Mr. Patterson began his public career at a time when choral music in the Boston area was in a kind of doldrums: "Apart from church choirs, there were, essentially, only the Handel & Haydn Society and the Cecilia Society. In their nineteenth-century heyday, each organization had been an important musical force in the city, premiering new works and dusting off seldom heard classics. But they had specialized in oratorios, and no one was writing oratorios much anymore. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, H&H and Cecilia were content to serve up strictly traditional fare."