Early Music Later On
In its fiftieth season, Music Before 1800 confronts existential questions.
Photos: Tatiana Daubek
Bam…! Bam…! Bam…!
An intruder’s knock echoed on the tall wooden doors of New York City’s hallowed Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Suddenly, in the middle of the final movement of William Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices, the members of vocal ensemble The Gesualdo Six fell into a frenzy around a cornucopia-decorated table at the sanctuary’s center.
“Get down!” one member whisper- shouted. Another hissed at the startled audience to quit milling and help extinguish the hundreds of candles that twinkled throughout the nave. All the while, the sextet members’ eyes darted to one another, as if daring each other to answer the ominous call at the side door. Eventually, a sacrificial lamb was chosen: a countertenor, dressed in a black priest’s robe rather than the ensemble’s off-white Renaissance smocks and breeches. As he left to meet his fate, the last of the candles were snuffed—and then, total darkness.
Part concert, part theater experience, Secret Byrd channels the clandestine hush, and abject terror, of a sixteenth- century Catholic mass as Byrd, the great Renaissance composer, might have experienced it: forced underground by threat of murder by Queen Elizabeth I’s Anglican-Reformationist spies. Since the work’s premiere in 2023 (marking the 400th anniversary of Byrd’s death), it has toured extensively throughout the United Kingdom and United States. Yet among its many august stops, the Saint John the Divine performances were special, and not only because the Cathedral is North America’s largest, with 177-foot ceilings and a full nine seconds of reverb. On that November evening, Secret Byrd’s creator and director, Bill Barclay, presented the work as part of the fiftieth-anniversary season of Music Before 1800 (MB1800), the venerated early music concert presenter for which he has served as artistic director since 2022.
Barclay is only MB1800’s second artistic director. His 47-year predecessor, series founder Louise Basbas, left him an airtight but staid formula: cozy afternoon concerts of talent both local and interna- tional, set in an unassuming northern Manhattan church. In New York City’s ever-changing early music scene, Barclay has had to reconsider the proverbial space that this storied series occupies. Barclay’s programming mix is satisfying, if unconventional. His seasons fore- ground narrative and draw on robust interdisciplinary partnerships, weaving new questions about early music’s origins, definitions, and exclusions into thematic threads that tie neatly together. With this revamp, MB1800 now offers fresh inroads for novices, extending early music’s relevance and appeal beyond its traditional Eurocentric boundaries, and freeing it from the stuffy reputation that has caused many of New York’s major conce∂rt presenters to divest altogether from the subgenre.
WHEN LOUISE BASBAS FOUNDED MB1800 in 1975, New York City’s early music scene was just gaining its footing amid a broader early music revival. At the time, early music in the city was largely a scholarly pursuit: the community wasn’t small, Basbas told me, but the center of gravity fell with academically oriented collegiums operated out of universities around town. (The late, great musicologist Richard Taruskin ran a notable one at Columbia.) Among Basbas’s enterprising peers was Chamber Music America founder and lutenist Michael Jaffee, whose Waverly Consort had been a persistent presence beginning in the early 1960s. Basbas had just started as organist and music director at the Corpus Christi Church, the same Baroque Revival sanctuary, just off Columbia’s campus, which serves as the MB1800’s home base today. She termed the series’ origin story as one of supply-and-demand: very few venues were available to house the city’s early musicians, and her job came with the perk of free access to a marble-tiled room, its acoustics crisp and responsive— perfect for chamber and vocal music.
And so, with support from Corpus Christi’s rector, Basbas began presenting friendly concerts of medieval, renaissance, baroque, and classical programming, always in meticulous balance, during the church’s only open timeslot, on Sunday afternoons. In the early days, budgets were shoestring: “The performers usually had enough for a cup of coffee afterwards,” said Basbas. But she formed a board within a couple years, and soon MB1800 was raking in New York State grants and private donations as a nonprofit organization. An expanded budget allowed Basbas to augment local programming with the best players from other US cities: groups from Baltimore, Washington, DC, Boston, and farther afield dot MB1800’s 1980s listings.
Still, with longstanding outlets for scholarship and a homecourt advantage, Europe was further along in the early music revival. Soon, Basbas strengthened MB1800’s presenter status with auspicious fly-ins from abroad. The first came in the 1979-80 season, when the pioneering British male vocal quartet Hilliard Ensemble made their US debut. The ensemble’s medieval polyphony “knocked the sold-out audience sideways,” according to viola da gamba player Wendy Gillespie’s account in a 2021 episode of her podcast, Harmonia Uncut. Gillespie had urged Basbas to program the quartet in the first place. (Emma Kirkby and Anthony Rooley, perhaps Britain’s most famous pair for lute-songs, also performed that season.)
By 1990, MB1800 had fallen into a rhythm it maintained until Basbas’s last programmed season, in 2022-23. Between 50 and 70 percent of its annual offerings came from US ensembles, always including a few from New York City—Anonymous 4, the vocal quartet whose recordings of Gregorian chant and medieval polyphony are among the first by women, were common fixtures. But MB1800 also became a common place for European ensembles’ New York City debuts: in the decade after the Hilliards, the series hosted local debuts for Britain’s Tallis Scholars, whose recordings of Tudor polyphony gained the now-standards their status, as well as for the Spanish viola da gamba virtuoso Jordi Savall, just a couple years before he helped to usher in his instrument’s renaissance via a French Baroque soundtrack to Alain Corneau’s 1991 film Tous les matins du monde.
Basbas stayed ever committed to that domestic-import balance, even as early music factions in New York began to schism. In 2008, Juilliard’s now-heralded Historical Performance program began. Though it wasn’t nearly the high-octane pressure cooker it is today, the program bucked much of the scholarly performance practice bred by the “old guard” of early musicians in favor of a conservatory’s learning-through-doing model: heavier emphasis on practicing and polishing, perhaps at the expense of some historical accuracy.
Over the program’s first few years, The New York Times heralded Juilliard as catalyst for a rebirth, or re-arrival, of early music in New York City. The steady proliferation of Juilliard-alum-driven early music ensembles and events bear this idea out—as I write, I’m missing one of those collectives’ Baroque nights at a local dive bar in Upper Manhattan. But, as Gwendolyn Toth, the harpsichordist, organist, conductor, and founder of the ensemble ARTEK (Art of the Early Keyboard), pointed out in an early-October panel discussion about the state of early music in New York City, the coverage of Juilliard in the Times implied that there had been little to no historical performance already in the city’s scene. At that panel discussion, Toth and fellow old-guarder Patricia Ann Neely, founder and director of the viol consort Abendmusik, bemoaned such erasure of important New York City early music precedent and a lack of connection between generations overall, while hurling some choice words at “the J school.”
The panel’s sole Juilliard grad scrambled for a response, but fellow panelist Louise Basbas stayed admirably neutral, one foot firmly on either side of the schism. In her last decade at MB1800’s helm, Basbas programmed plenty of rigorous scholarship—I especially enjoyed an authoritative, exhaustive, and supremely well-sung Ockeghem@600 project from Boston’s Blue Heron ensemble and a song-and-dance voyage through the life of eventual Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, from Philadelphia-based Renaissance woodwind band Piffaro. But Basbas is invested in the future, especially locally: Juilliard415, the Juilliard program’s flagship ensemble, has performed on MB1800’s series most every year since 2011, and alumni bands that sometimes make the treatise-huggers bristle—the rollicking Ruckus, with their Bach rewrites, or the bubbly Twelfth Night and their semi-staged Handel love stories—have made heralded appearances. They’re always innovative and invigorating, even if their experiments occasionally take them far from the notes on the page.
Basbas told me that she considers the shift from emphasizing scholarship to focusing on performance among the most significant changes within New York City’s early music scene during her long tenure, but she forewent any value judgment. The old guard’s scholarship- driven approach (and reticence to draw on Juilliard’s immense talent pool) isn’t bringing in audiences, so they’re fading into the background. ARTEK’s most recent performance at MB1800 was in 2005, and Abendmusik made their debut on Secret Byrd, well into the Barclay era—and even then, for all the power of the show’s drama, the consort faltered during the show’s preamble, at one p∂oint counting beats out loud to regain their composure.
Violist Dan McCarthy performs with Abendmusik
BASBAS TOLD ME THAT HER resignation was long overdue when she stepped down in 2022. She sought a successor who understood the spirit of the series, but who would continue at right angles to her established tradition. Enter Bill Barclay. Primarily an actor and composer before taking on administrative roles, Barclay oversaw the music program at Shakespeare’s Globe for much of the 2010s and took the helm at MB1800 in 2022, learning the ropes with a pre-picked Basbas season before programming MB1800’s forty- ninth year in 2023-24, as Basbas assumed her current position as board president. Growing pains aside, Barclay and Basbas are vocal about their mutual admiration and fondness—balm in a field full of contentious administrative turnovers.
Barclay hasn’t scrapped Basbas’s time-honored Sunday afternoon routine entirely, but he’s begun to experiment, largely in the vein of Secret Byrd. Barclay’s large-scale works of “concert theatre” play heavily into his programming. He’s a maven of the format, and his own separate nonprofit, Concert Theatre Works, Inc., tours compact programs to ensembles and presenters around the world, MB1800 included. Barclay deliberately blurs the lines of music and theatrics, and the result provides added value for both veteran concertgoers and novices.
Gambist and cellist Caroline Nicolas
Perhaps Barclay’s most important edict was implementing a pay-what- you-can option for most MB1800 performances—one fewer barrier to entry for new audiences. It’s a crucial step to filling a gap in the New York City early music scene’s makeup, he says. Larger presenters like Lincoln Center are largely divesting from most early music, perhaps because of its reputation as elitist, white, and patriarchal. On the DIY scale, Juilliard grads are creating phenomenal, scrappy upstart series in coffee shops and small churches, a mad fight for slim resources and even slimmer audiences.
IF A “MIDDLE BAND” OF EARLY MUSIC in New York—established but not establishment—exists, it is hard to pin down, says Barclay. The ARTEKs and Abendmusiks of the city are still puttering along, but as their audience base shrinks, one thing New York City misses is a tenured, rostered Baroque orchestra, akin to San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale, Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, or Toronto’s Tafelmusik. In those cities, early music factors into the permanent musical consciousness in a way that it just can’t in New York City, where the Baroque orchestra of record is Juilliard415, an ever-rotating student ensemble nestled within a huge institution flush with competing priorities.
That makes it ever harder for audiences to break in—and though his novel collaborations seem to be doing everything right, Barclay is dismayed at the return on his investment. The number of listeners in MB1800’s seats is dwindling, and subscriber counts hover dangerously low. “I feel like early music has won the battle, but lost the war,” Barclay told me. Some have been quick to levy criticisms since Barclay stepped into the head role. I’ve fielded comments from early music enthusiasts who take umbrage at Barclay’s definitions of “historically informed.” Yes, the Harlem Chamber Players did play The Chevalier on modern instruments and bows, a cardinal sin on a historical-performance series (though it’s worth noting that Joseph Bologne helped popularize the bow design of François Tourte, from which all modern bows take their inspiration). And Ravel and Debussy were notably not composing “before 1800.” But where else, Barclay contests, can one hear those pieces on period- appropriate gut?
“This is the Bill Barclay show,” I over- heard a Juilliard professor remark after the Rilke show. To an extent, Barclay does center himself in MB1800’s programming, but it reads as part of this larger, communally-oriented gambit toward narrative programming. Early music is a niche within a niche—a “final boss” one only encounters after thorough interaction with classical music at large— and constructing a story around a tradition that’s often construed as abstract provides a shortcut. (Besides, self-presentation is true to MB1800’s origins; Louise Basbas’s Corpus Christi Church choir appeared on the series’ slate most every year until the pandemic.)
And yet, as the Gesualdo Six approached that climax of Secret Byrd, I never felt as if I was watching an ego trip. I was fully engrossed with the sextet’s sumptuous lines of polyphony as they dissipated into the vast cathedral. When that door threatened to give way to its battering, my heart jumped. I’m fortunate not to know the feeling of persecution so intimately, but for a moment, I tasted that unsettling fight-or-flight reaction, and I’d venture that was a new experience for many of the Upper West Siders around me. Moments like these provide new ways to empathize with the world that gave rise to early music and to its revivals—and to consider how we can appreciate it anew today.
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