This weekend, the combined forces of the Burlington Choral Society and Montpelier's Onion River Chorus — 100 singers strong — will perform music in solidarity with Ukraine. Richard Riley, the artistic director of both choruses, drew up a program called "Deep in Song: Music From and to Ukraine" that features more than a dozen songs in Ukrainian, two piano solos by a Ukrainian composer to be played by accompanist Claire Black and a choral work in English by a UK composer.

The program's only other work in English is the premiere of an a cappella piece by Burlington composer Michael Schachter that the two choruses co-commissioned. "At Times I Wonder" sets to music an English translation of a poem by an Iranian poet. Ukrainian soldier Zhenya Perepelitsa recited the poem on the battlefield in a March 1, 2022, video that went viral.

Still flying under the radar in Vermont, Schachter is a composer operating squarely at the center of new music in the U.S. The 35-year-old's commissions include several for and with Davóne Tines, the renowned Black operatic bass-baritone. Most recently, Schachter co-composed a concerto with Tyshawn Sorey and Caroline Shaw — a MacArthur Fellow and a Pulitzer Prize winner, respectively — that Tines performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl last August.

Schachter and Tines also cocreated The Black Clown, an extraordinary hourlong musical with an all-Black ensemble based on the eponymous Langston Hughes poem about Black American history. Schachter's "rollicking" score, as Alex Ross of the New Yorker wrote admiringly, encompasses a Harlem revue, spirituals, funk and R&B. The work premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., in 2018 and was presented at the 2019 Mostly Mozart Festival in New York City.

So this local commission is something new for Schachter. The collaboration came about after his wife, Allie, a new soprano with the Burlington Choral Society, introduced her husband to Riley at the end of its fall concert.

The timing was fortuitous: Riley wanted his upcoming Ukraine program to feature a work by a local composer, but he needed it within a month — a "crazy turnaround time," Riley admitted. Schachter was between commissions and had a month free. Riley discovered the soldier's recitation and passed along an English translation.

Schachter first came to Vermont when he and his wife were undergraduates at Harvard University, he told Seven Days. Allie regularly visited her father's house in Grand Isle, where she had spent much of her childhood.

"It was pretty clear I wouldn't have too much traction with her unless I got on board with the whole Vermont scene," Schachter recalled.

During the pandemic, the couple lived with their two small children in a tiny, expensive apartment in Cambridge, Mass. Schachter had begun a three-year postdoc with the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2019. The two dreaded the area's ultra-competitive school scene.

Vermont, meanwhile, seemed to have "a slower pace of life. People are more down-to-earth, and we thought it'd be a lovely place to raise kids," Schachter said. When a house near the University of Vermont came on the market a year and a half ago, they snagged it.

Schachter grew up in the Boston area in a nonmusical family. In fact, he said, he "betrayed" his father and grandfather by turning from baseball to music in high school. "I was supposed to be the next great Jewish baseball player," he joked.

He started piano lessons in elementary school, and by age 9, he could play whatever came on the radio and was composing songs. Starting in eighth grade, two piano teachers influenced Schachter: a Russian Soviet émigré who introduced him to classical music and a jazz teacher who taught him improvisation. He listened to George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein and Igor Stravinsky.

In college, choral singing became a formative experience. Schachter, Allie and Tines all met their first year singing in the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum. The chorus introduced Schachter to pre-baroque music, and he "fell in love with" Renaissance and Franco-Flemish composers such as William Byrd, Josquin des Prez and Johannes Ockeghem. He also took a class in Carnatic music, a tradition of southeast India.

"From the first two seconds of the track [the professor] played for us in class, I was totally in love with it," Schachter recalled.

After graduation in 2009, he spent a year on fellowship in Chennai, India, as an apprentice learning the veena — a southeast Indian cousin of the sitar. He went on to earn a double PhD in composition and music theory at the University of Michigan, where his composition dissertation was The Black Clown.

The work was conceived years earlier, Tines said during a phone call. In 2010, Tines was singing for the choir of the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., before entering the Juilliard School. The job "grew kind of boring," the singer recalled, "so I wrote [Schachter] an email saying I wanted to sing something uniquely for my voice, that I care about, that's soulful but also whimsical."

In a volume of Hughes' collected poems that Allie had recently gifted Schachter, the composer and singer found both "Clown" and "Pierrot (Heart)." Schachter turned the latter poem into a recital song, his first composition for Tines, in 2011.

"That was the first seed to our much bigger collaboration," Tines said — one that finally became an American Repertory Theater commission in 2016.

Carlos Simon, a Black composer who wrote a piece for the Vermont Symphony Orchestra in 2021, befriended Schachter while the two pursued their doctorates at Michigan.

"He would show me his work, and I'd show him mine," Simon said. "We leaned on each other in that way. We still do." Having seen The Black Clown develop, Simon said he was "really amazed at [Schachter's] handling of such delicate topics in African American history."

Schachter admitted his composing interests are "a bit eclectic." He has written choral works to Hebrew texts and Wallace Stevens poems. He composed a cello duet inspired by Johannes Brahms and a work for chorus and quartet — notably, Conspirare and the Miró Quartet — based partly on a letter Ludwig van Beethoven wrote. His violin concerto Cycle of Life, for violinist Tessa Lark and the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, was inspired by fiddling and a sculpture installation.

Tines commented of that concerto, "I really loved how [Schachter] could incorporate idiomatic folk playing and expand that into larger orchestral textures. He's really great at taking common American aesthetics and augmenting them to a grander, richer scale."

Schachter even wrote a chamber opera as a junior at Harvard, said Aram Demirjian, music director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, who met him in a music theory class. Since attaining his current post in 2017, Demirjian has commissioned two works from Schachter and programmed several more.

"He's one of the finest young composers of our time," Demirjian said, noting in particular the "amazing breadth of musical styles in which he's conversant and even fluent. He can bring them into what he writes in a way that's organic and not at all imitative, and in a voice that's undoubtedly his own."

Schachter's current projects, if successful, will bring his music to much larger stages. Last September through November, he was in New York City workshopping The Black Clown for Broadway. And he has several projects in development for film and television. One is a limited series about Terezín, aka Theresienstadt, the Czech concentration camp for prisoners bound for Auschwitz where the Nazis allowed and then exploited an extraordinary level of Jewish musical and cultural production.

"I have some likely family history in the camp, and my wife's family definitely does," Schachter said.

Asked if a thread runs through his compositional interests, Schachter noted, "I'm really interested in folk traditions and folk music, very broadly conceived, as a universal communal activity — something that's not just a cultural privilege or a luxury but fundamental to human identity."

His approach to "At Times I Wonder" certainly reflects those concerns. Like the Ukrainian songs on the program, the six-minute-long piece honors the country's rich a cappella choral tradition.

Riley has directed the Burlington Choral Society in concerts of Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian music, and he was already considering a concert of Ukrainian music when Russia launched its war on the country more than a year ago. Schachter, however, had to do some catch-up.

"I'd known about pre-20th-century klezmer folk traditions but not choral traditions, which come out of the Eastern Orthodox church. It was inspiring to get to know that music," Schachter said. "At Times I Wonder" incorporates Orthodox-inspired drones and chants — techniques, he said, that are often mistakenly seen as "ancillary" in Western culture, which is dominated by the Germanic tradition.

Schachter wrote the piece specifically for a "giant mass of singers." His challenge, as he saw it, was to "do something really slow and soft and elegiac and simple but with tremendous power."

Hearing it in rehearsal "was wonderful," he said. "I was able to pipe in and give some thoughts in terms of the shape and the mood of the piece. It can be nerve-racking, but this was lovely. The singers were game and interested. I feel I'm in very safe hands with Richard."