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.