Founded and led by baritone Brian Mummert, The New Consort is a vocal ensemble that explores the roles musical ritual and community can play in 21st-century lives. The ensemble draws on a roster of leading early music and contemporary singers and are winners of The American Prize in Chamber Music. Their program for their debut album contrasts two major works for voices across four and a half centuries: Robert White’s The Lamentations of Jeremiah a5, by a Tudor composer whose career was cut short by the bubonic plague, and Jonathan Woody’s Lamentation, a commission by The New Consort receiving its world premiere recording, trading the prophet Jeremiah’s ruined Jerusalem for the contemporary experience of queer life. The album takes its title from a line in Emilia Effie’s poem The Revelation, one of the texts Woody sets: “to eat the fruit of knowledge is to lose your innocence and be flung from the garden forever.”