"My Days," Homage to Elizabethan Music at St. Thomas Church "My Days" is the title of a program of mostly Renaissance works for voices and viols that was presented Tuesday at St. Thomas by that church's Choir of Men and Boys and the wonderful English viol consort Fretwork. It's also the title of an arresting new work by Nico Muhly, a touching declaration of fraternity with the great Elizabethan composers that had its United States premiere that evening. Mr. Muhly's affinity for English Renaissance music was born during the hours he spent as a child chorister studying and performing this material. So it was with a sense of visceral familiarity that he decided to use a commission from Wigmore Hall in London to write a homage to Orlando Gibbons that would draw on the stylistically ambidextrous talents of Fretwork and the all-male Hilliard Ensemble. For the American premiere, that vocal ensemble was replaced by a finely balanced quartet from St. Thomas made up of the alto Geoffrey Williams, the tenors Martin Coyle and Lawrence Jones, and the bass Craig Phillips. In "My Days," Mr. Muhly sets a contemporary account of Gibbons's death in 1625, embedding it in Psalm 39, which includes the words "Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long." To hear it performed right after Gibbons's own setting of that psalm offered the same forensic pleasure one might experience poring over photographs of family members separated by generations, retracing physiognomic similarities while noting the changes of fashion. Both composers play with the friction created by close harmonies and tangled instrumental lines, but in "My Days," the dissonances are more stringent and more frequent, and Mr. Muhly draws a wider spectrum of colors from the viols. The program also included songs for solo lute and for solo treble and lute by John Dowland that sounded as lovely as they were fragile, skirting the border of audibility inside the vast church. In choral works by John Sheppard, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, the choir proved itself to be one of the city's finest. Its sound, molded by John Scott, a conductor trained at St. John's College, Cambridge, was smooth and evenly blended - except in Gibbons's "Cries of London," where a warren of street hawkers" voices was rendered with speechlike zest.