But it was the raw, cry from the soul new work, “The Just and the Blind,” that has stayed with me from my marathon. Part of Carnegie’s 125 Commissions Project, begun in honor of the hall’s 125th birthday in 2016, it’s a 60-minute piece by the spoken-word poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph, with music by Daniel Bernard Roumain. Though it includes a dancer (Drew Dollaz), a vocalist (Somi) and projected animations and videos, the work is driven by Mr. Joseph’s stinging, brilliant words and is structured as a series of vignettes. Mr. Joseph voices the thoughts of a black father who admits to being afraid when, at night, he walks past young black men who look the same age as his son. Every day, he tells his son, the boy’s main mission in life is “to come home to me.”

Stretches of Mr. Roumain’s score, which he mostly plays on piano and violin, are alternately jazzy and modernist. A rhythmically frenetic section will segue into a breezily cool passage. But Mr. Roumain knows when to pull the music back so Mr. Joseph’s searing words can do their work.

Is this classical music? Perhaps not by traditional definitions. But it speaks to where Carnegie has come that it fit in at the hall just as well as the Vienna Philharmonic.