Description

Suspend any doubts you may have about classical choral “crossover”: Carol Barnett’s The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass is tremendously powerful music, doing justice to both its parental musical styles. Incorporating bluegrass instruments, Barnett adapts the ancient Mass text for a modern sensibility, dealing with issues of social conscience and building community.

As Barnett blends two musical worlds, so do the composers featured in the first half of the concert. Harry Burleigh and William Dawson were among the pioneers who transferred African-American spirituals into a choral guise, a tradition later carried by Moses Hogan. Kevin Siegfried dresses nineteenth-century American Shaker tunes in sumptuous modern harmonies. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Frenchman Maurice Duruflé went back even further for inspiration: to medieval chant.

Ensemble Photos

Cascadian Chorale. Photo: Jeff Carlson