Run Time: Approx. 5 minutes

In this short ode to Bach, Samuel Barber takes the centuries-old Lutheran plainsong melody, Christe, du Lamm Gottes (“Christ, Thou Lamb of God”), which Bach harmonized for his Cantata No. 23 around 1717, and reimagines it for modern brass choir. He begins with a series of his own voicings, and though they hew fairly closely to the Baroque style, the use of timpani, cinematically sweeping lines, and a more simplistic relationship between soloists and accompaniment give his rendering a distinctly modern orchestral feeling.

Mutations is a curious title for a work like this. It carries an inherent association with biology and evolution not usually applied to music. However, Barber’s creation does indeed feel like an evolution of its source material, rather than a rewriting. Wartime financial constraints had brought Neoclassicism into vogue during Barber’s formative years. He watched his teachers look to the past, finding solutions in the comparatively smaller ensembles that predated the modern 60-piece orchestral behemoth. But unlike many of his predecessors, who largely applied the structures of earlier eras to modern musical language (like Bartók, whom we’ll discuss next), Barber’s choice to stick with Bach’s harmonization gives us a unique imagining of what Bach might have written given access to the modern brass section—arguably the instruments that have most evolved from their 18th-century iterations. Here, like a storybook prince plucked from his castle and dropped into the modern world, Bach is treated to 300 years of technological advancement. You might expect the result to sound more foreign, as does the Neoclassicism of Stravinsky or Prokofiev, but the grandeur of today’s brass section, which can sound a lot like an organ, makes the music feel surprisingly at home.