The Pitch: A Kansas State grad student has reconstructed a piece of Vatican music that’s not been heard since 1542

The Pitch: A Kansas State grad student has reconstructed a piece of Vatican music that’s not been heard since 1542. “[Patrick] Dittamo came to the project after learning that the Kansas City Chorale was looking to perform a piece that hadn’t been done in modern times. He started researching underserved composers and came across Escobedo. Only a handful of his pieces had survived, but ‘Missa Ad te levavi’ was one of them, and it had been digitized in the Vatican’s online library. Despite the damage to the document, Dittamo was confident he could transcribe the manuscript. (Last summer, Dittamo completed Yale and Cornell University’s Historical Notation Bootcamp, and he’s currently wrapping up his master’s in music history and compositions.) Still, Dittamo says he underestimated the difficulty of the undertaking.”