Emmanuel Music’s artistic director Ryan Turner on the podium: “This isn’t just a health pandemic, it’s a cultural pandemic.”
There is still one Boston venue where you can hear live classical music.
With under-the-radar consistency, Emmanuel Music continues its decades-long practice of performing Bach cantatas. As part of Sunday liturgy, artistic director Ryan Turner programs a different cantata each week—drawing from the 200 possibilities that Bach left behind—for Emmanuel’s tiny congregation.
“We are still performing, one on a part and distanced,” Turner says. “I’m trying to choose cantatas with one woodwind, and we use plexiglass enclosures. Six in the orchestra, or seven, and four singers.”
The modest audience is distanced as well, and until guidelines are relaxed, it will stay modest.
“Emmanuel is a very small congregation,” he says, “so now on Sunday we have 30 to 40 people in the audience.”
But the cantata performances, as well as the weeklong Bach Institute and Emmanuel’s chamber series—like last month’s Benjamin Britten weekend—are also streaming for free on Emmanuel’s YouTube channel.
“After March 8 or 9 we were on hiatus until September,” Turner says. “We always take the summer off. We had to get a buy-in from the orchestra committee to stream, but we are providing the music ministry that is so important for the church. We’ve invested in equipment, and the cantatas are available four weeks.
“We’re reaching a much larger audience,” he says. “We have close to 300 to 400 views on livestream—in person we used to get 200 tops. It’s a much broader reach. So there are some silver linings in this.”
Turner, a Haverhill resident, has recently taken directorship of the Newburyport Choral Society as well. With rehearsals and performances impossible any time soon, his impact on the large (130 singers) and active community chorus will wait. For Turner the appointment is part of a personal puzzle.
“For me music is a three-legged stool,” he says. “That means professional, educational and community work. Realistically we’re looking at holiday concerts in 2021. There’s a lot of work to make it safe and viable.”
The conversation turns to reassessment, and the need for all organizations—cultural or otherwise—to rebalance their institutional equality. For Turner and Emmanuel, 2020 may not have brought everything to a halt, but everything does has a new perspective.
“This isn’t just a health pandemic, but a cultural pandemic,” he says. “We focus on Bach, an 18th century white dead composer for the Lutheran Church. We could not be more exclusive. So we want to look at Bach as a living laboratory.
“But how do we embrace diversity and inclusion?” he asks. “How can we look outside ourselves? Those are ongoing conversations, figuring it out. Programming Bach with contemporary and diverse composers. It could show up in the chamber series. We have ideas.
“If we were to talk about music in 2030, what would that look like, and how would we get there? All of us can do a better job putting people in the room who have different experiences than our own. I want it to be engagement, to go out to communities. I hoping Emmanuel will find performance opportunities.
“Classical music by nature is an exclusive act,” he says. “We see it in the schools. There are so many obstacles for diverse students and classical music. Musicians come from families with access to extended training. That’s where we have to see the change.
“We’re on Newbury Street,” he says. “Emmanuel is fortunate. The congregation is incredibly educated. They come for the progressive thinking and the music. Older, progressive, but not diverse.”
Any broadening of the classical music audience, and its awareness, will help. Those improvements will likely include different modes of performing—methods that are being lab-tested now since gatherings are restricted.
“I can’t imagine us doing chamber music the same way, for one,” Turner says of performing life after the pandemic. “My wife (soprano Susan Consoli) and I watched the Britten weekend on our big screen. It was completely different than sitting in the concert hall. There are a lot of ways to reimagine how music is delivered.
“If you can engage an audience that you haven’t been able to attract before, they might find themselves in a concert hall that they hadn’t been to before.
“We’re also going to need each other more,” he says of his Boston area colleagues. “I can see more partnerships and collaborations. We won’t be in our own silos so much. We need to lean on each other, and find ways.”
Keith Powers covers music and the arts for Gannett New England, Leonore Overture and Opera News. Artists Alone is a series about musicians and the impact of the pandemic. Follow @PowersKeith; email to keithmichaelpowers@gmail.com.