Meditations on Grace
Composition and premiere: Carlos Simon wrote Meditations on Grace in 2023 on commission for the National Symphony Orchestra, Gianandrea Noseda, Music Director. The NSO and Noseda performed the piece as an encore during their 2024 European tour, premiering it at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, Spain, on February 16 of that year. He later included the piece as one movement of his Good News Mass, which was premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel’s direction in April 2025. This is the first American performance of the piece as a standalone work.
“Amazing Grace” was written in 1772, over 250 years ago, by Anglican preacher and poet John Newton, who began his career as a British slaver. By 1788, Newton would eventually join in the fight for the abolition of slavery by publishing the essay, “Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade.” While this well-known hymn is traditionally sung in sacred spaces, it can easily be recognized by many around the world of all faiths and walks of life. Musically, I chose to use fragments of the melody as a meditation on the idea of “grace.”
—Carlos Simon
Carlos Simon’s Meditations on Grace is a small moment in the long history of the composer’s engagement with the gospel and sacred music that have been the foundation of his art since his childhood as de facto music director of his father’s church. Having performed his own arrangements and improvisations on “Amazing Grace” as a pianist, he created an arrangement for himself and the violinist Randall Goosby in 2023 to mark the tune’s 250th anniversary. He composed the present orchestral score as a further contemplation of the song and its message. In 2025, he included the full work as one movement of one of his most ambitious and personal projects to date, his Good News Mass, co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony, Sphinx Symphony Orchestra, Ravinia Festival, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In an interview with the Washington Post, Simon made explicit the connections between his work and his spirituality: “My dad, he always gets on me. He wants me to be a preacher, but I always tell him, ‘Music is my pulpit. That’s where I preach.’”
Carlos Simon was named Composer Chair of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the first in the institution’s 144-year history, in 2024. His diverse range of BSO commissions includes Song of Massachusetts, written for premiere during this month’s Boston Pops Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular on the Charles River Esplanade in Boston; the Gardner Suite for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, who premiered it in January 2026, and Words and Prayers of My Fathers for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, premiered at Tanglewood in the Koussevitzky Music Shed in August 2025. Works premiered by the BSO include the co-commissioned Good News Mass, performed in Boston in January 2026; Festive Overture and Fanfare marking BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons’ 10th anniversary season with the orchestra, and Four Black American Dances, which the orchestra premiered in Boston under Nelsons’ direction and performed on tour in France, Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland, and England in 2023. He also composed his violin-and-piano Serenade for the BSO’s 2025-26 Artist in Residence, Augustin Hadelich, who premiered it with pianist Orion Weiss in February 2026.
Carlos Simon is also Composer-in-Residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In addition to Meditations on Grace, he has written several orchestral works for the National Symphony Orchestra, including most recently his Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, premiered this past spring. The NSO and Noseda recorded a full-length album of Simon’s music, Four Orchestral Works. Other recent premieres include Lamentations for String Orchestra, a symphonic soundtrack to artist Simon Frederick’s multimedia work The Unspoken Elegance of Stillness, and Zodiac: Symphonic Suite.
An interconnectedness of subject matter and musical genre is key to Simon’s approach, which is illustrated on a more personal and intimate level in his albums My Ancestor’s Gift and Together, which feature stylistically fluid collaborations with close musical colleagues. “The way I think about things, I’m a composer first,” Simon has related, but he has enhanced his instinct via hands-on and pragmatic musical activities in several spheres, as he has demonstrated in his work with the BSO. Along with his own pieces, he has curated concerts for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, performed as pianist, and acted as a musical ambassador for the BSO in Boston and elsewhere. Simon’s music has been commissioned by the Kennedy Center, American Ballet Theatre, BBC for the 2024 Proms, Minnesota Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Carnegie Hall, and many others. His Los Angeles Philharmonic-commissioned Good News Mass was premiered in 2025 under Gustavo Dudamel’s direction.
Simon has been commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera for a new work, The Highlands, slated to be produced by the company in 2027. He is the first Black composer commissioned for an original opera in the history of the company. He is also collaborating with Boston Lyric Opera on a project to premiere in spring 2027. Along with Meditations on Grace, this summer the Boston Symphony Chamber Players reprise his Gardner Suite, Tanglewood Music Center Fellows perform his wind quintet Giants, and he participates in a Talks and Walks with BSO Vice President of Artistic Planning Anthony Fogg.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.