spookily close to (let’s call it) Heaven. We typically feel it in places of worship: the cathedral, the mosque, the wat, the temple, Stonehenge, Uluru, the Grand Canyon, the local graveyard … but it can take us by surprise too.

American poet Charles Anthony Silvestri (Tony to his friends) adds hospital rooms to the list. “They’re numinous places,” he says. “Places strong in the Force, as Yoda would say.” After he lost his wife, Julie, to cancer in 2005, he began to dwell on a more permanent, ever-present thin place, an invisible veil through which we can almost touch the other side.

His friend Eric Whitacre, the renowned American choral composer, found this thin place on his piano. Middle C. Just a couple of notes south of dead centre on the keyboard. “Can you hear that?” he asks, as he plays a soft, strangely transporting four-note phrase straddling either side. “Tony was talking about these holy places and that connected with me deeply,” he says of their latest collaboration, a choral work of 12 movements called The Sacred Veil.