The Judas Kiss is a work for brass and percussion ensemble about betrayal, disillusionment, and the loss of innocence. The piece draws from two moments in J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: the chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” and Jesus’s final recitative, in which he cries out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Rather than quoting Bach as a stable object of reverence, The Judas Kiss fractures and distorts these materials over the course of the piece. What begins as something familiar and devotional is gradually pulled apart, darkened, and made unstable. The music traces a movement from trust toward suspicion, from innocence toward cynicism, and from faith toward rupture.

The piece was commissioned by Blair Bollinger and the Curtis Institute of Music for an all-Bach concert with the Curtis Brass Ensemble. While its title refers directly to Judas’s betrayal of Christ, the work also considers betrayal more broadly: personal, spiritual, political, and human. The Judas Kiss uses Bach’s Passion not as a monument, but as a point of pressure—a way of confronting one of the most devastating emotional turns in the Passion story and asking what remains after trust has been broken.

—SC