It was the Winter of 1972, my third year at Antioch College. My academic interests had been in radio production and music, but I hadn't yet declared a major. I was losing focus with the radio production, so I explored the music angle by enrolling in a Harmony class and singing in the school's chorus.

Its music director was John Richard Ronsheim (1927–1997), an extraordinary professor whose biography I'm currently researching. He was a force of nature, a firm believer in absolutes. He didn't give class lectures; he gave performances, visualizing with his facial and bodily gestures the character of the music he wanted to convey. And in so doing, he carved into our souls deep appreciations for both the well-known and the obscure (to us at the time), from Francesco Landini to Cecil Taylor, with Charles Ives and Charlie Parker and Luigi Dallapiccola (his mentor) and early Hot Five Louis Armstrong and Anton Webern and Billie Holiday and on and on in-between.

But it was the composer whose music he was directing that Winter of '72 that had its greatest impact on our lives, mid-late 15th-century Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem. His work was of his time with its theoretical adherence to modal structures but also apart, avoiding the clichés that consumed his followers such as Josquin and Compère. The complexity of his full-voice syncopations and the otherworldly beauty of his duos, both from the heavens as well as the depths of hell, was breathtaking. His compositions were impossible to analyze yet made perfect, coherent sense.

His was also the first polyphonic Requiem that has survived. And it was that music John chose to have us rehearse, and later perform, that Winter. He told us that it was the very first performance in the U.S.

I'll have a lot more to say about those rehearsals in my upcoming biographical essay, but onward. The following Spring, John directed a mass Ordinary from Ockeghem's older contemporary, Guillaume Dufay, titled M. Ave Regina Coelorum, another jaw-dropping experience.

In the summer of 1973, soon after I had graduated, John organized a European tour with his chorus. They would perform both the Dufay and Ockeghem in churches and outdoor venues throughout the continent. I instead moved to San Francisco and, soon,with the prodding of my friend Doug Goodkin, who had just returned from the tour, put together my (our) own chorus devoted to Ockeghem's music, with a touch of Dufay thrown in.

We called ourselves the Ockeghem Choir of San Francisco, and we'd perform in churches and public halls in San Francisco and Berkeley from 1974 until 1978, when I left the Bay Area to enter graduate school in Historical Musicology at Columbia U. in New York City.

We were by no means a "professional" group, with "professional" singers; this was an evolving personnel of lasting friends, persistent in presenting Ockeghem's music as best we were able. Some performances could have gone better. But others went surprisingly well. I taped many of them, and I recently dug them out from my reel-to-reel tape collection to begin digitizing them.

After learning and performing many of Ockeghem's masses and motets, our last project was tackling what got me started in the first place -- his Requiem.

It's exhilarating music. Time is suspended, then moves into seemingly uncharted paths. It demands attention and grace.

So that's what I've uploaded here, our last concert at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley on April 21, 1978. There are a few imperfections, but overall I'm pleased with the goal we always set for ourselves: presenting the _music_. Too many interpretations of Ockeghem's masterworks try to manipulate the audience with gratuitous tempo and dynamic changes, all which take the focus away from the music and instead toward the director's personal quirks. That's not the case with our choir. To coin a cliché, we tried to let the music speak for itself without any self-conscious interference or distraction.

I couldn't be prouder of the performers that evening. Perhaps tough to embrace from the start, but as the music rolls along I think/hope you'll be taken with both its beauty and gravitas.

Forty-six years after performing this rare jewel, I share this in honor of having John Ronsheim in our lives.

Oh, and I did finally declare my music major in the Spring of '72.

Note: The heavily-worn first page of the "Requiem" score that's shown at the beginning comes from the Winter 1972 Antioch Chorus. It was transcribed by hand by John's wife, Eileen.

Sopranos: Diana Dillaway, Diana Rogers, Kyle Rolnick
Altos: Catherine Bauman*, Rachel Levin, Lyle York
Tenors: Doug Goodkin*, Ken Gundry, Tad Merrick*, Peter Sorensen
Basses: Scott Horton, Dick Illig, Peter Kohn
Director: Don Giller

* Alumni from the 1973 European tour.