Ask choral enthusiasts for their top American composers and pieces of music, and THIS is the concert that comes to mind! The first half features numerous iconic works, each one more beautiful than the last. These works, and many others from the 20th-century American canon, were championed by the pioneer of professional American choirs, the Dale Warland Singers.

Commissioned for the 1940 inaugural concert of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Randall Thompson’s Alleluia has only two words but infinite beauty.

John Corigliano, a first-generation Italian American composer, has won many accolades including a Pulitzer Prize, five GRAMMY awards and an Academy Award. When Corigliano first read the poetry of Dylan Thomas, “it was a revelation.” He found the poetry “astonishingly musical” and used it in the beautiful Fern Hill to describe his experience of the American prairie.

Eric Whitacre’s Water Night put him on the map with glistening threads of sound and the gentle brush of dissonance, transforming the music into a sheen of silk. Stephen Paulus’s most famous work was chosen for the funerals of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. One of Samuel Barber’s most performed choral works plus trailblazer Emma Lou Diemer’s Three Madrigals round out the first half, along with the world premiere of the 2026 Stephen Paulus Emerging Composers Competition winner, Jeffrey Derus, setting a text by abolitionist & suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

True Concord is proud to have co-commissioned We Are Phoenix by Co-Composer-in-Residence Timothy C. Takach. It is an experience of poetry and beautiful choral writing that explores our essential relationship with the Earth.