Sing On! Anniversary Series: The Boston Cecilia

From Alexander’s Feast to a “Feast of Remembrance”, The Boston Cecilia sings on

For the first installment of our “Sing On!” anniversary series, GBCC gathered reflections from representatives of The Boston Cecilia, officially founded by B.J. Lang in 1876 as The Cecilia Society. Michael Barrett (music director), Charlie Evett (bass and board member), and Marylène Altieri (alto and historian) shared some of the organization’s 150-history and their personal memories.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. (Published: February 2026)

Alison LaRosa (General Manager, GBCC, she/her): I’ll start with this question: how did you come to be connected with The Boston Cecilia?

Marylène Altieri (she/her): I joined Cecilia in 1976. And I’ve been a member continuously, more or less, since then. I took a little bit of time off when we had a child. My husband is also in the group. We met in this group! We were kind of “yenta’d” by the previous music director, Donald Teeters, who brought us together, but I got interested in the group because I moved to Boston to do graduate work in history. As it happens, I was dating a guy who sang on the side. He was a professional tenor, but he also sang in this chorus, and he started telling me about it, and I got interested, and before I knew it, I had been sucked into his circle of friends, all of whom were far more interesting to me than my fellow graduate students in history! I had never sung before. And, next thing I knew, I was in the group, and never left.

Charlie Evett (he/him): I joined the group in the 1991-92 season. I’d recently gotten married, we had our first child, and we were settling down. I thought, well, I should find a chorus in the area. You know, you leave college, and then you stop having that organized choral outlet. And after a little while, you feel like your life has kind of settled down again, and maybe you could find something. Actually, I first encountered The Boston Cecilia because my boss at the time hired them to sing at his wedding, which was pretty unusual for the group to do that, but he really wanted them and paid a hefty fee to have them come and sing! I was very impressed, and then I started looking into it. I looked in the paper, and they listed what that coming season was going to be, and it looked absolutely out-of-this-worldly. They were going to do Israel and Egypt and the St. Matthew Passion. I thought, wow, that’s gotta be for me! And so I auditioned and got in.

AL: And how about you, Michael?

Michael Barrett (he/him): And for my part, I was directing a Renaissance ensemble, Convivium Musicum, for a number of years, and was looking for possibilities of other kinds of musical outlets for my conducting life. I saw that Cecilia had an opening for music director in 2019. The process involved only a final round of auditions. One day I got the call and was pleasantly shocked to learn that I had been offered the position. Now, this was March 2020 when I got that call, and you can imagine that choral life was a little bit weird right after that. 

MB: So thinking about how this… relaunch was going to happen, we had to try to figure out how to make this work. The chorus was able to at least have some conversations together, and start to figure out, well, how can we, somehow, make music together, even though we might not necessarily hear one another due to latency and things like that. Is there any project that we could possibly put together? So we tried these various things. I was flying by the seat of my pants, frankly, between getting to know new people and not actually being able to get to know them in a traditional way. But that was better than nothing! 

MA: It really was. We were really lost at sea, because we had lost a music director very abruptly just before that. We were all still kind of in shock about that, and then the pandemic hit, and we had seen Michael in person the one time for his audition. The only way we could see him was online until we were able to meet again in person. Michael has really risen to this challenge. I’m sure a lot of groups went through similar experiences, but having a new music director come in right at that point, I think, was kind of unique for us. 

MB: So, a “soft launch” in the extreme!

AL: What was it about this group that really allowed you, Michael, to be able to come in during that time and for that to ultimately be successful? 

MB: I tried to view it as optimistically as I could. We could still talk about singing and about musicmaking more generally. I mean, not the things that you can do directly with one another, but things that we can nevertheless think about. And we had conversations as well over that time about the mission of the organization, and how we could move forward with the great difficulty between what was happening with COVID, and with what else was happening in the world, that kind of fired our imagination about what we could do. 

MA: Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd situation also coming up at that time, I think, caused us to re-evaluate the repertoire that we were going to do going forward, and our relationships with the community. There were a lot of issues that we were trying to deal with simultaneously, with getting to know our new music director and start up concerts again, and all of that. When you think back on it now, it was quite an amazing experience.

MB: And maybe in some strange way, it was a benefit to be forced to pause and reflect on some level, and I hope that some of that thinking has survived into normal times again.

AL: Marylène briefly mentioned the relationship with the community. How would you define Cecilia’s place in the community, and how that’s evolved over time?

CE: Cecilia has definitely evolved. In the beginning (1876), the group grew out of Harvard University, but it was also very much a part of downtown Boston. Then in the 20th century, there was a long period where it was the chorus of the Boston Symphony under Arthur Fiedler. Then, after World War II, that ended as people came back, and Cecilia became an independent organization (more on this history later in the interview). 

MA: Right. There was a shortage of male singers, even starting before the war. A lot of the singers were recruited from, I would say, the upper middle class of Boston society. I don’t think it was quite as open to community membership as it is today, where anyone can audition and become a member. So I don’t think that, early in our history, there was very much of a community tie. In fact, in the very early years, you could only attend concerts of the group if you subscribed. Those people had money. And then at one point, B.J. Lang (Cecilia’s first director) initiated a series of “wage earners’ concerts” with tickets at a greatly reduced price. (Ticket pricing) is a perennial problem. Our ticket prices have to try to cover our expenses, but how do we bring in people who, you know, can’t afford those tickets? So we have various initiatives going now where we try to offer discounted tickets to groups and do some performances that are more accessible to the community. 

MB: Sometimes we’ll tailor a program to try to reach out to a different subsection of the community. A couple things that come to mind was a family-focused concert from a recent season, where we collaborated with a children’s chorus, as we have a connection via one of the members here at Cecilia. I imagine it as a kind of quasi-didactic experience, too, for the children and for the audience to unpack what a chorus does and how a piece of music might be put together. And then with other concerts, it’s our hope that it opens up doors to different audiences, like the concert where we focused on Asian and Asian-American choral music. Or the story of Dvořák’s time in the United States and his advocacy of African American and Indigenous musical cultures as a foundation of new American art music, and the extent to which that happened, or it didn’t happen, and the stories you can tell through music around that.  

CE: So since Donald Teeters took over as director of Cecilia in 1968… 

MA: …it was the year after Don was appointed music director at All Saints Parish in Brookline, and he asked the church if he could use All Saints as the base for his chorus as well, so it all came together. 

CE: That’s now been a long-established partnership, and certainly a big part of the audience community. We had a longstanding arrangement where we had one concert a year where parish members could get a free ticket. And we’ve had lots of interchange between the All Saints Parish Church Choir and Cecilia, with Don conducting both groups. And for a number of years now, we’ve been singing every year in the Brookline Porch Fest. We’ve done some other Brookline events. We definitely did Boston First Night. We did the Boston tree lighting for quite a few years in the 1990s.

MA: Years ago, we had a chamber chorus (Cecilia Chamber Singers), which my husband, Keith Glavash, directed at the time. We used to go out and do daytime, half-hour-long caroling programs in various downtown locations, many of which were bank lobbies. Those places paid us to come in and sing, so it was a fundraiser for the group. We also got hired for parties at people’s homes in those years. So over the years, we’ve had various ways of getting out into the community.

AL: So tell me about a favorite performing experience that you’ve had with the group.

CE: A huge highlight was when we finally… we had this long series of doing the Handel oratorios, and actually, for many years, Don resisted doing Messiah. 

MA: That was partly because, you know, both Handel and Haydn and Boston Baroque were doing it every year at Christmas time. Don felt very strongly it should be done at Easter time. 

CE: And so, finally, we performed Messiah in the spring of 2001, I believe. But what was really fun about it was that we brought to bear a lot of familiarity with Handel. At that point, we had done many, many of the other oratorios. And so it seemed really familiar, but also really fresh at the same time. And I think, you know, many of the players and soloists were like, “Wow, I’m actually really having fun here!,” instead of like, “Okay, we’re gonna do it again.” It seemed like the whole cycle of oratorios culminated in that performance. It was super exciting and moving.

MA: Since I’ve been in the group so long, it was really hard to pin down one, but the one that sticks with me the most, I think, is when we did, Benjamin Britten’s A Boy Was Born, which we had originally performed in 1978 with Don. We made an LP recording of it at the time, which we still have in our archives. And the Boston Boy Choir sang the treble part, which is a fairly difficult part. But when we did this piece again in 2001, the second time we did it, there was a children’s choir here at All Saints, which was directed by my husband, Keith, and there were about thirty singers in it at that point, mostly between, I’d say, ages 9 to 15. And they were very capable. They performed it from memory. They did an incredible job, but it was a really big treat for me and Keith, because our daughter was on stage with us in that, as was Charlie’s daughter. So, we were all up there singing this together, and we were all weeping by the end of it. I will never forget that performance. It was just one of the most fun things!

MA: I’ll just quickly mention one other thing we did. In 1997, we did Gian Carlo Menotti’s piece, The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore, which is for chorus and dancers. So we had a dance company join us for that. There are these dance interludes throughout the piece, and we also dressed in 1950s period outfits, and semi-staged the work. It’s a very interesting piece that’s not performed very often. And we actually recorded that on a commercially-released CD, which is still out there, too.

CE: Yeah, that was a good one.

MB: Speaking of dance, I had a lot of fun with the collaboration we did three years ago with a San Francisco-based dance company. We performed Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles together with this dance company who had developed a whole choreography to go along with this piece.

We had originally thought about staging it in different outdoor locations, but we ended up at First Church in Cambridge and moving from place to place within the church. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see a lot of the show since I was turned in the wrong direction, but the singers got to see it. It was fantastic. 

CE: It was our first performance back after COVID, and we weren’t really sure if people were going to come out at all. But, what a great piece!

MA: And what a great moment to be actually performing live to a live audience again.

AL: I know that Cecilia has premiered quite a few works over the years, and whether they were performances you were part of or not, I’m curious if there are any particular works that the organization has a history with that you are especially fond of as pieces.

CE: Yeah, one of the more recent ones that was this operetta by Scott Wheeler called The Construction of Boston. We performed the piece and made a recording of it. It’s all about the history of Boston, in this kind of comic poem.

MA: Yes. Scott is a very witty person, and he always has a little bit of a, almost sardonic quality to some of his writing, and I think some of that came through in that piece. We’ve performed other pieces by Scott Wheeler as well, but they weren’t premieres. That one was the first premiere. I really enjoyed Paul Rudoi’s Transcendental Passion, which we were originally supposed to perform before the pandemic with our previous music director, and it got completely derailed, so we finally got back to it with Michael. That is a piece that incorporates texts by 19th-century abolitionists, transcendentalists, and women’s rights figures. I found the texts and the whole concept very moving, because it was inspired by the Bach passions in its structure, but moving that structure into a completely different story, which was very engaging, intellectually.

(on The Boston Cecilia’s long history of premieres)

MA: When B.J. Lang formally founded the chorus in 1876 (the group informally started in 1874), there were a lot of pieces that today are well known, but that had never been performed in America before. And, you know, there were no recordings, there was no radio, there was no way for people to hear that music, unless someone got a score, brought it here, and organized a performance here. So Lang was in the habit of going to Europe every summer and going to all the music festivals, meeting composers, and looking for pieces to bring back here. Some that were performed for the very first time in America by Cecilia include Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the Dvořák and the Brahms Requiems, the Bach B Minor Mass, and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. So, in his time, there were something like 110 premieres. They’re either first Boston performances or first American performances of works that are in the standard repertoire now. Cecilia was bringing that music to people. I’ll just mention a few other notable premieres: in 1930, Cecilia sang the American premiere of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms with the BSO. It had been commissioned by the BSO for their 50th anniversary. And then in 1938 they repeated it, but that time Stravinsky himself conducted it, which is really quite amazing. And then in 1954, Cecilia gave the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard with the BSO under Charles Munch, and the soprano soloist was a very young Leontyne Price.

AL: Wow.

MA: We also gave some premieres of works by the Boston composer Daniel Pinkham, with whom we had a really close relationship over the years. And there was the Robert Sirota Mass that we did at the National Convention of the American Guild of Organists, which happened to be in Boston that year. And some other things, too.

MB: And at our spring concert (titled “A New Song”) we have a commission and a premiere. Two, in fact. The season overall is a celebration of Cecilia and its history. The last program of the season is looking towards the future, but more broadly, things that either are new or were new. And so we have some music by a previous Cecilia director, Nick White, and also another piece by Scott Wheeler for chorus and mezzo-soprano soloist that Cecilia premiered about ten years ago with the same soloist, Krista River, who sang in the premiere. And then we commissioned two works, one by Ashi Day and one by Grace Coberly, who is a singer in Cecilia. So it’s a concert that’s celebrating new music or “certified pre-owned” music that we had a connection with premiering. One of the spring concerts will be at Methuen Memorial Music Hall, where we’ll have a chance to show off the organ.

MA: B.J. Lang was one of the people responsible for having that organ constructed. It was constructed for the Boston Music Hall, where Cecilia performed in its early years. Lang played in the inaugural concert on that organ. And then much later, it was moved to Methuen. Cecilia has a history with that instrument. In the 1980s, we did a recording up there called Great Sacred Choruses.

AL: When you think about the next chapter for Boston Cecilia – I don’t know how you want to define “next chapter” because it’s hard to predict 150 years out – but what do you hope will remain the same, but what do you think will be different?

MB: It’s an intriguing question, predicting the future. But I would hope to keep that which is best, the same. A huge part of that, of course, is the community among the singers, having this common purpose, coming together, which is itself becoming more and more a kind of old-school way of looking at things, people actually physically being in the same room for a common purpose. So that, I think, for the mental health  of our members (among other reasons) is such a valuable and wonderful thing. But just as important for me are the connections that we can make outside of this room. And I think that’s an area, as others have suggested already, where we can be growing and expanding and asking new questions and looking around. So how do we develop programs that maybe appeal to different audiences? How can we find those people to begin with? How can we make the economics of concertgoing make sense in a way that is solvent for the organization, but also open and accessible to as many people as possible? Livestreaming has actually helped in that regard. And I like to think about, well, what is the set of repertoire for which we can do justice? There is music that I grew up with, that my education suggested was the set of music that should be front and center. There is so much out there, and we have started to explore in other directions and around the edges, and I think we can go much more in those directions, and we can just try things and see if they work for us. Some things that we’ve tried have been better fits than others, perhaps. For example, we recently tried some Meditations by Pauline Oliveros. There’s no score; it’s just a paragraph of information. It may not be everybody’s cup of tea compared to the B Minor Mass or something like that, but it encourages a different way of listening, of interacting with one’s fellow musician. Less guidance from somebody waving their arms, say, and that could have benefits outside of that experience.

AL: Charlie and Marylène, do you have anything you want to add on this question?

CE: Michael has really succeeded in recruiting new singers. I feel like we’ve got a kind of critical mass now. The group can sustain itself with a new generation of singers, literally. 

MA: That’s absolutely critical, in more ways than one. It’s important to represent society within the group, and so not just younger people, but people of different backgrounds. I think it has tended to be a white, middle-class preoccupation for a very long time, at least in Boston. To diversify our membership a lot more would be really great. Singing is a great way to meet people, and I can relate to that myself, because, as I mentioned, I was in a graduate program in history with a lot of very nerdy people who didn’t do anything else but study, study, study. And, I started singing in this group, and suddenly I was singing with teachers, and doctors, and lawyers, and working people, and parents, and people I wasn’t coming into contact with at all in my daily life. And it just… it made me so happy. I mean, the opportunity to meet people face-to-face, and get off of screens, and, you know, think about something else for a change.

CE: The opportunity to just get to make art, you know, is… in choirs you have these magic moments that happen. I think that everyone who’s a serious choral singer has had it happen to them, and it’s very unpredictable when it’s going to happen. It just conjures itself somehow. And once you’ve experienced it, it’s like you want it again, but you can’t make it happen. You have to work on things enough that you have command over the material that you’re singing. But not too much that you’re sick of it! 

MA: And the other thing is that music has vanished from a lot of schools, so we’re not bringing up a generation of kids who have the skills or even know how to use their voices. It’s a particular problem with boys and men, to get them singing. The gender imbalance can really skew what you could do for repertoire.

CE: Although it is funny that when you look at the ancient proceedings from Cecilia, they had problems recruiting enough tenors in 1877, even then!

AL: Despite perpetual tenor shortages, it’s incredible that this organization has been around for 150-plus years, and so why do you think it is that Boston Cecilia, compared to so many other choruses that existed in earlier generations, has made it as far as it has?

MA: One factor that kept the group going – even though there were several periods when it could have all come crashing down – were some very strong music directors. So first, B.J. Lang, who was here for 33 years. Then there was a revolving door of people, and then Arthur Fiedler came in, and he was conductor of Boston Cecilia for 15 years, simultaneously with being director of the Boston Symphony, but when he was conducting this group, his main job was to prepare the chorus to sing with the BSO, because at that point, they were the official chorus of the BSO. That gave Cecilia a kind of glue that kept that group together. And then World War II happened, and everything fell apart again, and another set of revolving doors, and fluctuating membership, and then Donald Teeters came in, and for 44 years his being here and being a compelling personality, and people really enjoyed singing with him. You can’t plan for that kind of thing, but, in so many ways the cohesion of the group over all these years is what has kept it going. 

AL: Turning back to the early days of Cecilia’s history, can you say more about B.J. Lang’s impact on the organization?

MA: As Charlie mentioned, the chorus was founded as an arm of the Harvard Musical Association, which was an orchestra. They wanted to do some choral works, so they needed a chorus. In 1876, B.J. Lang separated the chorus off, and it became an independent organization. He was an extremely well-connected individual who was able to attract a group of dedicated singers, and had very strict and very high standards. His demanding rehearsal style was legendary. The other thing about him is that he knew everyone in Boston, and in other places in the world. He hobnobbed with the likes of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the BSO – in fact, Cecilia performed at the opening of Symphony Hall in 1900 – and even Richard Wagner. Lang’s portrait was drawn by Winslow Homer. As I mentioned earlier, he traveled to Europe every summer and met lots of composers and brought their music back to America. He invited Dvořák to come to Boston, and Dvořák actually conducted Cecilia in his Stabat Mater. Lang was also a champion of the Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor. Cecilia performed Coleridge Taylor’s Song of Hiawatha several times. And then upon his retirement, Lang established an endowment for Cecilia, to ensure its continuity. When Lang died, it’s significant that his death was announced on the front page of the Boston Globe. The obituary went on for two pages! 

MA: But that endowment helped set Cecilia up for its future. A couple other highlights from the chorus’s history after Lang’s time that I have not yet mentioned: In 1938 Cecilia sang Beethoven’s Ninth at the opening of the Shed at Tanglewood Music Center. And in 1953, the group toured France to raise money for the post-WWII restoration of French landmarks like Versailles and cathedrals. That was a highly praised event.

AL: What do you think Lang and other early participants in Boston Cecilia would find most surprising about the organization today? 

CE: I think they would be shocked, actually, by the period instrument movement. Like, if you were here in 1875, you’re at the height of Romantic performance as being, like, they’ve “solved” all the technical problems of instruments. Everything’s reliable now. So the idea that they would throw that out and go back to the 18th-century instruments would just seem crazy. 

MA: There was resistance to that, you know? Some groups in town wanted nothing to do with early instruments. But it’s worth mentioning that in Cecilia’s first performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass, which was in 1900, B.J. Lang brought in a viola da gamba, and a transverse flute, and an oboe d’amore. It was commented on in the newspaper, these “exotic” instruments! Lang knew that that was important. He didn’t want to substitute with modern instruments, which is fascinating.

AL: Let’s talk more about Cecilia’s long association with Handel and other Baroque composers.

MA: Before he became director of Cecilia in 1968, Don Teeters was assistant to Thomas Dunn, who was then the director of the Handel and Haydn Society. Dunn was an authority on Handel, and he was a mentor to Don, so when Don became the head of Cecilia, he started exploring the oratorios of Handel. The first one was Alexander’s Feast. He felt that these works were ideal for the size and vocal character of Cecilia. Alexander’s Feast was performed in 1972, and from that point on, he continued programming oratorios periodically for the remainder of his tenure. We got up to 19 performances of 17 oratorios, many of which had never been performed in Boston before, because they were huge undertakings. Some of them were incredibly long. I remember when we did Semele, they were watching the clock during the performance. They knew they were going to go into overtime and have to pay the orchestra overtime, but the real issue was getting us out of Jordan Hall in time for people to catch the last subway! That’s how long that piece was.

MA: It was also a very expensive undertaking, because it required these orchestras of specialized players and soloists who are capable of all these flights of virtuosity. With the first few oratorio performances, Don used modern instruments, but then starting in 1981, he began to use early instruments, period instruments. In fact, he began with Bach, in the 1981 season, with a performance of the St. John Passion, which was the first performance of that work in America on period instruments. Don coached both the singers and the instrumentalists very carefully in Baroque style and became an authority. At first, a lot of the players struggled with the quirks of their instruments or the unfamiliar stylistic elements. But eventually, people got better and better, and the singers were absolutely phenomenal. This all involved pretty heavy-duty fundraising. In particular, Stephen Jay Gould, who was a renowned Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, was a devoted singing member of Cecilia. He was also passionate about the music of Handel. So Steve made generous donations that helped to subsidize the series, and he wrote and spoke widely about the performances, bringing in a lot of audience members. Without Steve, it’s unlikely that any of this would have happened. 

AL: And so what are you most proud of in your association with Boston Cecilia?

MA: There were two kinds of situations in Cecilia that made me proud. One would be when we did an incredibly difficult piece of music that we thought we were never going to be able to learn, and then we got up and did it. One particular example for me was Benjamin Britten’s A.M.D.G., which is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever sung. Not just in terms of the notes and the counting, but the vocal virtuosity that it asked for. And I think we all thought at first, oh, this is just never gonna work, but we did a really good performance of it, and I’m feeling very proud of the group for being able to do that. But also, in the Handel oratorio series: a lot of the Handel choruses can be a little on the boring side at times. There’s a lot of repetitiveness. When you’re rehearsing them in isolation, you don’t know how they fit into the larger context of the oratorio. But it was when we got into the rehearsals with the soloists and orchestra that suddenly we were like, wow! These people were doing the most dazzling things, and the players were playing all these early instruments in spectacular fashion. And we would just get a whole new level of motivation and sing a whole lot better. The final product would be really exciting, and that was always something to be proud of.

CE: I’m proud of the quality of the music that we’ve made over the years. I am the self-appointed recording archivist. I inherited a whole bunch of the recordings from the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s from Don Teeters, when he was downsizing. These were archival recordings of our concerts; we don’t have the rights to broadcast or reproduce them. But I’ve been assembling them and trying to catalog them and transfer them into digital forms that can’t be lost or degraded. There’s still a big box of things that have not been transferred, and we’re looking for grant support to try to finish the job there. But what I was getting at was that when I go back and listen to those recordings, I’m always like, “Wow, these sound really good!” And I have very high hopes that our upcoming performance in Jordan Hall in a couple of weeks is going to be just as high a level. Even though we’re amateur singers, I’m always proud of the crossover of having our professional ringers or soloists have that feeling of, this is what it’s like to do this for fun, for the pure excitement of doing something. Of having the people who are doing it for their jobs and their livelihood be enlivened by the people that are doing it for, you know, the purity of the experience. And for the amateur singers, being able to see in the professionals that next level that they could get to, with enough work.

MB: I just was thinking, those were such critical moments for me in college, as I recall, as a choir member getting to collaborate with a professional ensemble. Just to hear that very different level of experience. But in the other direction, as the professionals were mindful of us as students… and I think that makes a lot of sense, Charlie, your observation that if we can really show the love for the music, then it can be inspiring in both directions, in different ways. 

MA: It’s really important, I think, in a chorus to go beyond just showing up to rehearsals and doing your concerts. You should always be trying to build some kind of cohesiveness there that gives people a reason to keep coming back. I know that in my and Charlie’s cases, a lot of our best friends are the people we’ve met in this group. And there have been marriages, and our kids have become friends. Groups like this don’t just serve a musical purpose. They serve a really strong social purpose, and a psychological purpose.

AL: We look forward to The Boston Cecilia continuing to serve those purposes for many years to come.

The Boston Cecilia’s next concert in its 150th anniversary season is February 22, 2026, at Jordan Hall in Boston. Click here for a preview video.