Why am I like this? I’ve been rejected by Faith Alive more times than a bacon salesman at a vegetarian convention, but here I am submitting four more songs to them. It started with an email that read:
Calling all composers, Work continues on the upcoming hymnal Lift Up Your Hearts: Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs to be published by Faith Alive Christian Resources in 2013. As we finish making our selections we noted a couple of texts that we would like to find new tunes for.
The first text listed is “As In that Upper Room You Left Your Seat” by Timothy Dudley-Smith. The meter is 10.10.10.10, which makes the poetic lines long enough that the syllabic stress can be all over the place. The trick is to write music that is fluid enough to accomodate changes in text stress between verses, but not so much that things turn to mush. So I wrote a melody that focuses on the arc of each phrase, and doesn’t worry too much about meter. In fact, I don’t show any time signatures and I’m thinking very seriously about taking out the bar lines.
Take a look (PDF) or listen (MP3), then give the folks at Faith Alive a call and tell them that their hymnal will be nothing without this tune. But still, I fully expect it to be rejected.
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