A few days after the second and final 12-hour installment of Taylor Mac’s Philadelphia performance, a friend emailed a handful of pals who had attended the concert, asking us to contribute to a list of the songs we had seen performed. This was no mean feat, given that Mac and his musicians had delivered more than 200 tunes of this take on American musical history with the underlying theme of “how communities are built as a result of being torn apart.” We had all been awed by the show. Yet in the days and weeks afterward we also shared a keen sense of its slipping away from us, compounded by the startling realization that, in this era of endlessly available documentation, no set list appeared in the program or anywhere on the internet. As of this writing, neither an original cast recording nor any official videos that last more than...

You do not currently have access to this content.