The Renaissance was not merely an artistic period; it was a reawakening of the human spirit. Across Europe, composers sought to make the invisible visible, and to give sound to balance, proportion, devotion, grief, wonder, and transcendence. Music became architecture in motion: lines woven together with such ele­gance and inevitability that centuries later these works still seem suspended outside of time. Yet the Renaissance has never truly ended. Its ideas continue to echo through contemporary composers who return to these ancient texts, forms, and sonorities in search of something en­during within our own unsettled age. Tonight’s program explores that ongoing conversation across centuries. Ancient texts reappear in modern harmonic language; Renaissance polyphony becomes the seed for contemporary meditation; composers separated by hundreds of years stand side by side, asking the same human questions. What does it mean to rejoice? To seek light in darkness? To mourn? To long for peace? Though musical languages evolve, the emotional and spiritual impulses beneath them remain profoundly constant.

The program opens with two settings of Exultate Justi (“Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous”), from Psalm 33, first by the late Renaissance composer and Franciscan friar, Lodovico Grossi da Viad­ana and then followed by contemporary film composer John Williams from the film, Empire of the Sun. Viadana’s setting emerges from the late Renaissance tradition, filled with unanimous declarations, buoyant imitation, and radiant clarity, while Williams transforms the same sa­cred exuberance into cinematic transcendence, using soaring lines and luminous harmonies that feel both ancient and modern at once. Where Viadana’s rejoicing is measured, liturgi­cal; Williams’ is unconstrained, almost primal, a cry wrung from the far side of suffering. Heard in succession, the two settings become a kind of diptych: the same ancient summons, answered across the centuries in utterly different tongues. Together, they demonstrate how sacred joy continues to find new voices in every age.

Two settings of Te Lucis Ante Terminum (“To Thee Before the Close of Day”) follow, offering music of evening, protection, and contemplation. Thomas Tallis, who navigated the theological convulsions of Tudor England with a rare and serene intactness, crafts music of extraordinary restraint and purity, allowing the text to unfold with serene inevitability. Liturgically speaking, it is the hymn sung at Compline, the last of the daily offices, a prayer to commend the sleeping self to divine protection. The persistence of this prayer across fifteen centuries of musical settings is its own form of testimony. J. Aaron Mc­Dermid’s approaches the same threshold, that border between wakefulness and surrender, be­tween the known and the nocturnal unknown. More apparent in McDermid’s setting is the drama of “nightmares” with a lush, dissonant language that is neither imitative nor indifferent to its predecessors. His harmonies are warmer, more immediately embracing; the petition for protection feels less austere and more intimate. Together, Tallis and McDermid remind us that prayer for protection at night is not merely a historical curiosity but a perennial human need: the nightly renegotiation between self-preserva­tion and trust, between the sovereign self and the darkness that will not be commanded.

The beloved Ubi Caritas of Maurice Duruflé serves as both centerpiece and bridge in our first half. Rooted deeply in Gregorian chant, as all of Duruflé’s choral oeuvre, the work floats between antiquity and modernity. His genius lay in making the ancient chant not a relic to be preserved but a living root from which new mu­sic could grow. Duruflé’s pandiatonic harmonic language is unmistakably twentieth century, yet every phrase grows organically from the precise contours of the ancient melody. The result is music of extraordinary warmth and humility, both ancient and modern, reminding us that compassion, charity, and even love itself may be humanity’s most timeless inheritance.

The first half concludes with another dialogue across eras through the text O Nata Lux (“O Light Born of Light”). Tallis again offers clarity, balance, and luminous simplicity within formu­laic cadences, while contemporary American composer Douglas Byler expands the text into accessible lyrical landscapes rich with emotional immediacy. Tallis’ setting, less than two minutes in length, is perhaps the most perfectly achieved compression in the choral repertoire. Written in broad, largely homophonic strokes; the five voic­es moving together with true chordal gravity. Yet within this apparent simplicity he deploys the English “false relation.” This is the simultaneous sounding of a note and its chromatic neighbor which produces a quality of harmonic ache, as if the music itself were reaching toward something it cannot quite grasp. The Transfiguration, after all, is the moment when the eternal becomes briefly, blindingly visible through the mortal (the invisible, visible). Tallis finds its sonic equivalent in a handful of extraordinary chords. Byler, on the other hand, seeks warmth through beautifully shaped lines that honor the texts longing for light. The ancient plea for divine illumination becomes newly urgent in modern sound; it is consolation as much as aspiration.

The second half turns toward lamentation, longing, and ultimately peace. Z. Randall Stroope and Tomás Luis de Victoria each set the Lamentations of Jeremiah, texts born from devastation and exile. O vos omnes expresses the full catastrophe of grief: the Book of Lam­entations is among scripture’s most unsparing texts, a poet’s raw testimony to the destruction of Jerusalem and the apparent silence of God. Stroope’s contemporary response embraces a broad emotional palette, from despair to anger, drawing listeners into the anguish and vulnerability of collective grief. Victoria’s setting is among the most profound achievements of Renaissance sacred music, filled with austere beauty and tremendous emotional restraint. To­gether, the works reveal that lamentation is not weakness, but one of humanity’s oldest forms of robust prayer.

We break from the usual pairings to do another “pre-modern” setting. I hope, as you look upon the title (and composers) you will see and hear something that only SCMC can do for you. While this concert works toward bringing the past into the present, this is the opposite. Here, we try our hand at sending a modern “masterpiece” back to the style of yesteryear.

James Jordan’s Interpolations on Sicut Cervus acts almost like memory of itself. Built upon Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s immortal motet, it sets a psalm of spiritual thirst rendered in flawlessly arching Renaissance counterpoint, each voice a separate stream flowing toward the same source. James Jordan’s Interpolations does something at once irreverent and deeply respectful: inspired by the landmark recordings of the Jan Garbarek/Hilliard Ensemble, where a soprano saxophone improvised freely around medieval and Renaissance polyphony, Jordan introduces a jazz-inflected saxophone voice into Palestrina’s pristine texture. The choir continues largely as written; the saxophone departs into the space between phrases, exploring the long­ing the voices have named but not exhausted. Ancient and contemporary, the fixed and the improvised, the sacred and the searching: these are not opposites but companions, both reach­ing toward the same unquenchable source. The past is not discarded here; it is remembered, reshaped, and heard anew.

The program concludes with one of the most striking pairings of the evening: Palestrina’s Agnus Dei alongside Samuel Barber’s choral ar­rangement of the Adagio for Strings. Palestrina’s setting, from his Missa Papae Marcelli, represents the ideal of Renaissance sacred polyphony: balanced, transparent, eternal. Barber’s setting, by contrast, unfolds with aching intensity, its long ascending lines carrying both sorrow and yearning toward transcendence. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has become, in the near-century since its 1938 premiere, the West’s unofficial anthem of inconsolable grief. It has been performed at the deaths of presidents, in the silences that follow catastrophe, whenev­er sorrow requires a sound large enough to contain it. Composed first as a string quartet movement, arranged for string orchestra at Ar­turo Toscanini’s invitation, and then transformed in 1967 by Barber himself into a choral setting of the Mass’s Agnus Dei, the music seems to have been searching all along for these words. The transposition requires almost no alteration to the notes: the long, suspended melodic line, the slow accumulation of harmonic tension toward an unbearable climax, the eventual subsidence into exhausted stillness. It is as if the music already knew it was a prayer, and Barber simply acknowledged what was always true. Beneath the differences in these two setting lies the same plea repeated across centuries: dona nobis pacem: grant us peace.

This is perhaps the enduring message of tonight’s concert. Across five centuries, com­posers continue to return to the same texts because humanity continues to wrestle with the same hopes and fears. We still seek light against darkness, comfort against grief, beauty against chaos, and peace against violence. The Renaissance, then, cannot be confined to history books. It is renewed whenever artists look backward not in imitation, but in rediscovery. We seem to be doomed to repeat our mistakes of the past, even when ancient wisdom is given fresh voice for a new age. Still, the Renaissance spirit endures precisely because it believed humanity was capable of growth. These works survive not simply to remind us of old failures, but to challenge us toward wisdom, empathy, and renewal. If ancient voices continue to sing into our present moment, perhaps it is because they still believe we can become worthy of the beauty we create.

Exultate Justi in Domino

Ludovico Viadana

Exultate Justi (from “Empire of the Sun”)

John Williams

arr. Brian Dehn

Te Lucis Ante Terminum

Thomas Tallis

Te Lucis Ante Terminum

1. Aaron McDermid

Ubi Caritas

Maurice Duruflé

O Nata Lux

Thomas Tallis

O Nata Lux

Douglas Byler

Lamentations of Jeremiah

1. Randall Stroope

O Vos Omnes (Lamentations of Jeremiah)

Tomas Luis de Victoria

Manete vivos

Baribus and Robinus Gibbini

Interpolations on Sicut Cervus

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

arr. James Jordan

Agnus Dei

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Agnus Dei

Samuel Barber