Can Singing Unite Us?

Matthew Swanson on bringing people together from three states and 92 zip codes through music

with Matthew Swanson | director of choruses, Cincinnati May Festival

Matthew Swanson has spent the last several years working with one of the great American choral institutions: the Cincinnati May Festival, the oldest choral festival in the Western Hemisphere, founded in 1873 by a community that decided singing together was worth building an entire tradition around. After working with the May Festival in various capacities for many years, he took over as Director of Choruses in 2024, and now serves as Artistic Head of the organization, overseeing a number of choruses, for singers of all levels and ages, as well as conducting the organization’s flagship choir, the May Festival Chorus, the official chorus of the Cincinnati Symphony and Cincinnati Pops orchestras.

Nick sat down with him this past May, right in the middle of a week where they were on stage together performing Stravinsky and Orff — music that, on the surface, seems about as far from Bach as one can get, even though both composers clearly owe a great debt to Bach, like most Western classical composers.

The May Festival Chorus draws its singers from three different states and 92 different zip codes — a genuinely wide cross-section of a region that is deeply politically purple, not red or blue. Rather than treating that diversity of belief as something to work around, Matthew talked about it as part of the point: a room full of people who likely disagree with each other on a variety of political and religious touchpoints, choosing every Tuesday night to arrive at the same time, the same pitch, the same vowel, in pursuit of something beautiful that none of them could make alone.

It’s a small, weekly act of common purpose in an era where that kind of communal activity seems to be getting harder to find — and it illuminates another layer to our central question: is Bach’s music, or any music this demanding, actually for everyone?

Recording BWV 8 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music

EPISODE CREDITS:

Was willst du dich, mein Geist, entsetzen from BWV 8

PERFORMERS

Oboe: Debry Nagy

Cello: Elisabeth Reed

Organ: Corey Jamason

SOUND (BWV 8 only): Lolly Lewis | VIDEO (BWV 8 only): Clubsoda Productions

Episode 19 was made in partnership with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Les Délices. BACH 52 is made possible in part by grants from the American Bach Society, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Bettina Baruch Foundation, and Intermusic SF.

BACH 52 is a production of Nicholas Phan Recording Projects, which is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.

Charitable contributions in support of Nicholas Phan Recording Projects and the BACH 52 project must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.