“I’m excited about it,” Habermann says. “It’s everything from historical cathedral music from South America — mission music way out in the jungles that was written and it’s a miracle that we have it — all the way through Mass of the Americas, a new piece written by a North American composer a couple years ago. It’s a nice variety, and it’s a lot of fun, rhythmic stuff.”

Habermann says the program, which also includes several compositions written in the 17th and 18th centuries, extends a Desert Chorale tradition that predates his arrival. Founder Larry Bandfield loved Latin American music, Habermann says, and Santa Fe’s location in the Southwest made it natural to keep exploring that rich source of material. La Rocca’s work has been performed by Desert Chorale once before — the composer says he believes that occurred in 2016 — but Mass of the Americas represented a leap to another level.

The piece started, conceptually, from an idea by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, who wanted to hear a Mass similar to what may have been performed in California centuries ago. Then La Rocca, composer in residence at the Benedict XVI Institute, took it to its logical conclusion.

“I said, ‘If we’re going to be looking at the history of this thing, how did those Franciscan missionaries get to California in the first place?” La Rocca says. “They came from Mexico and were preceded by other missionaries. I said, ‘If we’re going to pay tribute to the Indigenous cultural traditions that eventually manifest in these things the Franciscans did with the Native Americans, we ought to go all the way back to the Aztecs and not just blend Spanish and English. We ought to do something that uses the Aztec language, Nahuatl.”

La Rocca did his homework and discovered there are still 2 million Nahuatl native speakers in Mexico and Guatemala, and going back a few centuries, he found a book written by a priest who had an Aztec mother and a Spanish father. That book led La Rocca to another discovery: a translation in Spanish and Nahuatl of the “Ave Maria,” a veritable choral Rosetta Stone.

The composer fashioned the Nahuatl into a verse for Mass of the Americas, and Desert Chorale will perform that passage as part of the second movement of Songs of the Americas. When asked if it was out of his ordinary purview to be conducting musical archaeology, La Rocca says that that’s more common than you might think.

“I wouldn’t characterize Masses as dramatic works; they’re not like operas,” he says. “But when John Adams does Golden Girls of the West or when he does Doctor Atomic, he’s got to know something about the Gold Rush days, and he’s got to know something about the whole unfolding of the Manhattan Project. In preparing for dramatic works, I think it’s not unusual for a composer to have to do research. But that’s not typically the case of writing music for a Mass, unless you’ve got some historical subject connected to it as we did in this case.”

La Rocca, who has a doctorate in music from the University of California, Berkeley, says he knew he wanted to be a composer by age 14.

Up and away

First, Desert Chorale will tackle Songs of the Americas. Then starting July 21, the choral group will take on composers as varied as Antonín Dvořák and Dolly Parton in their second program entitled Out of This World. Joshua Habermann, Desert Chorale’s longtime artistic director, says the ensemble’s ability to switch gears and tackle different material is part of what makes it special.

“In the professional chamber choir world — in the U.S. and abroad too — there’s a lot of groups that are specialist groups,” Habermann says. “There are early music groups, and they just do music before 1750, and they’re amazing at it. There are groups like The Crossing-Philadelphia, and all they do is new music. They’re doing a million commissions, and everything is straight out of the composer’s pen. We are none of those things and all of those things.”

Out of This World will feature two pieces of music that are making their world premiere. One is by commissioned composer Daniel Knaggs, who took words from German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-16301631) and set them to music.

The second world premiere piece, by Andalena Jackson, is called Thoughts; Jackson won a collaborative program between Desert Chorale and Chicago-based professional chamber choir a cappella called Her Voice.

The program is for “mentoring young female composers and trying to get them composition opportunities and get their pieces performed by the nation’s best choirs,” Habermann says. “We signed on to that, and we’re going to be performing her piece called Thoughts;”We’ve been in a mentoring relationship with her where we workshop the piece and help her tweak it a little bit and give her feedback, and then we’re going to perform it.”

Habermann says soprano Chelsea Helm from the choir will step out andsing as a soloist during Dvořák’s “Song to the Moon” from the opera Rusalka.

Desert Chorale will perform two songs arranged by Shawn Kirchner — “Angel Band” and “Hallelujah” — in the second half of the program, and Parton’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” will also be part of that passage.

“It’s all relatively contemporary,” Habermann says. “It’s really very varied in terms of pop and jazz and some hardcore classical compositions and everything in between.” — S.F.