Before it belonged to composers, this music belonged to anyone who could carry a tune.

Antonín Dvořák spent a career proving that was enough. His Four Choruses, Op. 29 take the folk melodies of his own country and treat them with the seriousness reserved for sacred text. Béla Bartók went walking into the Hungarian countryside with notebooks and came back with treasure.

Then the room itself changes. In Ēriks Ešenvalds’s Northern Lights, the singers set water-tuned glasses ringing and power chimes shimmering beneath an old Latvian text about a boy watching the sky. The sound doesn’t seem to arrive from the front of the church so much as gather overhead.

And the afternoon closes with R. Nathaniel Dett — who found in Dvořák’s example the permission to bring that same devotion to the American spiritual. The Chariot Jubilee is where that tradition arrives.

Four composers. Two continents. One shared conviction that the songs people sing to one another are worth everything art can bring to them.

The program also looks forward with two new American works: Andrew Vu’s A Golden Day and Kabanya Vinson’s All Creatures of Our God and King, receiving its world premiere.

Come hear where they lead.

Purchase Tickets Here: https://www.washingtonmasterchorale.org/pathways-of-light.html