If the scheduling gods smiled on us, the weather gods spat in our faces: after a mild start to the week, NYC saw sustained temps in the upper 90s and unrelenting oppressive humidity. The air in the venue was heavy and hot. (We kept the fans running throughout the performance, recording be damned). But somehow, in retrospect, it enhanced the sense of dogged, excited commitment we all felt.

We opened with a whip crack: “Exsurge: quare obdormis, Domine”—“Get up! Why are you asleep, Lord!” The final chord, bringing those first four minutes together to a close, gave me goosebumps. We proceeded to explore what are, for me, some of the greatest pieces of choral music ever to be put down on paper. We closed with the Agnus Dei from the Mass for Four Voices—an absolutely devastatingly beautiful piece of music, one that I’ve carried around in my heart for years and revisited reverently, like a cherished poem you know by heart, that always works, but hits you differently every time you recite it.

Below, I share my brief remarks on that program, and link to some video from that special day.

In the preface to his first volume of Gradualia (1605), a sixty-five-year-old William Byrd testified:

In the words themselves (as I have learned from experience) there is such obscure and hidden power that to a person thinking about divine things, diligently and earnestly turning them over in his mind, the most appropriate musical phrases come, I know not how, and offer themselves freely to the mind that is not lazy or inert.

Our selections today hopefully illuminate many such “most appropriate musical phrases,” among the most expressive and beautiful ever to flow from Byrd’s pen.

In his thirties, Byrd and his mentor Thomas Tallis were granted a music publishing monopoly. Together they released a volume of motets in 1575, seventeen apiece, in honor of Queen Elizabeth I (who granted them the patent). Surviving snippets of documentation—prefaces of later published volumes, legal proceedings, and anecdotes—suggest that Byrd was a composer who created somewhat painstakingly, honed his compositions over many years, and offered them up for publication scrupulously. In the preface to a 1588 collection of “Sundry Songs,” Byrd alluded to forthcoming publications full of “other things of more depth and skill.” Two volumes of Cantiones Sacrae released in 1589 and 1591 delivered on that promise. In the preface to the 1589 volume, Byrd bemoans some colleagues’ and collectors’ copying out his shared motet drafts before he had truly finished them and admits to taking them “back to the lathe” before publishing his own definitive versions. And for good reason. Within the works in the 1589 and 1591 collections (and all the other volumes he likewise meticulously oversaw into publication) one struggles to find a phrase whose music is misaligned with the lyric it was designed to convey or whose impact is perfunctory.

Indeed for me, Byrd’s motets in the 1589 and 1591 Cantiones Sacrae volumes illustrate his distinctive compositional style at its most impactful. By the 1580s, the joint volume with Tallis behind him, Byrd had fully digested the harmonic idiosyncrasies and melismatic freedoms of the Pre-Reformation and mid-century Catholic motets written during the brief reign of Mary when he was a chorister, and had reconciled that decidedly English style with the suave polish of the Continental polyphonic style. In many passages, Byrd constructs his polyphony geometrically, cutting the five or six voice-part facets at equal angles, bringing each to the fore in its turn. Each line has rhetorical independence but gains depth and dimension only by virtue of arrayment in the matrix to every other. The extended motets—Tribulationes Civitatum, Ne Irascaris Domine, and Tristitias et Anxietas showcase a particular lapidary artistry. The ache and longing of these terse texts summon a ruminative approach, wherein Byrd relentlessly but not wastefully tumbles a few short words round and round again in the polyphonic texture to a clearcut polish. So perfectly honed are these passages, as mesmerizing as slowly rotating gems, that the occasional surprise moments of homophony, all opaque big-block marble, are devastating in their effect.

Res Facta sings "Ne Irascaris, Domine"

Res Facta sings "Tristitias et Anxietas"

Res Facta sings “Tribulationes Civitatum”

The decade or so during which Byrd was working on the motets in the 1589 and 1591 Cantiones volumes saw suspected so-called recusant Catholics (those refusing to attend, or recusing themselves from, Protestant worship in their parishes, Byrd among them), surveilled, fined, and imprisoned. These extended motets have non-liturgical texts rife with ardent pleas for rescue from tribulation, studded with laments for the destruction of “Jerusalem” or “holy cities,” ready-made for allegorical allusion to the plight of Catholics stranded in Protestant England. And while we can’t definitively surmise a causal relationship between Byrd’s political/religious strife and his artistic output, scholars have demonstrated persuasively links between the sentiments the motet texts express and the recurring themes of contemporary Jesuit literature widely circulated among recusant Catholics. The power of those images, especially set to Byrd’s music, would have been felt acutely. Byrd biographer Kerry McCarthy deems the Cantiones “a display of sustained earnestness that is probably unequalled in any other Renaissance motet book.” I stand in awe at the way their exceptional directness and intensity, four centuries later, still registers, still summons the struggle and heartache of contemporary communities facing exile, persecution, and destruction of their homeland.

But it’s not all desolation and nostalgic longing. The madrigalisms animating Vigilate vividly depict the necessary vigilance and paranoia of the secret Catholic communities to which Byrd belonged (and the best cock-a-doodle-doo ever set to music). Laudibus in Sanctis, a setting of Psalm 150 in elegiac Latin verse, captures the joyously clamorous music of the ancient Temple, bidding us praise “in the highest” with the full battery of bells and whistles available to Bronze Age worshippers: the “warlike trumpet,” “Pierian lyre,” “resounding timbrels,” “lofty organs,” “melodious psalteries,” cymbals. It culminates: “let everything in the world that feeds upon the air of heaven sing Hallelujah for evermore.”

The two Agnus Dei movements come from settings of the Catholic Mass Byrd published (without a title page) in the 1590s after he had retired from court and public life, intended for use by small communities of recusants, clandestinely celebrating Mass in private homes. In contrast to the extroversion and breadth of the Cantiones motets, these are works composed on a more intimate scale befitting their likely chamber-scale performance forces. The extraordinary “dona nobis pacem” from the Mass for Four Voices seems to distill a lifetime’s worth of longing into some eighty seconds of music.

Byrd published Psalmes, Sonnets, and Songs in 1611 at the tail end of a remarkably long career. He admits: “The natural inclination and love to the art of music, wherein I have spent the better part of mine age, have been so powerful in me, that even in my old years which are desirous of rest, I cannot contain myself from taking some pains therein.” In the preface, he dedicates this, his final publication, “to all true lovers of music,” describes the contents as “some solemn, some joyful, framed to the life of the words,” asks the performer to put as much care into singing them as he did in creating them, and makes a case for returning to his music again and again. “The oftener you shall hear it, the better cause of liking you shall discover.”

As biographer McCarthy points out, it’s as though Byrd, reflecting on his life’s work, had the insight, indeed, the audacity, to assert confidently, if obliquely, that he knew his works were very, very good—that, over time and over many hearings, we’d not bore but marvel at their perfect marriage of music and word.

And so the question hangs there, 400 years on: was he right? We hope your experience immersing in his works this evening, and throughout the Byrd celebration, brings a resounding, satisfied yes.

Over the years I created a multi-season garden, transporting my love for orchestration to the natural world, creating a particular balance of textures and colors, building a rhythm, managing volumes.

A garden is meant to be experienced—walked through, hands stretched—in a way that’s hard to describe. Prose falls short of the task, just as it does describing sound. Photographs (especially in my inept hands) can capture color and texture but only in two dimensions. Video can capture movement, but not the caress of warm breeze. All fail to tap into the Proustian delights of fragrance.

The garden’s swaths of color and texture can be appreciated from wide vantage points in all seasons. But I designed the garden to have a period in July that invites a different kind of attention, when its sense of abundance is most obvious, when the most idiosyncratic and brightly colored blooms make their perennial appearance. I always think about music, about bells and whistles, and about gardens, as I get up close to the blooms.

In fall of 2024, as I was watching my garden put on its autumnal glow, and we awaited a presidential election, I was preparing Haydn’s Creation with Princeton Pro Musica. My essay for that performance, shared below, brought together some musings about the Edens we imagine, inhabit, lose, and recreate.

After spending most of his adult life ensconced comfortably as head of music at the grand palace court at Esterházy, Franz Josef Haydn, at 68, began a new chapter of his career. The music-loving Prince Nikolaus died and was succeeded by his son, Anton. Haydn’s duties were greatly curtailed. Comfortably situated with a pension and the freedom to travel, he was more a free agent than he had ever been. He accepted an offer to travel to London from the savvy impresario Johann Peter Salomon. In London, Haydn not only had the opportunity to compose for large orchestras and create his most mature, developed symphonies but also to behold choral music making in its most grandiose form. By that point, some thirty years after his death, Handel had been lionized and embraced as a national treasure, his oratorios and ceremonial works performed frequently, beefed up to gargantuan proportions the likes of which Haydn had never experienced. Haydn returned to Austria and settled in Vienna, where his friend, mentor, and librettist, the Baron Von Swieten tried to entice him to try his hand at oratorio. When Haydn embarked on his second trip to London (August 1795), he was toting a libretto in English on the subject of the biblical Creation story, which Salomon had given to him. Von Swieten supplied the English-shy composer with an amended version in German. Haydn started writing in early 1796 and finished in 1798. A version of the oratorio with both English and German text was published in 1800.

Structurally, The Creation operates as many oratorios do, combining solo recitatives, solo arias, and chorus, all accompanied by orchestra, in a series of movements, divided into large sections. The story is told in the first two parts by three archangels who appear in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Raphael (bass), Uriel (tenor), and Gabriel (soprano). In the description of each day, the music tends to come first, pre-describing what the soloists will outline. As each day unfolds, they describe what’s happened and then wax poetically, with quotes from Genesis and lyrical glosses on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The chorus vociferously cheers on each step along the way with grand paeans and psalm paraphrases. In the first four days, we see the formless void of chaos take on shape and yield to order. God delineates light and darkness, sky and earth, sea and land, sun and the moon, and sets spinning the cycles and seasons underpinning the tempo of all life. Plentitudes of flora spring from the earth. The fifth and sixth days see the creation of Earth’s animals and humankind itself, in the form of Adam and Eve.

Musically, The Creation is assured and splendid. The score—instantly a success—showcases the seasoned composer, more than one hundred symphonies under his belt, at the height of his powers. It’s quintessentially Classical, reflecting the beautiful balance of form and filigree so characteristic of the architecture and formal gardens of that period, but featuring in lieu of symmetrical eaves or square planted plots with tendrils of vines, pleasingly proportioned musical phrases and a sonic brocade embroidered with quick moving melismas, trills, and turns. Music is sound, of course, but Haydn does his utmost to evoke the splendor of fields and flowers, verdant and fragrant, and the diverse delights of the creatures that swim the seas, soar through the sky, and gallop and creep across earth’s surface—a menagerie in music. Haydn, by all accounts, held a straightforward, cheerful faith (he, as Bach did, signed all his scores solo dei gloria). One wants to believe he found deep joy in the world around him, which his God created.

Conceptually, The Creation is conspicuously prelapsarian: all of its action takes place before “the fall,” before Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit. Adam and Eve begin happily, walking hand in hand unashamedly naked, tending to (not toiling in) their beautiful, bountiful garden, feasting on its fruits. Living, as we do, after the fall, it’s hard not to think about the missing, more consequential second half of the story. The sanguine, blissful account stands in sharp relief to those who currently feel neither sanguine nor blissful. After their transgression, they’re driven out of Eden. The ground is cursed to bear thorns and thistles and provide them food only through the sweat of their brow. Childbirth will be painful. And most consequentially, they will now know death, and return to the dust from which they were made. It’s right there, in the title of the Milton poem that’s a source for the oratorio’s libretto: paradise, lost. What paradises have we lost? How far, how fast, have we fallen?

The majority of The Creation comprises revelry in the splendor of the natural world. Have we lost that paradise? Though Genesis recounts the world’s creation in six days, the cosmos has unfolded on a timescale whose units of measure—eons, eras, millennia—our brains can barely comprehend. And so most read the story reconciling the six “days” with the four or five billion years the earth has been around and the hundreds of millions of years it’s been home to animals. A variety of processes, some moving glacially, tectonically, some in eruptive fits and starts (the Cambrian explosion, etc.) have shaped the planet that the modern humans writing and reading the Bible inhabit. Almost as hard to comprehend as those eons is the accelerated change seen the Anthropocene, as humankind’s attempts to find or regain earthly and economic Edens have altered the world itself.

In Genesis, God brings forth all living things to the earth. In the very next breath, he bids his newly created humans “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion . . . over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The Creation’s libretto heralds “man, the lord and king of nature all.” At the end of the story, Adam and Eve are banished from their pristine paradise and told that they and all of mankind will have a laborious relationship to the land. Famine and privation animate ancient biblical stories and today’s headlines alike. Those who can afford it emulate the perpetual fecundity of Eden. Consumers enjoy an unnatural always-in-season bounty, but at great, hidden, cost. Rainforests bulldozed into factory farms and palm oil plantations. Sub-tropical cash crops sprouting from the deserts of the southwest, gulping the remaining dribbles of diverted and dammed rivers. Our attempts to recreate our own latter-day Edens, too, are not without cost. The stately rolling hills, grand stands of trees, and perfected vistas of some of the most celebrated estates of the 18th and early 19th century necessitated the razing of small villages, felling of forests, and clearing of “wastes.” The vast wealth required for such decades-long efforts were ofttimes extracted via the enslaving of Africans in trans-Atlantic colonies. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, tracts of modern McMansions arise from lot after lot of manicured monoculture lawn. The reality of “every living thing,” too, has changed. The 2024 Living Planet Report from the World Wildlife Fund documents a devastating 73% drop on average in monitored populations of vertebrates globally since 1970.

And yet Haydn’s Creation, and its solos especially, reflect and rekindle our unshakable connection to Earth and some innate understanding of our symbiotic relationship to it. We haven’t lost the sense of wonder The Creation captures. Darwinian-era botanists’ taxonomies evoke that pesky notion of “dominion.” But the endless litanies of Latin names betray a pride of place—canadensis, cambrigeiensis, virginicum—while they enumerate the bewildering variety of plants in our world. When I stand amidst my own quarter-acre garden, I’m awestruck by shades, textures, and shapes. The plants aim merely to photosynthesize and, if they’re lucky, reproduce, but they do so with an almost lurid variety of enticements. The lacy delicacy of wild carrots’ bruise-mauve flowers. The perfect, pointy radial symmetry of dahlia petals. The sword-shaped leaves of irises guarding the coquettish curve and flop of their blossoms. Foxgloves’ towers of peach and pink bells. Lavender, its foliage starchy and scratchy, its scent powdery and soft. Refocus your eyes and you’ll see, everywhere, gluttonous bees supping on the sweetness of it all. Turn the earth, and a squirming shovelful reminds you that more than 95% of the described animal species on earth are invertebrates (they’ll outlive us all). I’m certain I’m not the only one who cherishes how much of earth’s paradise remains to us. Through the eyes of an infant newly able to waddle through it, the natural world is a paradise of novel sensory inputs. Attendance at National Parks is at an all time high. Thousands throng to New York City’s own Olmsted-designed Eden, Central Park. During the first spring of the Covid pandemic lockdown, the Burpee company reported its highest sale of seeds ever, and Instagram feeds filled with photos of newly cherished houseplants

.

The latter parts Haydn’s Creation depict the harmonious relationship of Adam and Eve, to each other, and to God. Does that original human relationship represent a certain perfection from which we have fallen away? The politics of paradise in Genesis have long played a role in the way humans cultivate their relationships among themselves and govern. In Genesis, God chastises Adam and Eve for the choice they made to eat the forbidden fruit. The very first line of Milton’s Paradise Lost sets the terms explicitly: “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe.” At issue here is God’s gift of sovereignty and free will, and the tug of war between obedience and autonomy. Princeton University’s historian of early Christianity, Elaine Pagels, wonders: “Are human beings capable of governing themselves? [In the first three centuries of Christianity] defiant Christians hounded as criminals by the Roman government emphatically answered yes. But in the fourth and fifth centuries, after the emperors themselves became patrons of Christianity, the majority of Christians came to say no.” In those first few centuries, converts and emperor-defying martyrs, and writers such as St. John Chrysostom saw in the notion of “in God’s own image” a God-given moral freedom to rule oneself and saw “imperial rule,” with its force and coercion, “[epitomizing] the social consequences of sin.” In the late fourth and early fifth century, the church father Augustine gleans from the same story human bondage to sin. Pagels paints the bigger picture: “Early Christian spokesmen, like Jews before them and the American colonists long after, had claimed to find in the biblical creation account divine sanction for declaring their independence from governments they considered corrupt and arbitrary.”

Milton himself had supported the creation of an English republic in the mid-1600s, arguing in his prose against tyranny and state-sanctioned religion, advocating for the abolition of the Church of England. In the space of little more than a decade, a king was beheaded, a Commonwealth was piloted, and a new king was coronated. After the restoration of the monarchy, he feared for his safety. At the very same time that Haydn was visiting London and composing The Creation, a group of men across the Atlantic in America were two decades deep into their daring experiment in free will and sovereignty (for some), even as Napoleon was putting an end to the French revolutionary experiment in liberté, fraternité et egalité. In the mid-19th century, as industrialization swept England and the United States and workers increasingly moved from work in nature to work in factories, a preponderance of utopian, communal living experiments came and went, and newly imagined utopian political systems took form. In upstate New York’s so-called “burned over district” preachers portended creation’s counterpart in the end of days. The United States saw recurring cycles of boom, bust, and rebirth every so many decades. At the time of writing these thoughts down (November 2024), the American presidential election is still a few days away, looming large in my thoughts. Some claim our country is failing, after the fall, and seek to make the country “great again;” others hopefully seek “a new way forward.” With any luck, by the time we gather on November 10, there will be a definitive result. But this won’t be our last election; every four years we dare to consider what paradise of self-government we could cultivate, as we take the chance to alter the political landscape.

At the very end of Paradise Lost, an angel leads Adam and Eve out of the garden. They turn around and see its gate guarded by angels and an array of flaming swords, shed a tear, and move on. In Milton’s poetry:

In either hand the hastening Angel caught

Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate

Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast

To the subjected plain; then disappeared.

They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld

Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,

Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate

With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:

They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

My father-in-law gave me The Garden Against Time, by Olivia Laing, which has been much on my mind as I’ve spent time in my garden while preparing for today’s performance of The Creation. She notes:

Milton used the model of horticultural cultivation as a way of considering good government, right relationship between different kinds of beings. Eden runs on very different principles to the autocratic rule of heaven. If God lays down laws and punishes transgressions, Adam and Eve practice a style of custodianship that is understated and benign. When they prop a rose or twist a vine into an elm, they are active collaborators in an interconnected ecology, subtly stage-managing processes that are already underway in order to maximize abundance and pleasure. That this blissful state of affairs comes to an end doesn’t drain it of its power. Despite its title, Paradise Lost is not exactly nostalgic. The garden serves as a kind of lodestar, an experience of nurture and richness that cannot be dismantled and might in future be recreated.

Who among us doesn’t have some lost paradise of our own—a sepia-toned childhood memory, a past youthful love, a cherished home now far away in time or place, a period in our lives when everything seemed to be swimming along? Perhaps the potency of paradise as a concept is its impossibility, its utility its precariousness. Perhaps we’re drawn to it because we feel so acutely in our own lives the way our most cherished practices and places—our marriages, our friendships, our gardens—must be tended. The final four lines of Milton’s poem are pregnant with possibility and remind us that life is lived in the pursuit of a paradise that reflects the best version of it we can dream of.

I’m biased, to be sure, but the longer I pursue my life’s work in music, the more fervently I have faith that what we’re doing when we partake in concerts is its own kind of paradise, its own pursuit of possibility. Like all large-scale major choral-orchestral works, Haydn’s Creation as it exists as a permanent piece of art—as a score—isn’t so much a creation as it is a blueprint for one. To bring it into being and live within it, musicians and audience must create it anew each time with their materials, sound and space. This process of re-cultivation demands cooperative labor, careful listening, compassion, and trust. Music might just offer the best template for recapturing paradise in our own time. Harmony is the antonym of discord; unison, the absence of division; synchronization, the antithesis of disintegration. Even if it lasts for just an hour or two, we can dwell together in that paradise. It is in regathering this community, and re-sounding this musical idea into a fleeting reality, that our music making reminds us that creation is always possible. As winter sets in and the results of our quadrennial election become clear, let us be reminded that our gardens can always be regrown, through our own mindful, loving, cooperative cultivation.

As the debate over “authenticity” in historical performance unfolded in the 1980s and 90s, quite a bit of heated ink was spilled in academic journals, recording reviews, and even The New York Times. Now, decades on, the debate is cooler, less febrile, less polemical. But the questions it raises reemerge each time we face music whose notational lacunae leave a gap between evidence of a composer’s “intentions” (scare quotes for old times’ sake) and our instincts.

I’ve engaged students and audiences in the debate by having them listen to performances of sounds likely familiar to them. In conducting courses and lectures about performance practice and Baroque rhetoric, I’ve played, side by side, recordings of the same piece: “And the Glory of the Lord” from Handel’s Messiah. First, we listen to a 1958 performance, with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Philadelphia Orchestra: three inexorable, lumbering beats, syllables stressed equally, and an interpretation of Handel’s Allegro indication that I’ll generously call stately. Then I cue up René Jacobs with the Freiburger Barockorchester and the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge: historical instruments with their pliant gut strings and arched bows; a dancing Allegro whose fleet, variously weighted beats make the barlines twirl by; imperceptibly overdotted eighth notes; and rhetorically minded, speechy syllables from the choir, sometimes staccato, sometimes sostenuto. It effervesces and, to my ear, trades some of the grandeur of the older recording for a sense of wonder, as glory “shall be revealed.”

Most people listening to this comparison—at least in the last twelve or so years—have preferred the second recording. So do I. But why, and what does that say about us?

In 1995, Richard Taruskin gathered many of his characteristically spiky and trenchant writings on historically informed performance into a volume titled Text and Act. His gimlet-eyed conclusion was that historically informed performance isn’t, and can’t be, authentically historical; it’s modern. The fleet tempos, the textual literalism, the insistence on clarity—these reflect the aesthetic preferences of the late twentieth century, not a recovery of those expressed in the seventeenth or eighteenth. He aired his arguments with late-20th-century HIP proclivities and skewered them on their own post-Romantic spit:

The whole trouble with Early Music as a ‘‘movement’’ is the way it has uncritically accepted the post-Romantic work-concept and imposed it anachronistically on pre-Romantic repertories. What is troubling, of course, is not the anachronism but the uncritical acceptance—and the imposition. A movement that might, in the name of history, have shown the way back to a truly creative performance practice has only furthered the stifling of creativity in the name of normative controls. Here Early Music actively colludes with the so-called “mainstream” it externally impugns.

And yet—and this is the part that is sometimes misremembered—Taruskin didn’t think the problem was permanent. He thought historically informed performance, properly self aware, could be “the least moribund aspect of our classical music life.” It was, to him, the only genuinely contemporary practice on offer. Authentic to our moment, not Handel’s or Bach’s. The word “authentic” has been abandoned almost entirely in early-music marketing—perhaps, in part, due to the downstream effects of Taruskin’s arguments. (Let’s take a moment to lament the loss of a time when James Oestreich’s publishing Taruskin in the Times Arts and Leisure section put these questions in the minds of a more far-reaching readership. I was in high school, completely oblivious, and would dive into this debate nine years later, at grad school in Cambridge).

In 1996, John Butt—scholar, conductor, keyboardist, music director of the Dunedin Consort, maker of a Gramophone Award-winning recording of Handel’s Messiah—offered a review of Text and Act in the journal Early Music. He titled it “Acting Up a Text: The Scholarship of Performance and the Performance of Scholarship.” (I will give you a moment to savor the way this balances tart and sweet, crunchy and creamy, in one perfect, bitchy title). Taruskin, it should be noted, was himself an accomplished choral conductor and viola da gamba player—a practitioner as much as a scholar. One performer-scholar, in other words, assessing another. Both of them in the room with the music as well as the sources.

Butt doesn’t disguise his admiration for what Taruskin was able to do (they were “close friends.”) And the review wasn’t a passing shot, but something enduring: It became a major part of the first chapter of his 2002 volume, Playing with History–a thorough and even-handed treatment of the whole debate. In the 1996 review, he helpfully distills Taruskin’s central argument into “a diagnosis, a judgment and an axiom.” The diagnosis: “Very little historical performance is, or can be, truly historical—much has to be invented.” The judgment: “Not that historical performance practice is intrinsically wrong, rather that it is a true and indeed ‘authentic’ representation of modernist thinking.” And the axiom: “The methods on which we base—and by which we judge—scholarship are not those on which we base artistic performance. Each may inform the other, but the one cannot be reduced to the other. . . . Performance, of any kind, should be an act and not reduced to the status of a text. Performance is significant for its human component and not for its objective veracity.”

Taruskin was right to leave us wary of the work-concept, too beholden to a text. Of course, these “debates” appearing in academic journals and occasionally in the pages of The New York Times were reflecting a wealth of work on the ground: experiments with historical equipment, the poring over treatises and tables of agréments, countless hours in the practice room. That homework has equipped modern (i.e., living) historical performers with a vast array of tools for compelling, expressive performance, allowing them to find in early music (in my estimation) something immeasurably more rhetorical and alive. Some thirty years after the publication of Text and Act, I, living in New York City, find myself working with players fully versed in HIP, performing with the fruits of decades of top-tier pedagogy, research, rehearsal, and realization. The range of rhetorical articulation available to a conductor, these days, is astonishing. There are baroque bands all around the world, each with a house style, with something specific to say.

Butt’s pithy summary of what Taruskin ultimately identified is, I think, the most honest thing anyone has said about this debate: “[His] huff and puff reduces to the simple statement that dull performers will use historical evidence dully and inspiring performers will use it inspiringly.” Perhaps the question was never really about history at all?

I should acknowledge, dear reader, the proverbial pot and kettle. I am a performer and conductor who also writes—who has spent hundreds of hours crafting program notes that concertgoers thumb through while waiting for the downbeat, and who is now, somewhat audaciously, publishing a newsletter premised on the idea that this writing deserves a wider (or at least less glancing) audience. I have just quoted Butt’s title with undisguised relish. I am, in other words, also acting up a text, also performing my scholarship. The difference—I hope—is that I know I’m doing it. And that, in the end, may be all Taruskin was ever asking of any of us.

Jacob Jahiel, writing in Early Music America in 2025, suggests, in an outstanding re-evaluation of the current state of historically-informed performance, that the authenticity “debate” now “reflects the preoccupation of previous generations.” Early music today, he argues, is concerned with something different: adapting what we know of historical practice to serve the narratives we want to tell modern audiences. I think that’s right, but I’d nudge it a step further. The most extraordinary musical moments I’ve experienced—as conductor, as singer, as listener—haven’t come from serving a narrative. They’ve come from a kind of surrender. You do the homework. You stand in front of the musicians. And then you let go and listen to what’s happening in the room.

Let me give two examples from my own practice, because I think they’re more honest than any theoretical argument.

If any work has been subjected to the proclivities of a particular period’s or place’s “performance practice,” such as it is, it’s Messiah. The choral world has engaged with Messiah every year since its premiere. Ormandy’s big-boned mid-century version recalled Romantic-era performances with hundreds of players and singers. Nowadays, you can catch symphonic-scale performances with modern orchestras or chamber choirs with Baroque bands, as you wish, in nearly every corner of the country.

There is no definitive version. When Handel himself performed the work, he added, cut, transposed, adapted, and made substitutions in the solo arias to suit the singers he had booked for the performance. Messiah’s score provides the notes, the words, and some simple tempo designations, such as grave or allegro which, in Handel’s time, had as much to do with character as they did with a metronome marking. No dynamics or articulations. It leaves the who, the what, and—especially interesting for me—the how up to us.

It begins with a sinfonia. The ink Handel actually put on paper provides the ingredients for memorable music. The harmony itself tells a story—aching dissonance and sweet release stretching across the phrase—and grave gives us permission to summon a vibe. Note, on the page from the manuscript, Handel doesn’t indicate trills, dynamics, or a metronome mark, and most of the dotted rhythms are dotted quarter notes followed by eighths. In recent decades, our understanding of the performance practices of Handel’s time has led performers both to adjust some of the rhythms by “overdotting” dotted figures and to adorn other melodic passages with a variety of agréments—trills, ports de voix, and the like.

How do we turn this information into a musical moment that draws the proverbial curtain, sets the scene, grabs our audience’s attention, and leaves them eager to hear the story that’s about to unfold? And, for that matter, what type of story are we introducing? Epic and tragic? Wry and comic? Who should our audience imagine as the protagonist of this story? Someone humble, meek, human, or mighty, regal, even godly? Using the same printed music, different ensembles can get strikingly different results.

Consider, here, just three: Leonard Bernstein’s, René Jacobs,’ and Masaki Suzuki’s.

The world around us often helps us find the answers, for better or worse. The day I first conducted an entire Messiah (i.e., not just Part I), December 16, 2012, was two days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. What we had rehearsed anticipating a spirit of communal joy and mutual discovery (this was my first Messiah with that ensemble) was now to come to fruition in an atmosphere shadowed by shock and grief. The gravity guiding my arms to the downbeat felt different that day. And the flick of my wrist on beat two, which sets the character and length of the overdotted eighth-note pickup to beat three, had a different sort of snap, drained of joy. So, on that day, we commenced Messiah not portentously and powerfully but with brokenness: the dynamic, more intimate; the bows, less pressured on the string; the overdotted eighths, ever so slightly longer, ever so slightly separated, as one snags air between sobs. At the repeat, we intensified, as heartbreak hardened into heated incredulity. How could it be that children were slaughtered in this way? Letting our shared sorrow manifest in the music, letting the gesture give voice to our grief, conjured a collective moment where our mixed, even mangled emotions could commingle in a few precious hours of community. The E minor chord at the end of the sinfonia was low, severe. An index finger cocked at the violas begat extra bite on the minor third of the chord—the open G string. The bow-slur eighths in E major that begin the first aria then glided in like cirrus clouds. We were ready, primed to receive the consolation promised in the oratorio’s first two words: “Comfort ye.”

I’ve conducted Messiahs since that called for something entirely different, and I hope for a world that someday demands Messiah meet a moment of collective ebullience. The violin writing in the piece—some of it, in certain passages—strikes me as unabashedly fiddly. Handel wrote the work (in London) for premiere with a Dublin audience and ensemble. Did he absorb something from the musical air of that city, with its strong folk traditions, and let it seep into his orchestral writing? The historical case is impossible to make. It may be, as I said to myself the first time the thought occurred to me, completely ludicrous. But is it so bad that I want to hear a connection? Is it so bad that I want to play around with it—to let that fiddly quality breathe a little more in rehearsal, to see what happens when the violinists lean into it rather than away from it?

The first version of the soprano aria “Rejoice Greatly” that Handel penned in 1741 was scored not in 4/4, with skittery sixteenth-note melismas, but in 12/8, with loops of lilting triplets. I unapologetically prefer this version, even if it’s not what ended up in the autograph. How unbridled might the joy of “Rejoice” feel if we let its inner jig shine through, complete with the unnotated fiddly ornaments suggested by the shapes? What if we recalled it in the wriggly triplets and trills of the soprano’s iconic “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” to open Part III of the work with excited assurance? The score doesn’t forbid it; while I might use a small t or cross to indicate a trill in a Messiah violin part, the specific delivery of that indicated/allowed ornament depends on received tradition and current taste as much as scholarship. After all, the founders of the Juilliard Fiddle Club were members of that institution’s esteemed historically informed Baroque orchestra, Juilliard415. I know, from my own experience, that they can convincingly play early music and fiddle tunes on the same gig. What might Messiah have to tell us if we admit its merriness into the room, when that feels like the right thing to do?

And then a different time, different place—September 2024—I conducted Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah with the Res Facta Vocal Ensemble. The score gives nothing but notes and words. No forte, no piano, no hairpin. Surely the lack of expressive indications doesn’t mean that performers at that time sang the piece without any sauce. Tallis left the dynamic scheme entirely up to the performers, which means entirely up to me and my singers. And what the text demands at measure 117 is something I’d annotated as “elbows and angles”: the voices at their most combative, the harmony grinding through the line et facti sunt ei inimici—her friends have become her enemies—each voice pressing against the others, sharp blows of syllabic quarter notes, something hard-edged and exposed in the sound. Fortissimo, and not a comfortable one. It culminates in an ultra-dense cadential gesture squeezed by the dissonance of a leading tone sounding simultaneously against its resolution.

Then, the most special moment of any Lamentations set, Jerusalem—the city calling out to itself, calling itself home. I wrote one word: vapor. The sound that had been all elbows and angles sublimates into a barely there pianissimo, the voices still present, still singing, but the energy drained from them, the texture open and hollow. Then, like a Hoberman sphere contracting, the voices repeat Jerusalem at a lower pitch with a more densely packed texture, the compression commanding a contrasting forte. Tallis appends an extra phrase, one last plea—convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum (return to the Lord your God)—wherein the voices separate, the sphere re-expanding to openness. There I marked mezzo-piano, the rage reined in but not entirely resigned, calibrated to the surprise major third in the sopranos, floating atop the spacious texture. In that room, in September 2024, the singers and I needed an annotation that reflected the way we felt: exhausted, yet still willing to hope.

The scheme wasn’t sketched out by Tallis in the score—yet it seemed to be there, in the music. (I wrote about this dynamic in an earlier essay about Byrd’s Tristitia et Anxietas). He married words and music with such care—such “sustained earnestness,” as the scholar Kerry McCarthy put it—that the music itself will tell you what it needs, if you keep listening.

This is why we take the time to read our Quantz and Mattheson, Tarling and Hefling, and all the rest, to become historically informed—not to constrain the performance but to make ourselves more potent vessels for what the music needs to say, when we need to say it. Historical repertoire, ready and willing, has never been more vital, more indispensable.

I’d started work on the pre-concert lecture for that concert in the bitter cold of January, thinking ahead to this year’s July 4. And here we are, celebrating in sweltering summer heat. The thoughts I shared back in March are front of mind again today, so I figured I’d publish that pre-concert talk here. Those pieces—their serious, seminal texts and, especially, the act of putting them together in concert, gave us a moment to grapple with what makes America great, then, now, and going forward.

This year marks 250 years since the creation of The United States of America with the Declaration of Independence. A hallmark occasion like this—a quarter of a millennium!—naturally invites some reflection. What is this thing, the United States of America? How did we make it to this point? Where are we heading?

Caught up in the demands of our day to day lives, or spinning in the whir of ever-shorter news cycles, it can be easy to lose sight of just how momentous, novel, and radical it was in 1776 to declare independence and found a democratic republic. The founders’ document daringly declared the existence of “The United States of America.” In doing so, they didn’t forge a permanent, physical entity; the country’s geographical bounds have changed many times. And in doing so, they didn’t immediately establish an effective system of government but set in flight a fledgling confederacy. When delegates convened more than ten years later to draft a Constitution, they debated ideas and ideals, some ancient, some novel. They wheeled and dealed in search of consensus. While the men at the convention managed to create a Constitution, they were under no illusions that it was a fait accompli, that they were in total agreement, or that they had made something infallible, something that wasn’t besmirched by dastardly, dehumanizing compromises and half measures. Some 40 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned or had once owned enslaved people. Between 17 and 25 of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional convention were enslavers. None were women.

The authors of the Constitution declare in its preamble that they’re striving to make a “more perfect” union, improving on the Articles of Confederation, but not achieving perfection itself. Union implies the coming together of separate pieces. Plurality is baked right into our name, the United States. The nation is a notion, a framework. As we do today, the framers were juggling the tangible, quotidian realities of living in this new nation—taxation, elections, security—with the bigger ideals that held it all together—democratic self-governance, rights, “the blessings of liberty.” Over these last 250 years, the survival of their experiment has required our navigating twin pulls, sometimes entwined, sometimes at odds: the continual adaptation to unforeseen quotidian realities and a devotion to the best parts of its foundational principles.

We’re taking the occasion, this afternoon, not to blow out birthday candles, pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, or wag our fingers at past wrongs, but to consider briefly, through music, how a few American figures have considered American freedom in seminal writings. The texts that inspired the music on today’s program come from several key points in the formation and re-formation of our nation. They interrogate inclusion and equity. They warn against tyranny—a word that, for a while, at least, felt quaint, historical, something defined for a fifth-grade history class—but that once again feels urgent. Despite their gravity, they express hope.

The earliest writer featured is Abigail Adams. Julia Wolfe’s Letter from Abigail sets an excerpt from one of her many letters to her husband, John Adams. In the spring of 1776, John was in Philadelphia in the hopes of making a daring, radical rupture with Britain. Abigail admits that the concurrence of spring and the departure of the British fleet from Boston had left her with an unusual “gaiety de coeur.” She told John she longed to hear of “an independency” but took the occasion to express:

And by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands.

She then borrows a line from a poem by Daniel Defoe: “Remember all men would be tyrants if they could” and continues:

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of yours as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as vassals of your sex.

The historian David McCullough suggests that Abigail was, in part, joking. But, he clarifies: only in part. The nature of rulers and the contours of leadership were very much on the minds of those adjacent to and in-the-room with the formation of this new nation and its laws. Some essential notion in Abigail Adams’s heart is echoed in James Madison’s pithy observation in the 51st Federalist Paper: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” And while John Adams partially dismissed Abigail’s plea, others heard it loudly and clearly. Her demand was embraced by many in the women’s suffrage movement in the 19th century as the opening salvo, declared in the same year independence itself was declared. Women wouldn’t gain the right to vote, of course, until the 19th amendment to the Constitution was ratified 144 years later.

Composed in 2019, the work is part of Wolfe’s ongoing engagement with American texts and the lives that surround them. Other projects have included pieces about Pennsylvania coal country, the Triangle Shirtwaist company fire, and the suffrage movement. In Letter from Abigail, Wolfe takes this brief but electrifying fragment of American history, puts it into the mouths of singers, and turns it into something vivid and immediate: a musical setting that amplifies Abigail’s clarity, urgency, and quiet fury. She breaks apart Adams’s sentences into their component parts, circling on individual words, pairs of words, allowing the listener time to meditate on each. Wolfe knowingly excerpts just the four words “we have no voice” from the phrase “will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice.” The music gathers force around the words—at times insistent, at times luminous—so that the listener hears both the historical moment and its unfinished implications.

Throughout, Wolfe explores the coloristic possibilities of the voice, from clipped, speech-like utterances and gasps, to dreamy sighs, to full-throated shouts. She likewise calls on a wide array of colors and techniques from the string orchestra and percussion section. Chillingly, at the climax of the piece, “remember all men would be tyrants,” she has the sopranos and altos whisper loudly, all hiss and upper partials. Her background in theater often inspires her to include theatrical instructions in her music, and, in Letter from Abigail, instructs singers to cover their mouths with their hands, physicalizing the enforced silence of the founders’ omission of women.

Wolfe’s ending makes the point explicit. She notes: “You can end in so many different ways. It can be triumphant. How many of us have been in orchestra concerts where it ends like ‘ka-chang!’ and everyone’s [applauding]. I’m really fascinated by endings. All ways of ending are valid and it really depends on the piece but I liked the idea of it being choked at the end.” After repeating “no voice, no voice, no voice,” the choir exclaims “we have . . .”—then a gasp, hands over mouths, and silence. Abigail Adams’s voice, via Wolfe’s music, powerfully reminds us that the question of equity between two halves of the nation’s population has been present since its very founding, and that for much of the nation’s 250-year existence, millions of its voices remained unheard, in effect, silenced.

Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait of 1942 was born at a moment when the United States and its European allies were again asking if democratic nations could endure. In the early months of American involvement in World War II, conductor André Kostelanetz asked several composers to write orchestral works that might speak to the nation’s ideals. After initially considering Whitman as a subject, Copland turned to Abraham Lincoln. He seems to have wanted to portray Lincoln not as a monument, but as a voice in the midst of crisis. He determined that music alone was insufficient and added a role for a narrator. The texts he selected for the narrator come from three moments between 1858 and 1863—years when the United States were divided, and the nation came as close as it ever has to ceasing to exist. The words move between an address to Congress and a speech given in 1858, and culminate in the Gettysburg Address of 1863. Rather than constructing a biographical portrait, Copland assembled speech fragments that trace the nation’s arc in those five years—from a nation confronting division to a people asked to measure themselves against their founding ideals.

With respect to the music, Copland said he “hoped to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality. The challenge was to compose something simple, yet interesting enough to fit Lincoln.” He opens quietly with a simple dotted-note figure shared between a flute and a muted trumpet, establishing at the outset the coexistence of the softest and most bellicose voices. Copland ruminates on this simple gesture incessantly. In some places it evokes the private Lincoln, deep in reflection, his barely audible inner thoughts exchanged among a few woodwinds. Elsewhere, it’s transformed into impassioned outcries amped up by bombastic brass and the rib-rattling bronze bwonnngg of the gong. The music surrounding this motif is representative of Copland’s now-iconic American sound—wide intervals, open textures, and sprightly fugatos quoting folk tunes such as “Camptown Races” and “Springfield Mountain.”

A narrator enters in the third section of the piece. Copland’s music isn’t meant to interpret or soundtrack the words; in a note for the narrator in the score, he advises, “the words are sufficiently dramatic in themselves.” The music of Lincoln Portrait is, by itself, powerful. But with all due respect to Copland, what makes the piece so engaging are Lincoln’s evergreen words: the texts refuse to resolve the tension at the heart of the American project. Lincoln speaks repeatedly of unfinished work and highlights our responsibility to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” These are not declarations of accomplishment but an urgent voice, from a time when the nation was gravely imperiled, bidding us “take increased devotion to that cause.”

Howard Hanson’s Song of Democracy appeared 15 years after Copland’s Portrait, in 1957. The work was written for the centennial of the National Education Association and the fiftieth anniversary of the Music Educators National Conference, and Hanson himself led its premiere in Washington, D.C., before an audience of some 23,000. That origin story is apt. Hanson was not only a composer but one of the great advocates for American music education, shaping generations of musicians during his four decades as director of the Eastman School of Music. The commission gave him an opportunity to unite two of his deepest loyalties: Whitman’s poetry and the idea that the future of democracy rests in the classroom.

Hanson sets two late poems by Walt Whitman. Written during Reconstruction, Whitman’s texts reflect not the young radical of Leaves of Grass but a man looking back on youth and forward into a nation’s uncertain future, who had seen civil war and national fracture and perhaps had hope in the educational aspect of the Reconstruction project. Song of Democracy’s first section’s poem, “An Old Man’s Thought of School,” was written for the dedication of a new public school in Camden, NJ, in 1874. Its rousing final section, “Sail thy best, ship of democracy,” comes from the poem “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” recited at the Dartmouth College commencement in 1872. Whitman imagines democracy as a ship moving through history, carrying not only America but the accumulated struggles and ideals of the world. Its “valued freight” is youth: “these young lives… building, equipping, like a fleet of ships.” The humble public school becomes the place where that voyage is prepared.

Hanson sets Whitman’s vision in unmistakably American musical language—broad, luminous, and unabashedly idealistic. The work is a choral-orchestral paean to possibility, fusing Whitman’s expansive poetry with Hanson’s neo-Romantic lyricism. What makes the piece striking today is the vantage point from which Whitman speaks. Writing late in life, amid the unfinished promises of Reconstruction, he nevertheless entrusts the nation’s future to its youngest citizens and to the teachers who shape them. The “ship of Democracy,” Whitman suggests, does not sail on rhetoric or power alone—but on the patient labor of public education, preparing each new generation for the voyage ahead.

Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man was written in 1942, at the request of conductor Eugene Goossens of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Goossens had the idea—amid the uncertainty of World War II—to commission a series of short fanfares honoring the spirit of the American people. Copland chose his title after reading a speech by Vice President Henry Wallace, who proclaimed the coming century “the century of the common man.” Scored for brass and percussion alone, the work unfolds in spacious but solid gestures. The percussion section opens the work with a tectonic quake. Unison trumpets soar across open intervals, a perfect fourth followed by a perfect fifth. It repeats, warmed by a quartet of unison horns. Trombones and tubas add depth, their entry intensifying the heat of the glow like orange embers visible beneath the blaze.

There’s something brazen, or at least ironic, about the title. For centuries, fanfares were the provenance of royalty, aristocrats, victors. The semiotics—brass, dotted rhythms—connote regality, class hierarchy. The creator of a fanfare “for the common man,” one of the most enduring sonic emblems of American plainspoken heroism, was anything but “common” as the term would have been understood in the 1940s, on the eve of two decades or so of astonishingly pervasive postwar American cultural hegemony defined or at least policed, in part, by the “anti-Americanism” alleged in Red and Pink Scares. Here was a gay, Jewish composer from Brooklyn, formed by modernist training in Paris and by intellectual circles far removed from the agrarian mythologies often attached to his music.

Maybe that distance is why the piece works. Copland chose the title himself, and in so doing elevates “common” from its pejorative sense to its connotation of universal. Copland didn’t try to imitate everyday life, the way he did in other pieces; he distilled an idea of dignity—broad, deliberate, and unadorned. The result is less a portrait of ordinary Americans than a monument to the ideal they were asked, in wartime, to become. Harmonically, the work chooses aspiration over closure: The F sharps in its final, radiant D major chord brighten, and leave behind, the prevailing Bb major sonority.

These works engage an ongoing heritage of American self-definition. They remind us that democracy is not a static inheritance but an ongoing act of imagination—one that each generation must undertake again. Copland’s Lincoln Portrait listens back to a moment when the nation nearly fractured beyond repair. In doing so, it asks the same question Lincoln asked in his own time: whether the ideals that gave the country birth can continue to guide it forward.

We never know when we program a concert (typically at least a year and a half in advance) how we’ll feel when the day finally arrives. We’re not in the midst of the Civil War, of course, or World War II (though we are at war). But the questions implicitly raised by the lacunae of that initial Declaration linger, urgently. Adams, Lincoln, Whitman: each asked in their own way who gets to determine what America means. This coming summer, there will surely be speeches and celebrations considering the Declaration made on July 4th.

I need to interject and skip for a second from the March 2026 pre-concert talk to today . . . As anticipated, there were speeches. Two were given yesterday, July 3, 2026: President Trump, at the foot of Mt. Rushmore; Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, seated at George Washington’s desk, flanked by newly naturalized Americans. Flags festooned both vignettes. Back in March, I referenced a speech given last summer, on July 5th, 2025, by Vice President Vance, in which he said:

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles of the Declaration of Independence—that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? It would also reject a lot of people the Anti-Defamation League would label as domestic extremists . . even those very Americans . . .[who] had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary and the Civil War. . . I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.

Vance praised the contributions of immigrants with the caveat that they needed to be grateful. He mentioned in particular Zohran Mamdani, an immigrant, then a candidate for and now mayor of New York City, who had described America the day before, July 4th, as “beautiful, contradictory, unfinished.” Vance pondered: “Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult on its most sacred day?”

Mamdani appears not to have forgotten Vance’s 2025 remarks. An excerpt from his own speech yesterday:

The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel — the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.

The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.

How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again — including 250 years ago — those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.

Vance’s blood-and-soil philosophizing and Mamdani’s reconsideration of American exceptionalism stand in dialogue with a speech Lincoln gave in 1858 (the same year as some of the Lincoln Portrait texts), reflecting on the Dred Scott decision, slavery, and the question of popular sovereignty. Lincoln said:

We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

For its part, before it veered into a philippic against Communism, President Trump’s speech extolled America’s uniqueness, and praised its particular culture. “As we march into our 250th year, incredible, beautiful year it will be, we must never forget there is no American freedom without American culture. And there is no American founding without the American people.” He enumerated various aspects of American culture and character—strength, ambition, kindness, excellence—and summarized: “This is our culture, this is our character. Not every American is all of these things, but every American knows these are the traits that make our country exceptional. And exceptional it is.”

It remains valuable to pause on this anniversary and debate and reconsider our founding ideals, and endeavor to set the best course for our “ship of democracy.” But how? Historical documents are inert. Ideals take no actions. Special-occasion speeches might go in one ear and out the other, depositing a sound bite or two along the way. President Trump gets at an essential question: what is our culture? What do we do that expresses our character?

That’s where our concerts come in (stay with me).

The French writer and observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, captured a particular aspect of American culture and character in his 1835 Democracy in America. DeTocqueville’s home country had experienced a revolution around the same time as America had. France’s ended differently. In seeking to understand how that came to be, he identified something special in America’s local expressions of democracy, at the state, town, and civic level, noting that “township institutions” “give people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.” He observed that Americans formed what he called “associations:”

Not only do [Americans] have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. . . Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

To de Tocqueville, these associations wove the individual threads of humanity into a tapestry—a citizenry, a society. Some of America’s founding principles came from philosophical debates in French salons yet Frenchmen seemingly felt no deep link to each other. Americans, in his mind, behaved differently: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite.” The threads start to weave together.

And where are we now? Is this still true? I fear that we no longer “associate.” We “engage,” alone. A description, now five years old, by The Atlantic’s Anne Appelbaum and Peter Pomerantsev, has haunted me:

As internet platforms allow Americans to experience the world through a lonely, personalized lens, this problem has morphed into something altogether different. With the wholesale transfer of so much entertainment, social interaction, education, commerce, and politics from the real world to the virtual world—a process recently accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic—many Americans have come to live in a nightmarish inversion of the Tocquevillian dream, a new sort of wilderness. Many modern Americans now seek camaraderie online, in a world defined not by friendship but by anomie and alienation. Instead of participating in civic organizations that give them a sense of community as well as practical experience in tolerance and consensus-building, Americans join internet mobs, in which they are submerged in the logic of the crowd, clicking Like or Share and then moving on. Instead of entering a real-life public square, they drift anonymously into digital spaces where they rarely meet opponents; when they do, it is only to vilify them.

And more has changed in the five years since those words were written. Though its effect in our day-to-day lives might still be imperceptible, AI stands to change the way society grapples with information, interacts with, and understands itself. Already, deep-fake video harbors the capacity to rend societies in two, in a way we haven’t seen, perhaps, since the 1850s.

What more potent antidote to this disintegration could there be than a moment such as the one we’re creating, this afternoon, at this concert? The singers have put in hours and hours of rehearsal. You have purchased a ticket. To what end? To listen. To see and hear and feel what happens when human beings breathe and blow, beat and bow, not willy-nilly, but in dogged, cooperative, selfless coordination and consensus. This is neither theoretical nor artificial. A Princeton Pro Musica concert performs community. It would surely represent, to de Toqueville, an association.

Admittedly, our occasion today is nowhere near as serious as Lincoln’s, dedicating the Gettysburg cemetery in 1863. But this concert shares Lincoln’s spirit of looking back and looking forward. He admits that they were, nominally, gathered to do just one thing—dedicate a cemetery. “But,” he continues, “in the larger sense, we can not. . . .It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” As we head into a summer of celebration and reflection, I hope that the words and music on today’s program help create for you a space for pride, for contemplation and, above all, for increased devotion. Thank you for being here.

I can’t precisely recall when or where I first stumbled upon this term, but it was likely sometime in my early twenties, when my love for singing Renaissance polyphony, stoked in choral rehearsals, deepened a thirst for understanding how it worked, slaked in the classroom. I do recall the term implanting itself in my brain with a denotation close to its rough Latin translation—the made thing—and recall its having something to do with a distinction between music that was improvised—say, above a chant—and music that was notated, fixed, made permanent.

I wanted to understand the magical translation between the ink-and-paper scores I sang from and the beautiful, four-dimensional sound objects they begat, especially after learning that singers in the Renaissance performed not from scores, as we do now, but from partbooks—manuscript volumes displaying only the individual singer’s lines. How did composers conceive of an interactive whole? At some point, either in Rob Wegman’s course on Renaissance music at Princeton or in the musicology “boot camp” course at Cambridge, I picked up Jessie Ann Owens’ volume, Composers at Work: the Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600, which charts a shift from composers working alla mente to writing on erasable stone tablets (!) to, eventually, using manuscript paper.

Owens traces a history of the tactile craft of composers at their desks. Res facta appears in the theoretical literature that emerged to codify it, specifically, in the 1477 composition treatise, Liber de arte contrapuncti, of Johannes Tinctoris. He distinguished between res facta (composition that is written down) and cantare super librum (improvisation on a given melody). A slightly different version of that concept in his Diffinitorium muddied the distinction and led to centuries of misunderstanding. In a 1983 article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Margaret Bent untangled Tinctoris’s terminology and suggested that res facta denotes not just a written composition but a method of making, in which every voice is related to every other voice, the whole conceived as a unified object. Writing four years later in the same journal, Bonnie Blackburn examined how Renaissance composers actually built a piece, voice by voice or all at once, and she, too, found that res facta names not just a category but an actual compositional process: a way of writing in which every voice is considered in relation to every other from the start. She couched it as “harmonic composition,” rather than voices cumulatively added to a fixed foundation.

Here are the key lines from Tinctoris: “Counterpoint both simple and diminished is made in two ways, that is, in writing or in the mind. Counterpoint that is written is commonly called res facta.” We know that he perceives the received usage as a vulgarism: The word he uses for “commonly” is communiter, a qualification he deploys precisely when he wants to distance himself from a usage he considers imprecise. He then draws the critical distinction: “Res facta differs importantly from counterpoint in this respect—that all the parts of a res facta, be they three, four, or more, are mutually obliged to each other (sibi mutuo obligentur) so that the order and law of concords of any part may be observed with respect to one and all others.”

Tinctoris’s term, res facta, doesn’t distinguish between something worked out on paper or stored mentally, something written or improvised (both binaries betray our notation-dependent bias). The kicker conclusion from Bent, which makes the whole argument suddenly vivid, is that in practice, a perfectly executed cantare super librum and a res facta might be, even to the most discerning listener, indistinguishable. “Their results may be so close together as to defy diagnosis.” Res facta isn’t an either/or distinction, or even a method of working, but the conceptual essence of equal-voiced polyphony. Tinctoris’s true res facta, in which “singers shall make their singing together much more full and suave,” has everything to do with relationship.

Less to do with the score, then (again, singers sang from partbooks and had no notion of a score), than with the need for singers to listen—truly listen—to everyone around them, not just to a cantus firmus, or the adjacent voice part, but to the whole matrix of interactions. The res facta is achieved not when the composer finishes a sketch on the stone tablet or when the ink dries on the pages of the partbooks but when made into sound with every voice genuinely aware of every other voice—when the mutual obligation is not a theoretical concept but a living, sounding reality.

This concept animates every rehearsal and performance of Res Facta Vocal Ensemble. The score—a res facta—is, in one sense, the opus perfectum et absolutum, the perfect and complete work, needing nothing. And yet it needs everything: singers, listeners, a room, a particular Thursday evening concert in September. The thing is made—past participle—yet until sung into life, it is pure potential, pluripotent.

res futura

Tinctoris was theorizing about musical developments that had already unfolded earlier in the century (theory, as always, trailing in the wake of practice), parallel to developments in the other arts, where the “things made” are some of our greatest monuments and artistic treasures. On March 25, 1436, Pope Eugenius IV consecrated the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, aka “Il Duomo.” This iconic structure, as it happens, couldn’t be more emblematic of the flourishing of the arts in the Renaissance, as its history brings together architecture, art, and music.

The church had been under construction for more than a century without a dome, open to the sky (and pigeons). The dome that finally crowned it was the work of Filippo Brunelleschi, a sculptor and goldsmith who, among other achievements, developed the mathematical technique of linear perspective in art. His mission-critical insight for the Duomo, following a study of the ruins of the Pantheon in Rome, was that a dome could be self-supporting: If you laid the bricks in a herringbone pattern that locked each course into the one below it, the structure would hold itself up from within. It could tower handsomely without the leggy insectoid exoskeleton of flying buttresses that Gothic architecture literally leaned on to push back against stone’s outward thrust. His internalized logic has proven sound: The duomo, resplendent in its beautiful red-brick simplicity, has dominated the Florentine skyline for nearly six hundred years.

For the consecration ceremony, the composer Dufay (~1397–1474) was commissioned to write a motet, Nuper Rosarum Flores. The flowery lyric spun out by its two upper voices commemorates the Pope’s dedicating the new temple. But the cantus firmus—the architectural underpinning—is the Gregorian introit for the consecration of churches: Terribilis est locus iste. Two tenor voices repeat the cantus firmus four times, each time under a different mensuration sign (medieval time signature), producing proportional durations in the ratio 6:4:2:3. Scholars have argued about what those numbers encode: the dimensions of Brunelleschi’s dome, Solomon’s Temple, or—the most elegant conclusion—both at once, the dome having been conceived with Solomonic proportions from the start. The lyrics of the cantus firmus are, in fact, the words uttered in Genesis 28 by Jacob upon waking from his dream of a ladder stretching to the heavens: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” The dome stretched skyward as, inside, singers celebrated the moment of contact between the human-made and the divine.

Scripture, stone, and sound, all encoding the same numbers. The Duomo still stands, as awe-inspiring as ever. The legendary splendor of Solomon’s Temple was reduced to rubble in 587 BCE. But the architectural marvel of the motet exists only when singers build it anew. Ephemerality is not music’s limitation but its advantage.

A made thing in music is not diminished by its dependence on performance but enriched by it. Indeed, I’m reminded when I stand in front of the singers of Res Facta Vocal Ensemble that these terms—res facta, vox viva, the made thing, The Living Voice—aren’t historical curiosities but artistic experiences.

The scores exist prior to rehearsal. Neumes and signatures on staves encode intervals and proportions, dimensions and perspectives, in ink. I pore over them, sprinkling in some annotations to help inspire and corral sixteen independent musical intelligences. Then, in rehearsal, the mutual obligation at the heart of Tinctoris’s res facta transforms from rule to reflex, in real time. When the soprano in the first row adjusts her pitch by a few cents not because I’ve asked her to but because she hears the bass behind her and obliges, without being told. When all the singers see an annotation in the score (and my body language in the moment) imploring them to unleash their full resonance and they join forces to flood the room with a torrent of sound, awash in overtones. That is the moment when the ensemble becomes a living, breathing, four-dimensional piece of art.

And that is the moment the res facta is actually achieved. Not a score on a library shelf. Not an annotated ForScore file on a performer’s iPad. But the sound, in concert, when sixteen vocal artists move beyond the text to the act.

That’s all any of this is, really: an attempt to close the distance between the score and the sound. Between the made thing and the living voice. Between what composers dreamt up in the 15th and 16th centuries and what happens in an old basilica in New York City in the 21st when sixteen singers open their mouths on a September evening and discover, once again, the beauty of being mutually obliged.

Byrd left no performance instructions. More than 200 years ago Beethoven marked the opening of his Mass in C with this head scratcher: Andante con moto assai vivace quasi Allegretto ma non troppo. Nowadays composers routinely include super specific, evocative instructions. Consider this gem from Caroline Shaw’s 2016 string quartet, Blueprint: “like a marble bust / stoic & grand & still / but with a little wink or some side-eye.” 437 years ago, however, when he published Tristitias et Anxietas, Byrd gave us the notes and words and nothing else—no dynamics, no expression markings, no indication of color or weight. Remarkably, though, he left something more consequential: a compositional signal so clear it barely needs interpretation. After forty-three measures of imitative counterpoint, five voices arriving simultaneously is not a neutral event. It’s a flashing arrow. Any conductor who has spent time in this repertoire sees it the way a tennis commentator describes a player in top form: the ball looks as big as a basketball, sitting right there in front of you. The notation encodes the when and the what. The text suggests the how.

At Res Facta Vocal Ensemble’s debut concert in 2023, what happened in that moment floored me. In the singers’ scores, I’d written one word: creamier. And somehow (I am still not entirely sure how) fourteen singers read that word and made a sound that was, unmistakably, creamier. The fattier, velvety caress of cream in coffee, something warmer, rounder, more enveloping, the collective timbre softening at the exact moment Byrd’s architecture demanded it. Five measures later, at in dolore—”in mourning”—I’d written hollow, inert, glass, to ask for a new color: something drained of warmth, sound passing through rather than resonating. The singers in that room—each of whom routinely steps out, alone, and fills a hall over an orchestra, carrying an oratorio solo on their shoulders—summoned two moments, together, in sequence, without hesitation. Drawn into the gravity of a text that Byrd had set with such devastating structural precision, they found colors that no notation could have specified.

I’ve been conducting choral ensembles for twenty-five years, and I’ve never quite gotten used to that. The score is the score. But what happens as the score becomes sound—that is something else entirely. And it is, for me, the thing that the entire tradition of Renaissance polyphony—the musical outpouring of humanism—was built to make possible.

I have been trying to understand why that is—why notation from this period can encode so much and yet leave the most consequential things unsaid. It turns out that question arose hundreds of years ago, right alongside the advances in notation that facilitated it.

Renaissance music theorists worried about this gap frequently, even when they didn’t name it directly. Johannes Tinctoris, the great Flemish theorist writing in Naples in the 1470s and 80s, spent his career systematizing polyphony with extraordinary precision—defining consonances, enumerating the rules of counterpoint, cataloguing the effects of music on the human soul. But in De inventione et usu musicae (c. 1481), his most humanistically inflected treatise, he kept arriving at the same confession: the written thing is not the music. Music lives in its sounding. The qualities that make a singer finished, he moreover wrote, are five: ars, mensura, modus, pronunciatio, voxque venusta—skill, measure, technique, utterance, and a lovely, attractive voice. The page can encode the first three. The last two belong entirely to the living performer. You cannot notate vox venusta. You can only cultivate it, and then trust it.

Nearly eighty years later, Nicola Vicentino—theorist, composer, inventor of the extraordinary microtonal keyboard instrument he called the archicembalo—put a finer point on it, one related to my programming for this ensemble. In L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (1555), he argued that composition rests on three foundations: the disposition of melodic steps and leaps, the consonances that accompany them, and il moto, the motion—tempo, impulse, the quality of movement through time. All three, he insisted, must serve the words. The text is not decoration applied to music but the music’s governing intelligence, the thing that determines what steps are chosen, what consonances color them, how fast or slow the motion runs. A composition that sets joyful words with mournful motion, or sorrowful words with dancing rhythm, has failed at the level of its most fundamental obligation.

Vicentino isn’t merely describing word-painting in the narrow sense but devising a theory of interpretive surrender: the composer, and through the composer the performer, submitting every musical decision to the authority of the text. The notation is the conveyance, the beginning, of that service, not its completion.

Reading a Renaissance score in this spirit means reconciling the decipherable compositional signals that bare notation encodes and the paucity of composers’ performance directions typical of this period. How are the voices interacting? How foreshortened are the overlaps between points of imitation—is the composer compressing urgency, or allowing each voice room to breathe? How many times has a phrase been ruminated on before the texture shifts? When are the basses high in their range, pressing upward into an impassioned moment, and when are the sopranos low, something constrained or interior happening in the text?

These questions are not imposed on the music from outside. They’re already there, waiting to be read. The score speaks when we know how to ask.

This is what happened at moestum and at in dolore. Byrd built the signals into the structure. My annotations—creamier; hollow, inert, glass—were attempts to translate what the words and the structure together demanded into something singers could read and deploy in the vocal tract. What I love about the singers of Res Facta is not just their love and deep respect for this repertoire but their instinct for it: Any one of them could have come up with compelling annotations. They read the compositional signals and the words together, and intuit. My annotations were always just reminders of what was already there.

What I’m after with Res Facta Vocal Ensemble—sixteen singers, each an accomplished soloist, each capable of extraordinary individual expression—is something that only happens in the best polyphonic performance: the subordination of individual will to a collective, collaborative artistic journey. Not the erasure of individual voice but its consecration to a shared interpretive purpose. The soprano sustaining a long-breathed phrase across the top of the texture in Tristitias is doing something different from what she does as an oratorio soloist. She is skillfully weaving a thread into a tapestry, thoughtfully, knowingly coming to the fore and stepping back, as the score suggests.

I write annotations in scores because the notation alone is not enough—creamier, newly hopeful, non-apology, full soar, active/ripen, and my favorite, because even though it’s vague it invariably elicits an excellent result: GO. These are attempts to bridge the gap between pitch and meaning.

Tinctoris called it vox venusta, beautiful voice—the culminating capacity that makes all the technique mean something. Vicentino called it serving the words. The Ciceronian tradition that underlies both of them had a name for it too.

They called it viva vox—the living voice, the irreducible priority of the sounding utterance over anything written down. Tinctoris used it. Vicentino circled it. Cicero, whom both of them had read, named it. My ensemble is named after a Renaissance theoretical term, res facta, connoting a “made thing” that encodes a certain kind of interaction among voices (more on that soon). The Living Voice newsletter is named for the sensations we savor when score becomes sound.

Come. Read. Listen.

Res Facta Vocal Ensemble singing Byrd's Tristitia et Anxietas

The Performing Arts have the Spoleto Festival USA. The Spoleto Festival Chorus—forty singers chosen from more than four hundred live auditions held across the nation—and members of the Festival Orchestra—assembled from more than seven hundred auditions—gathered last week in Charleston, South Carolina to perform (among many other things) Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. I was there as assistant conductor to Amanda Quist, in her inaugural season as Music Director of the Festival Chorus.

What I noticed, over several days, is what happens when all-star musicians deploy their principal skill. Not technique. Not coloratura, effortlessly dispatched (though it was). Not virtuosic vocal fireworks (those were there, too). But listening.

The rehearsals began in a somewhat sweaty room in an arts center and continued in a brutally lit, tile-ceilinged church parish hall. Bright, completely devoid of aura, unforgiving. No acoustic blending brush. Tiny variances from perfect unison laid bare as though under the purpose-bright lights of an OR. In that environment, the work of building an ensemble is purely internal: you hear yourself and your neighbors with an almost clinical clarity, and you adjust. You modify, you reregister. You yield. (I love the French word for this, cedez, which I first encountered in the Duruflé Requiem). A collection of extraordinary individuals, each with their own technique, their own habits, their own home ensemble’s house style begins—experimentally, then with increasing confidence—to become something else.

By Thursday something had shifted. Not yet cohesion, but the promise of it. The way a chord settles when everyone is truly listening is different from the way it settles when everyone is merely playing their part correctly. The way the left hands and the bows of the strings started to unify. It has a different physical quality—a kind of inevitability, as if the sound has found its own center of gravity.

The proof came Friday afternoon, in the dress rehearsal at the Sotille Theater. I was out in the hall, listening for balance, articulation, unity of intent. At last we were gathered in the performance space itself. At last, we had an acoustic, having swapped the parish hall for a room built to caress and convey sound. The work of the previous days reached fruition: the plangent oboe sound melded imperceptibly with the uncannily unified sopranos, and the brass-warmed brilliance of the alto trombone burnished the already shining, stentorian sound of the choral altos.

That evening, Mozart’s Mass in C Minor—one of the most extraordinary unfinished things in all of music—filled the theater. Amanda Quist, at the head of what she had forged over five or six days, was matchless: the craftsperson and alchemist in one, presiding over the crucible where technique and camaraderie alloy, so inevitably, so satisfyingly, into music.

I’ve been conducting for twenty-five years. I spend most of my professional life not singing but trying to inspire others’ best singing from the podium. To be a singer again this week—to be reminded of what happens in the body when you listen and yield and work together toward something larger than yourself—was, to use a word I don’t deploy lightly, invaluable.

The all-star team, it turns out, always has the potential for magic. That athletes sometimes fail to find it makes sense: competition is their instinct; ego, its fuel or reward; collaboration, the necessary override. For musicians, it’s the other way around. Listening is the primary skill. I’ve written before (and you’ll see again): Harmony is the antonym of discord; unison, the absence of division; synchronization, the antithesis of disintegration. To breathe it, hear it, make it, was, truly exhilarating.

The Living Voice publishes essays on music—what it is, what it does, and what it feels like to live inside it. If someone forwarded you this post and you’d like to subscribe, you can do so below.

I wrote the essay below some years ago, preparing one of my own ensembles for a performance of this extraordinary, unfinished work. I’m republishing it here—very lightly revised—because being near this music again, in a different city, in a different role, watching a different conductor bring it to life, has reminded me of everything I wanted to say about it the first time.

A long time ago, 18 years old, madly in love with music but lacking language to describe it, I had the great fortune to have as the professor of my very first music theory course at Princeton the inimitable Scott Burnham. He brilliantly conveyed, and equipped me with theoretical language to describe, what I powerfully intuited about the music. He spoke directly but eloquently in class. In 2013 he produced a slim but exceedingly rich volume called Mozart’s Grace, describing the music of this hard-to-describe composer as only he can. I’ve leaned on his words in the essay below.

This newsletter, The Living Voice, is where I’ll be collecting many years’ worth of thoughts about music: essays on Renaissance polyphony and the long sixteenth century; on Bach, Handel, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Britten, and the great choral-orchestral tradition; and on living composers like Caroline Shaw and Sarah Kirkland Snider, whose work I’ve performed and whose friendship I’m lucky to claim. I draw on my past education and current curiosities—Burham, yes, plus Elaine Pagels, Carl Sagan, Olivia Laing; first-century Judean history and our current political climate; ancient texts and the living, breathing splendor of my own Long Island garden. I write as a conductor who lives inside and alongside this music, not a critic who observes it from outside.

Expect essays timed to performances, seasons, and the news (or maybe even an eclipse). Expect the occasional argument. Expect, always, a conviction that this music matters—not as a museum artifact, but as a living voice.

Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

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Musicologist Scott Burnham opens his book Mozart’s Grace with a caveat from theologian Karl Barth: “Whoever has discovered Mozart even to a small degree and then tries to speak about him falls quickly into what seems rapturous stammering.” Indeed, it’s difficult to find words on par with music that, in Burnham’s estimation, “seems somehow pre-made, [which] glows with a self-sufficiency that has less to do with ‘unity’ and more with apartness: untouched, untouchable.” But I shall try.

I performed the Mass in C Minor on the same program as Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet in A Major. That’s perhaps the easier of the two works to start with. It provides a window onto the “mature” Mozart, or at least Mozart as mature as he would ever be: Written in 1791, the year of his untimely death, it was the last work he would ever complete and not leave unfinished (as were the Requiem of that same year and the Mass in C Minor). It was born not of financial necessity but of friendship and enchantment: Mozart wrote it for his close friend and Masonic lodge-mate Anton Stadler, a virtuoso on a then relatively new and (by Mozart) much-loved instrument, the clarinet. The piece combines lyricism, verve, humor, and melancholy in a manner that has endeared it to audiences for two and a half centuries.

The Concerto is a masterfully polished gem of a work and a perfect showcase for its featured instrument. As he did in the instrumentation of his Requiem, Mozart leaves out the more plaintive and penetrating sound of oboes. Omitting, too, any additional clarinets, as well as trumpets, trombones, and drums, Mozart scores the Concerto for a complement of flutes, bassoons, horns, and strings that places the character of the solo clarinet front and center. Rivaling the flexibility of a solo violin, the clarinet can sound cheeky and ebullient one second, melancholic and lonesome the next. A skilled player can employ a rich and varied palette, ranging in shade and intensity from the brightest, most saturated oil-paint fortissimos to the faintest, most translucent watercolor pianissimos. The clarinet’s range stretches as high as the oboe’s but adds nearly another octave on the low end, covering with equal power a vast span of pitches encompassing the operatic soprano, mezzo-soprano, and tenor ranges. In the allegro outer movements, athletic arpeggios triple-jump from low to middle to high register and sprint back down again in a jolly flash—coloratura even the most virtuosic soprano could never execute. By contrast, the long, arcing, unhurried phrases of the adagio put it on par with Mozart’s most poignant, slow, and lyrical operatic arias. Mozart’s life was famously roiled by mixed fortunes, from financial ups and downs to the great tragedy of dying well before the age of forty. One can’t help wondering if the coexistence of joy and sadness animating the Concerto for Clarinet (and indeed forming the essential sound of the instrument itself) reflects his own inner crosscurrents at the time of its composition. Whether or not there exists any autobiographical strain, the Concerto for Clarinet captivatingly reflects the bittersweet, tragicomic fullness of life.

Describing the Mass proves more challenging. It appeared at a time when Mozart’s musical style was not inchoate but was, shall we say, flexible—susceptible and welcoming to the allure of new and exciting influences. Rather than demonstrate a single, fully formed stylistic modus operandi, the Mass shows Mozart trying on several for size. Austere movements hearkening back to the Baroque are juxtaposed with sensuous operatic arias. Melancholic movements grounded in counterpoint stand alongside fanfare-driven pomp. It is incomplete: Mozart did not finish setting all of the typical movements of the Mass ordinary, and some of those he started remain fragmentary. What he did leave us suggests a Mass setting far grander than the church music conventions at the time would admit. The first three movements are scored for four choral voice parts and solo sopranos. Subsequent movements increase both counts, to eight choral parts and a full quartet of soloists. Had Mozart continued apace on this colossal scale, the Mass in C Minor would easily have been the longest piece (aside from operas) he’d ever composed.

Those who love the sacred choral works of J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel will find much to admire in the Mass in C Minor. The Vienna Court Librarian, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, introduced Mozart to the choral music of Handel and Bach in the early 1780s. Mozart’s admiration for and fascination with the compositional procedures he encountered in those earlier scores is clear in the movements of his Mass in C Minor that are built upon fugal techniques. Both the “Cum Sancto Spiritu” and the “Osanna” fugues present the machinations of a deft composer eager to test out all the procedures he might have encountered in the fugues of Bach—myriad permutations of subject and counter-subject, right-side-up or upside-down; variations in minor keys and fragmentary, exploratory episodes; excitement built via the foreshortening effect of stretto overlaps; and the splendid, satisfying return of the main thematic material, writ large. Both fugues present their subjects straightforwardly at the outset, in the bass section, build steadily, and careen to a close with reiterations of the main subjects in as many as four voice parts at once. The “Qui Tollis” and the “Gratias” pay homage to a grand and severe style that Handel deployed in his oratorios; it features a stark contrast between the choral and orchestral layers of the musical texture, resulting in great dramatic effect. In these two movements, the voices plead, in long, sustained lines, while the orchestra churns through harmonically anguished arpeggios set to an insistently snappy rhythm. Neither group succumbs to the other’s style. That Mozart so unrelentingly sustains, for well over five minutes, the tectonic friction between these two monolithic strata of sound suggests a young composer brazen enough to push a Baroque Affekt to its limit.

If the aforementioned movements are tributes to the expressive capabilities and dexterous counterpoint of Handel and Bach, then the “Christe Eleison” and, especially, the “Et Incarnatus Est” are love letters to the sublime possibilities of the soprano voice. Indeed the origins of the Mass are entangled with Mozart’s falling in love with a soprano—actually two sopranos, and sisters, no less. In 1777 a twenty-one year-old Mozart visited Mannheim and fell under the spell of the teenage soprano Aloysia Weber, but she did not return his affection. When they met again a year later, she rebuffed him decisively. Several years later (after Aloysia had married someone else), Mozart actually lived with her family briefly after he was turned out of the household of his patron, Archbishop Colloredo. Now, it would seem, Mozart showed interest in Aloysia’s sister, Constanze—also a soprano. The young women’s meddling mother, fearing impropriety, asked Mozart to move out of the house, at the same time nudging him and Constanze towards marriage. Mozart’s father, Leopold, was less keen on the match. Wolfgang wrote to his father that the wedding should take place sooner rather than later, because “all the good and well-intentioned advice you have sent fails to address the case of a man who had already gone so far with a maiden. Further postponement is out of the question.” They married on August 4, 1782. Leopold’s consent wouldn’t arrive in the mail until the next day. Hoping to smooth things over, Mozart vowed to compose a Mass to be performed when he and Constanze made their first visit to Salzburg as husband and wife—a composer and his promising soprano.

Thus the C Minor Mass became one of the greatest showpieces for sopranos in the choral repertoire. In the “Christe Eleison,” “Laudamus Te,” and “Domine Deus,” for instance, the sopranos’ voices must flip, spin, and leap across chasms from the ledger lines below the staff to the ledger lines above it, from one extreme of register to another, while maintaining the weightless grace so characteristic of Mozart. It is as though they were executing elements of both an Olympic gymnastics routine and a grand ballet solo, magically free of the force of gravity. But because Mozart supports them with just the right amount of orchestral accompaniment and weaves them into the harmonic narrative, these cadenza-worthy acrobatics feel not superfluously decorative but fully integral to the musical line. Standing apart from the entire Mass, on par with Mozart’s greatest opera arias, is the “Et Incarnatus Est.” At once sensuous and sublime, it lulls us into levitating from the loamy earth of its orchestral introduction up into its gently swirling zephyrs of voice and woodwind quartet. Musicologist Alfred Einstein’s summation of Mozart’s music provides an apt description for this movement: “Here is pure sound, conforming to a weightless cosmos, triumphant over all chaotic earthliness.”

In contrast to the Baroque-inspired movements and the operatic solos, the “Credo” and “Gloria” present Mozart’s grand, ceremonial style. In the “Credo,” Mozart lets the orchestra do the work: The choir recites the long creed text in straightforward homophonic blocs while the orchestra sustains forward momentum with fanfare figures and high-velocity passagework in the strings. Mozart dispatches the first part of the lengthy “Gloria” text in somewhat similar fashion, but with more imitation in the choral texture.

While it’s gratifying to hear Mozart’s engagement with Baroque, operatic, and ceremonial styles, it’s the opening “Kyrie eleison” that, for me, demonstrates Mozart’s most compelling compositional style—one that has fully synthesized all its influences, concentrating them into an expressive, dramatic musical language. Here Mozart uses music theatrically, establishing in just a few measures a strong sense of atmosphere and setting. The shadowy C minor tonality dims the lights. A hesitant, resigned melody in the violins opens the work, accompanied by a loping ostinato pattern of chords in the lower strings. The melody descends through a C minor triad in the first bar and then searches through the darkness for a sense of Mozartian grace, but the flowing sixteenth notes at the end of each bar lead only to poignantly dissonant appoggiaturas on the downbeats. The choir’s entry loudly corroborates the pervasive C minor tonality with overlapping, widely yawning arpeggios. Where Mozart omitted oboes from the orchestra for the Concerto for Clarinet, he uses them to great effect here, along with trombones, trumpets, and timpani, but, notably, without the softer sounds of flutes and clarinets. A fugal subject emerges from the sopranos—a slow-moving, plaintive melody outlining a chromatic descent. As the orchestra continues its churn, each section in the chorus in turn presents the fugue subject. A gentle scale ushers in the relief of E-flat major, clearing away the storm clouds and welcoming the soprano solo, whose wide-ranging scales and roulades point up the constricted quality of the fugue subject. The choir picks up again in the soprano’s warm E-flat major but then winds it way back to C minor, ending the movement in the somber atmosphere in which it began.

The Mass in C Minor has not come down to us in complete form, and it’s possible that it was never completed. In January of 1783 Mozart admitted to his father that he had “the score of half a Mass . . . lying here waiting to be finished.” While it’s certain that an entire liturgical Mass was performed during the Salzburg visit, it’s uncertain whether Mozart had in fact completed the work—parts of which were subsequently lost—or whether he fashioned a complete setting by filling in the missing movements with other extant works. (The fragmentary state of the sections that do exist suggests the latter.) While Mozart was writing the Mass, Emperor Joseph II instituted reforms reining in the length and scope of sacred music. Then, in 1783, he cut funding for church music in half. Perhaps Mozart saw no financially viable future for the work. Writer Michael Steinberg puts forth two other hypotheses for Mozart’s failure to complete it: The composer worked on the Mass in the period immediately following his wedding, during which, at least insofar as he reports to his father, “I found that I have never prayed so fervently or confessed or communicated so devoutly as at [Constanze’s] side, and it was the same for her.” Steinberg suggests: “It may be that some months into his marriage his observances cooled into their previous less-fervent and less-devout temperature, with the consequence that he found it impossible to continue with his only liturgical work written not on commission or contract but ex voto.” Another possibility is that the work, written during a time when Mozart had completed other style studies and exercises, had served its self-educational purpose and lacked the tailwinds to go any further. Steinberg surmises:

It is not difficult to imagine [Mozart], early in 1873, looking through the growing pile of manuscript pages of the C-Minor Mass, scratching his head, wondering where in the world this monster wanted to go, and then, in the absence of a strong inner compulsion to move forward, deciding either to put off thinking about the problem for a while or to abandon the project then and there. After all, there was so much else to do, and surely the problem of what to perform in Salzburg would solve itself somehow.

Mozart would not compose any more works on sacred texts until his Ave Verum Corpus and the Requiem, both written in the last year of his life. The two movements that, to me, most clearly embody Mozart’s mature style—the “Kyrie” and “Gloria”—were in fact repurposed in a later cantata, Davidde penitente.

Given the evidence of absorption of new (yet old) musical styles in the Mass in C Minor and the compelling stylistic synthesis exhibited by the Concerto for Clarinet (not to mention the Requiem and other works written near the end of Mozart’s life, such as The Magic Flute), I can’t help but mourn the many musical monuments that we, lovers of Mozart, were deprived of due to his untimely death (an event that musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon labeled “the greatest tragedy in the history of music”). I admit to feeling disappointed by various editor’s “completions,” demanded by the lacunae in Mozart’s unfinished works. They’re generally excellent. But oh, that we had complete works from the composer’s own quill!

I wrote this essay when I was 38, just three years older than Mozart was when he died, just starting to feel as though I really knew what I wanted from music. Now, seven years on, I pine even more acutely for the works of “maturity” that never were. What might Mozart have done in his forties? His fifties? It was shortly after Mozart’s death that Haydn made his greatest contributions to the Mass genre and then penned two magnificent oratorios—a genre into which Mozart ventured but once, at age fifteen. A young Beethoven arrived in Vienna the year after Mozart’s death. What might that relationship have fostered? What new musical languages might Mozart have fashioned from his fecund imagination and compositional facility? Alas, we can only imagine. In the meantime, how lucky we are that so many scores remain from this once-in-a-century, gorgeous musical mind. Mozart’s music has always been and will remain, for millennia to come, the epitome of Enlightenment balance and the paragon of grace. Reviewing the Concerto for Clarinet at its 1791 premiere, Bernhard Weber wrote: “Such an abundance of beauty almost tires the soul, and the effect of the whole is sometimes obscured thereby. But happy the artist whose only fault lies in an all too great perfection.”