Philadelphia’s macabre Mutter Museum is a place where legs and arms with grotesque deformities and abscesses, hang alongside babies preserved in formaldehyde, next to cabinets full of gruesome Victorian surgical instruments. It’s not at all unusual for visitors to leave the hall queasy.

But it is a serious museum of the history of medicine, with timely public exhibits. For the centenary of the 1918 Spanish Flu, the museum held a “Spit Equals Death” Parade, for which they commissioned this fabulous choral piece ‘Protect Yourself From Infection,’ with text from government pamphlets of the time about epidemic dos-and-don’ts. The advice applies today, to coronavirus.

The bureaucratese of the lyrics is set to gorgeous music by composer David Lang. The piece is masterfully sung by the Philadelphia choir The Crossing.