To Really Understand Classical Music, Hear It in a Crypt

Last week, I huddled alongside 49 souls—the maximum allowed by the fire code—in the basement of Harlem’s Church of the Intercession. Four members of the contemporary choral ensemble Ekmeles filed into the low-lit crypt, along with their director, the baritone Jeffrey Gavett. They faced us soberly and then began to sing composer David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion, a secular rewrite of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion that puts Hans Christian Andersen’s poor freezing orphan girl in the role of Jesus. Their voices echoed off the stone walls. Outside, in the adjacent Old Trinity Cemetery, slumbered the corpses of John Jay Audubon, author of the 19th-century reference book The Birds of America, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, and at least one man who drowned aboard the Titanic. I snuck a look at my wife. Tears were streaming down her face.

The concept for the Death of Classical series, which began a decade ago, is arrestingly simple: small classical concerts, performed in crypts and graveyards. Some have taken place in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, which counts Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, William “Boss” Tweed, and Pop Smoke among its inhabitants. Others have happened in the crypt at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where bishops lie in tombs. But the throughline remains the same—classical music mingled with sites of death and remembrance.

For founder Andrew Ousley, the series’ title doubles as a tart joke about the supposed demise of the music to which he’s devoted his career. For as long as the hothouse flower of “classical music” has bloomed in America, it has been proclaimed “endangered,” on death’s door. In a 2004 essay for The New Yorker, Alex Ross observed that classical music has been proclaimed “dead” since at least the 14th century, and that the same story has been told for generations: “If this be death, the record is skipping.”

Ousley got his own taste of this existential panic when he joined EMI Records in the 2000s, right when Tower Records closed. “Everyone was running around tearing their hair out,” he recalls. Ousley’s introduction to classical happened in college, when he found himself in a classical music appreciation course (“it was, like, my eighth choice”) and “fell, headlong, into the repertoire.” After working for years in marketing, promotion, and social media, the idea for an unconventional concert series suggested itself to him.

He didn’t go looking for crypts, but when he saw the space at the Church of the Intercession, he knew he’d found the spot. As the Death of Classical concept slowly took shape, it united the three pillars of Ousley’s life: classical music, his father’s background as an Episcopal priest; and the death of his mother, an opera singer who introduced him to Maria Callas. “Part of why I started these concerts is my experience of my mother’s death, and the impact that it had on me,” he says. “Classical music was such an important part of my grief and how I found a way to live in a world with a human-shaped hole in it where my mother used to be. The processing and shared vulnerability of that is at the core of every concert I present.”

The series has struck a deep chord in a city that was hit particularly hard  by COVID. When I first ventured out to see a concert again in 2021, after a year spent largely indoors, it was to attend a Death of Classical concert. That year, I descended into the catacombs of the Green-Wood Cemetery to listen to the Ulysses Quartet perform Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” and Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae. Both pieces were haunted by death, but in different ways. Tenebrae throbbed with feeling, while “Death and the Maiden,” written while Schubert was in the grips of syphilis, reeked of terror and despair. When I came back outside after the concert, the night sky seemed more luminous than when I had entered.

I had a similarly religious experience seeing David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion last week. Ousley presented the stark, troubling work in 2023, and decided it would be the only concert in Death of Classical’s history to become an annual tradition: “It’s our Nutcracker,” he jokes.

Lang’s Pulitzer-winning work swirls together the four voices of the Ekmeles ensemble so that the girl’s death seems present from the very beginning. Drawing on sacred choral music and English madrigals, the piece feels ancient even though it only dates back to 2008. As the final lines of the piece—“Rest soft, daughter/Rest soft”—died away, the room felt stirred and quieted into a contemplation of deep, uncomfortable truths. People filed out, awestruck.

This feeling of awe represents Death of Classical’s greatest accomplishment. I have sat through countless “nightclub” classical concerts with a drink in my hand, but the truth remains that classical music rarely offers the kinds of pleasures promised by a jazz club or an evening of cabaret. The pleasures run deeper and quieter and don’t always mingle with the promise of a fun night out. Ousley’s series has reconnected us with classical music’s highest purpose—to help us grieve. When we are struck at the deepest places, this music rises up, wordlessly to meet us.

“When you sit to listen to horse hair over gut string over wood from notes on a page written a hundred years ago, it just pierces something in you,” Ousley observes. “I’m not interested in just getting people to hear the music. I am interested in getting them to feel the music, and to want to make the music a part of their life. There is a transcendental quality to the best of this music that puts us in touch with what is timeless in the human experience.”