After the bombast and drama of the Romantic era, twentieth-century music experienced diverging trends. Some composers moved away from Romantic traditions by creating completely new styles of composition that broke all the rules, as in twelve-tone pieces that mixed and matched the twelve different pitches in mathematically-determined orders, or experimental pieces that determined musical events with a roll of the dice. Other composers saw an opportunity to reconnect with music of the past, music that they found simpler and more inspiring. They studied music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras and found renewed appreciation for the elegant beauty, counterpoint, and expression of these works. In their own composition, they wrote pieces that managed to evoke simultaneously the echoes of composers from several centuries before while infusing the work with a personal and modern harmonic language.

In this concert, we will look at several twentieth-century composers who wrote this sort of music, music that works both referentially and on its own artistic merits, and compare their creative twentieth-century musical explorations with the original source material. We will begin with Stravinsky's 1959 completion of Carlo Gesualdo's 1603 motet Illumina Nos, which Stravinsky wrote on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Gesualdo's birth. According to Stravinsky's assistant and friend Robert Craft, "What he has done is to recompose the whole from the point of view of his added parts, with a result that is not pure Gesualdo, but a fusion of the two composers."

Giovanni Gabrieli's Jubilate Deo, written in late 16th-century Venice, is a stunning example of the polychoral style, in which the choir is divided spatially into different groups that sing in alternation. This technique, developed originally for the unique physical layout of the cathedral of St. Mark's in Venice, inspired every other composer on the concert, and for centuries has been used as a compositional technique that immediately evokes the idea of stile antico, the antique style.

We will also perform a polychoral work by Gabrieli's German student, the towering figure in German musical history, Heinrich Schütz. That work, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, uses polychoral techniques, and itself was a source of inspiration for the next work on the concert, J.S. Bach's motet masterpiece of the same title and much of the same text. Bringing this technique and this German tradition into the twentieth century, we will perform Hugo Distler's haunting 1934 setting of the same text, which combines polychoral writing with harmonic language that sounds at time medieval, at times Baroque, and at times jazzy. The creativity and rhythmic contrasts in this work contribute to its uniquely innovative and exciting sound.

The concert's central work will be Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir. Again, this work uses the polychoral style, but using lush harmonies and melodic lines that cause this work to sound like nothing else on this concert. Although the Swiss composer Frank Martin wrote this work in 1922, he did not permit its performance until 1963, as he had felt that the work was so deeply personal in its spirituality that it was unworthy of public performance. The music of this mass ranges from austere to quirky to, ultimately, joyful.