Remembering Craig Smith

adamg — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:41:49 +0000

Craig Smith, who founded Emmanuel Music in 1970 and had been its artistic director ever since, died yesterday.

David, who had worked with him for the past 10 years, posts a remembrance:

... It's hard to know where to start in cataloguing Craig Smith's musical accomplishments. The most famous is that, as music director of Emmanuel Church, Craig decided to recreate J.S. Bach's practice of performing a cantata -- a 20-or-so-minute piece for chorus, soloists, and orchestra -- as part of the weekly liturgy. No one in the United States had ever done that before, and I'm not sure anyone in the world had done it since Bach's time. It seemed crazy, like many of Craig's ideas -- especially since at that time the cantatas were a largely forgotten part of Bach's output (that has since changed, in significant part because of Craig). And yet, seven years later, the cycle of over 200 cantatas was finished. ...