Early Music Michigan is celebrating its 25th season with a season-finale concert titled Looking Bach: J.S. Bach and the Music of Palestrina, set for Saturday, May 30 at 3 p.m. at First Congregational Church in Kalamazoo. Music director Luke Conklin joined Cara Lieurance on Let's Hear It to discuss the program's unusual inspiration: a piece of Renaissance sheet music discovered in Bach's own handwriting.
The concert explores the relationship between two towering composers separated by nearly two centuries — Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). Conklin traces the program's concept to a seminar he took with renowned Bach scholar Christoph Wolff, former director of the Bach Archives Leipzig. "One of the most exciting things that was on the forefront of his mind was a Palestrina cantus firmus, copied out in Bach's hand from Bach's library, marked oboe," says Conklin. That discovery — that Bach was not only studying Palestrina but likely performing his music — became the heart of the concert's story.
The program features three movements from a Palestrina mass that scholars believe Bach studied closely while composing his own B minor mass, alongside Bach's motet Jesu, meine Freude (Jesus, My Joy). Conklin describes the motet as a remarkable showcase of Bach's range: "Instead of being one style from beginning to end, we see all sorts of different styles — chorale, stile antico, styles that sound like opera — all in this very compact way."
Conklin also takes an unconventional approach to the Palestrina repertoire, handing singers editions without bar lines to recreate the flowing, unmetered quality of 16th-century performance. "When I handed this out to everybody, suddenly things I was asking for in terms of the style of Palestrina were just instantly there," he says.
Joining the community choir are guest instrumentalists including a baroque violinist and oboist from Cleveland and a baroque cellist from Ann Arbor.
Looking ahead to next season, Conklin plans programs featuring Jewish composer Salamone Rossi and a multi-composer exploration of the famous Renaissance tune L'homme armé.
Tickets are pay-what-you-will and available at earlymusicmichigan.org.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
