As a kid in Catholic school, I used to play the banjo at Mass.

This was because of a confluence of cultural factors. First of all, I grew up in the 70s, when the liturgical reforms of Vatican II were being exploited to their fullest. Centuries of inaccessible Latin rites seemed to be dropped overnight in favor of the With-It Folk Mass, and there was an immediate demand for church musicians who could imitate the stylings of the Partridge Family.

Nuns threw off their habits and took up brightly colored polyester clothing and (in the unfortunate case of my fourth grade teacher) the electric bass.

Secondly, my parents had let me quit piano in favor of banjo lessons, because in every way possible I wanted to be like Steve Martin. I took lessons for four years – long enough to do a creditable rendition of the theme from “The Beverly Hillbillies” – but I eventually came to thesorry conclusion that the banjo was not ever going to impress girls. I should have stayed with it. But I did join the folk group in my parish and played at Mass every week. It was, in a word, bad.

So it was with some skepticism that I checked out a new mass setting that a colleague recommended: Minnesota composer Carol Barnett’s The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass. But as soon as I heard the  iece, I couldn’t wait to do it. The traditional mass texts (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) are all present, but in most cases are reimagined in English by the poet and playwright Malisha Chamberlain,  nd juxtaposed with stanzas of an original folk hymn (“It’s true, God loved the world so dear . . .”), performed by the band and their lead singer. The piece is unique, and it’s wonderful.

Speaking of unique: the other multi-movement work on our program takes its name from a magazine column. “Americana” was the most popular monthly feature in H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury magazine in the late 1920s and early 30s. The column was made up entirely of excerpts from other  ublications: newspaper articles, classified advertisements, tracts, pamphlets, etc., which Mencken thought were representative of the lamentable state of American culture.

For his 1932 choral suite, composer Randall Thompson chose several entries from Mencken’s column to set to music, verbatim. The texts include: a single belligerent sentence from a Protestant sermon; a newspaper advice column written by a fortune- teller; an anti-drinking leaflet by the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union; and a classified ad for a self- published collection of inspirational poetry (“ . . . all album with Joy, Love, Faith, Abundance, Victory, Beauty, and Mastery!”) I know of no other piece like it.

Rounding out our program is a colorful motet by the first truly American composer, William Billings; a choral arrangement of one of Aaron Copland’s beloved Old American Songs; a set of four superb hymn  nd spiritual arrangements by Alice Parker and Robert Shaw; and a better- known piece of Randall  hompson, his eloquent setting of Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star.” None of these feature  he banjo, alas. (Or the accordion, fortunately.)

MATTHEW GREER

Quintessence was formed in 1986, and that makes this year our 25th anniversary. So when it came time to
plan the season's concerts, I thought "Birthdays and Anniversaries" would be a pretty nifty theme, and I
figured that the bulk of the music on the program would be by composers who were celebrating a significant
anniversary in 2011. After all, most any year brings some jubilee or another. 2010, for instance, was a pretty
good year for this sort of thing: there were anniversaries for Chopin, Schumann and Barber. I settled on the
theme just in time to avoid being reprimanded by my board, and season brochures were printed.
Then, sometime last fall, I sat down to actually compile my list: composers of choral music who were
celebrating an anniversary in 2011. After literally minutes of exhaustive internet research, this is the roster I
came up with:

Franz Liszt

Now, Liszt is a name that makes the hearts of many piano aficionados beat faster, but in choral conductors it
generally doesn't inspire much more than confused silence. Undaunted (and a little panicky), I dug into his
choral output, and discovered that old Franz did indeed write some really lovely music for choirs. His Missa
Choralis of 1865, written during one of his manic religious phases, was composed with the hopes that it would
be performed by the incomparable a cappella choir of the Sistine Chapel. When the score was rejected by the
Vatican, he added a clunky organ part and published the piece for general use. We're singing two of the
work’s five movements: the Kyrie and Benedictus. They're gorgeous.

One composer does not a birthday concert make, however, and so I decided to broaden the theme a bit, to
include music "composed for joyous occasions." Birthdays and anniversaries would be fair game, as would
weddings and coronations. Baptisms, bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras. Shopping mall openings, if necessary.
Randall Thompson's “Alleluia” may be the best?known and most?performed piece of American choral music
of the last century. It was written for a joyous occasion, the opening convocation of the new Berkshire Music
Center (now Tanglewood) in 1940. Thompson accepted the commission, but did not feel he could deliver a
joyous piece of music. The war in Europe was raging, France had just fallen to the Nazis, and Thompson
didn’t feel it appropriate to write a “triumphal” score. His “Alleluia” is introspective (the composer even
regarded it as “sad”), but it is still sung at the opening ceremonies of Tanglewood every summer, and it is
universally beloved.

On the birthday theme, we have John Rutter’s irresistible Birthday Madrigals, composed to honor the 75th
birthday of the great jazz pianist George Shearing. The five movements are settings of Elizabethan poetry in a
jazz idiom. (Honestly, several of them remind me of Burt Bacharach). Three of the movements are
accompanied by piano and bass, and Rutter is clear in the performance notes that “should a jazz pianist not be
available, it is preferable to use only double bass in performance.” In other words, it don’t mean a thing if it
ain’t got that swing.

To honor other occasions, we have the New England composer Daniel Pinkhams’s superb Wedding Cantata, a
four?movement setting of texts from the Song of Songs. And we have Benjamin Britten’s “Choral Dances from
Gloriana,” choruses from the opera he composed to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.
(Her Majesty, alas, was not amused.)

The singers of Quintessence and I are so pleased to be able to offer this concert of fantastic music, as we
celebrate 25 years of choral artistry. And I’m already thinking about next year, so be warned: 2012 will be
the hundredth anniversary of both Herman Strategier AND Igor Markevitch. I swear, these programs almost
plan themselves . . .

MATTHEW GREER

My mother made meat loaf.

More correctly, she made meat loaves: two at a time. One was for the normal people in our family, and the other was just for my sister Ann and me, because we abhorred onions. I remember this not because Mom made great meat loaf. In fact, what I remember most is that the outside was slathered with Campbell’s tomato soup, which seemed to transform during baking into a sort of gelatinous skin. Not very appetizing, as I look back on it. But thinking of her meat loaf reminds me that she not only made sure that her five children never went hungry; she also went to the trouble to accommodate our obnoxious dietary prejudices.

Planning a concert program has often been compared to planning a menu, and I think choral concerts especially tend to follow this model. They often start off with something appetizing, move on to more serious and hearty fare, and then end with something fun and fluffy. Ideally, they send the audience off feeling pleasantly satisfied, but not uncomfortably full.

This concert, ironically, doesn’t really follow that template. All of the music is about food or drink, but the program is more like a smörgåsbord, or a salad bar, or one of those ice cream shops where you can have them shmoosh gummy bears and chocolate shavings and pickled okra into your Rocky Road.

The pieces are all wonderful — really wonderful — but the program doesn’t necessarily constitute what the Cap’n Crunch commercials used to call “a balanced breakfast.”

The centerpiece of our program is Bob Chilcott’s Fragments From His Dish, a work that features settings of six marvelously disparate texts, including an Ogden Nash poem, a diary entry by Samuel Pepys, and an anonymous 18th century newspaper account of the baking of an enormous pie. Chilcott, a former member of and arranger for The King’s Singers, does a splendid job of bringing out the character of each text. The set is gorgeous, and great fun.

This cycle by a British composer is balanced on the second half of the program by an American set. Paul Carey’s inventive Play With Your Food! is a collection of wonderfully vivid poems about berries, mashed potatoes, Malt-o-Meal, and other delicacies. There’s even a song about those disgusting packaged peanut butter and cracker combinations you can buy from a vending machine.

Of course, that particular song isn’t really about peanut butter crackers at all; it’s about the love between a father and son. And that’s the thing about this program: none of this music is really about food. It’s about the emotions associated with food, and chief among these is love. The great M.F.K. Fisher wrote, “When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it . . . and it is all one.”

In that sense, most every piece on this program is about love. There’s “If Music Be the Food of Love,” of course, in a setting by David Dickau. There’s Samuel Barber’s The Coolin, one of the most unabashedly romantic pieces of choral music of the last century. There’s a great arrangement of k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving.” And, speaking of Paul Carey, the fourth song of his set is arguably the sexiest song ever written about a blueberry muffin.

So, we hope you enjoy this program, and we hope that you’ll go somewhere afterward and share a drink and a meal with someone dear to you. A meat loaf is rarely just a meat loaf, after all. And sometimes, love is the absence of onions.

MATTHEW GREER