Music has been known to help people find common ground, so it's not surprising that there have been concerts aimed at bringing the Baltimore community closer together lately. An event on Saturday organized by a Peabody Institute graduate student provides another example, and another opportunity.
"American Masses: An Evening of American Choral Music" did not start out to make a post-Freddie Gray statement. The first intention for tenor and choral conductor Joshua Glassman was to provide a performance of new music for a cappella chorus, "An American Mass," composed by Peter Dayton, a fellow Peabody grad student.
"I was thinking about what else I would put on the program to go with Peter's work," says Glassman, 25, who received his master's degree at Peabody in May (and sang in the new opera "Stinney").
"It hit me after the rioting in Baltimore and the week of peaceful cleanup and protest that followed: A program of American music by Caucasian and African American composers, music that would honor Caucasian and African American traditions," Glassman says.
The resulting mixture includes folk hymns and spirituals, along with two compositions that employ age-old Latin texts: Samuel Barber's "Agnus Dei," the vocal version of his famous "Adagio for Strings," and "Ave Maria" by R. Nathaniel Dett, who, in 1908, became the first African American to receive a bachelor's degree in music from Oberlin College in Ohio.
The concert will be held at one of Baltimore's historic churches, St. John's in the Village, dating from 1843.
"One of our goals was not to do this at Peabody," Dayton, 25, says, "but to break the institutional umbilical cord and get outside the enclosure."
Dayton, who is doing his post-graduate work at Peabody with exceptional composer Michael Hersch, does not use any sacred texts in "An American Mass." Each movement is a setting of a text by an American poet dealing with such themes as love, regret and death.
The full work will be in two parts, totaling 10 movements. Dayton has completed eight. Three of those, put together under the title "Light & Mystery: Suite from 'An American Mass,' Part I," will be performed Saturday.
"I have always been passionate about visual art and poetry and [before choosing music] was going to be a writer, concentrating on poetry," Dayton says. "I've been in a relationship with a poet for five years now, and he introduced me to a lot of writers that I wouldn't have known."
Among those writers is Ronald Johnson, whose short poem "The Core" is packed with vivid imagery; and May Swenson, whose "I Will Be Earth" is an almost giddy celebration of what Dayton describes as "earthly love — a more poetic take on 'You're the peanut butter, I'm the jelly.'"
The third selection is "Just Walking Around," Dayton's setting of a poem by John Ashbery that conjures up the journey of a relationship: "Now that the end is near/ the segments of the trip swing open like an orange. There is light in there, and mystery and food … if I am still there, grant that we may see each other again."
"I find spiritual qualities in non-religious texts," Dayton says. "I'm expanding on what is considered spiritual — and defining what is sacred for oneself is an American precept. There are so many religious traditions. We want to represent a lot of them in this concert, a whole tasting menu and not just one entree."
To serve that meal, Glassman wanted to engage "the best musicians possible," and that led to his first experience with crowdsourcing. A Kickstarter campaign raised more than $4,500 to pay the singers.
"We've had very generous donations from people across the country," Glassman says, "not just friends and families and friends of friends. We got a $100 check with a handwritten note from a woman in South Carolina who said she likes to help anything that involves the arts and young musicians."