The second and third concert programs of the Santa Fe Desert Chorale’s 2025 season are celebrations of contemporary American composers and their choral music, including a large-scale work accompanied by chamber orchestra and the world premiere of a major commissioned piece.

Q&As with some of the composers and featured performers are also on the schedule, as is a chance to hear three chorale members in their alternate plumage as solo songbirds.

MASS FOR THE ENDANGERED

When audience members arrive for Mass for the Endangered, they’ll see something very rare at a Desert Chorale concert — a bunch of music stands.

Like an endangered species, instrumentalists have rarely been spotted in large numbers at chorale events in the past, but both works on the program — Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands and Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered — call for chamber orchestra accompaniment.

“We’re so excited to have them for these two works,” Artistic Director Joshua Habermann says. “The orchestra for the Shaw is smaller, it’s a string component.

“For Sarah Snider’s piece we’ll add winds, harp, and piano. It’s really a beautiful orchestration,” he adds, “and the size will work superbly in the cathedral.”

The chorale performed one movement of To the Hands on its The American Immigrant Experience in 2023, and Habermann was so impressed that he looked for the first possible opportunity to program the entire work.

Shaw is one of the most eclectic and highly acclaimed American composers of the 21st century. She’s also the youngest person ever to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, at age 30 in 2013 for her Partita for Eight Voices. It was commissioned by The Crossing, which specializes in contemporary music and describes it as “as the most frequently performed of our more than 100 commissioned works over nearly fifteen years.”

An accomplished vocalist and violinist as well as composer, Shaw has written for an impressively wide range of performers, from flamenco and pop singer Rosalía, dancer Tiler Peck, and rapper Nas to Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, and the New York Philharmonic. She has also received four Grammy Awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale University, and a Thomas J. Watson Foundation fellowship.

To the Hands was part of a commissioning project in which seven contemporary composers responded to a section of Dieterich Buxtehude’s 1680 Membra Jesu Nostri.

It’s a seven-part cantata, with each section addressing a part of Jesus’ crucified body; Shaw’s response is to the section titled “Ad Manus” (“To the Hands”). For her response, the composer added text drawn from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Zechariah to Buxtehude’s New Testament text.

Asked to describe its sonic profile, Habermann says, “It has 17th-century German music in its DNA. There are moments when you’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s Baroque music, it sounds like Buxtehude,’ and then the string group will start playing in a completely different key.

“It’s a fully contemporary piece of music. Caroline Snider’s is too, and all of it is pleasing to the ear to me. None of it, I think, is particularly spiky or inaccessible or overly academic. Shaw and Snider share a desire for communication that’s possible on a first listen.”

Habermann sees a shared thematic connection in the two works, in addition to their immediacy.

“In To the Hands, we are asked to consider what responsibility we have to other people in need,” he writes in his program notes. “Mass for the Endangered takes the same consideration and expands it to the natural environment that is the source of our lives. The composers of these works are asking us to reflect on the nature of our relationships, and the duty owed to those with whom we share life on this planet.”

Snider’s work was also written as part of a larger project of contemporary takes on historic constructs — the Mass Re-Imaginings project that Wall Street’s Trinity Church launched in 2018.

The composer describes it as “a hymn for the voiceless and the discounted, a requiem for the not-yet-gone.” Snider’s Mass is divided into the standards sections of the original — Kyrie, Gloria, Alleluia, Credo, Sanctus/Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. Like Shaw, Snider uses additional text, here by writer and visual artist Nathaniel Bellows, in counterpoint with the traditional Latin.

Habermann describes the vocal writing as very thoughtful and very smart. “Although it has some rich, complex sonorities, the notes are easily found by the voices,” he says. “It’s the mark of a good composer, someone who can create music that’s both technically and artistically pleasing.”

The orchestration is “very colorful,” he says, thanks to way Snider uses the winds, harp, and piano, with the latter two instruments often providing a twinkly, ethereal quality.

Snider and Shaw both use harmonics in the strings, which are created by lightly touching the string instead of holding it down firmly. “This will create a floating, disembodied sound that I think in the cathedral will work really well,” Habermann says.

The two works share one other interesting aspect. Snider’s “Credo” is based on a ground composed by Shaw. (A ground is a bass line with an implied tonality that is repeated throughout a work.)

ROOTS & RIVERS

If you think the Roots & Rivers program looks like a “Greatest Hits” compilation from the chorale’s recent years, you’re right.

It’s not because the group is lazy — it’s cutting a new album later this summer featuring music it has commissioned in recent years — and the three summer performances will help get the program in top form for the recording sessions.

There’s other big news, too, in the commissioned world premiere that serves as the program’s centerpiece.

In The American Road: Six Songs of the Enslaved, Embattled and Emancipated, Nigerian American composer Shawn E. Okpebholo reimagines folk songs, hymns, and spirituals to trace America’s complex journey through sacrifice, oppression, healing, and hope.

“We were approached by someone who knows us and has a deep love for choral music, who said, ‘I would like to commission a major work for you,’” Habermann says of its genesis.

There was one other stipulation, “That it be a piece that can live and be performed by others.”

The commissioner is a choral director herself, and, like Habermann, was aware that new work created for the chorale may be outside the skill set of most other groups.

“Composers can sometimes go crazy,” says Habermann, “and think ‘Wow! [the Desert Chorale] is the nicest sports car, and I’m going to drive it fast, and do all the things that I could never do before.’

“And we love music like that, because it gives us a challenge, but what it doesn’t do is lead to a lot of future performances.”

The chorale artistic director defined the qualities they were looking for in the composer as “writing grippingly interesting music” that also has intellectual rigor, a melodic gift, and the qualities to fulfill the underlying mission of the commission.

“Shawn was on the short list of composers who could do that,” Habermann says, “and we just kept coming back to him because he’s a very thoughtful composer who crafts with a lot of care.”

Okpebholo has received commissions from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; the U.S. Air Force Strings; Copland House Ensemble; the Tanglewood, Aspen, and Newport classical music festivals; Urban Arias; and the Kennedy Center.

His music has been described as “devastatingly beautiful” and “fresh and new and fearless” by The Washington Post; “lyrical, complex, and singular” by The Guardian; and “dreamy and sensual” by The Boston Globe.

The six sections of The American Road are:

I. Prepare Me One Body

II. Little Cuckoo

III. Left Foot, Peg Foot

IV. Battle Cry

V. Shall We Gather at the River?

VI. Shine

Most of the tunes are traditional, including “This Little Light of Mine” and “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” in addition to “Shall We Gather at the River?” Contemporary composer-performer Rhiannon Giddens wrote the music for “Little Cuckoo.”

Other selections on the Roots & Rivers program include Reena Esmail’s “The Tipping Point” from 2021, with guest tabla player Sutanu Sur joining the 24-voice ensemble; Jocelyn Hagen’s bilingual “Caminante” from 2022; and Kile Smith’s “Northland” from 2023. Nathan Salazar is the collaborative pianist.