In a previous post, I tantalized you with the premiere date of The God of Abraham Praise. That date has come and gone, and now I’m pleased to present you with a recording from the event. Without further ado, I give you the Calvin College Orchestra playing The God of Abraham Praise.
Author: Greg Scheer
I’ve written before about my love of the hymn What Wondrous Love Is This. That previous post included a stripped down recording of me singing the song, accompanied by guitar. This time I’m posting a more complex arrangement for piano. We used it last Sunday at COS as an accompaniment for congregational singing. After seeing how hard my pianist had to work (and hearing how sick of hearing it his wife became) and experiencing the difficulty the congregation had finding their note into the last verse, I think I may recast this as an instrumental anthem for piano and treble instrument. But I’ll let you be the judge. The piano is quite light in the recording, so you may want to look at the PDF while listening to the MP3.
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Creepy the Clown
When the cat’s away, they say, the mice will play. That was certainly the case last weekend when Amy was at a conference in South Carolina, leaving her boys to their own devices. I had just completed music that I had hoped would be chosen for a movie about a scary clown. (Rejected.) “What am I going to do with scary clown music?” I pondered. Then I hatched a plan to cast Theo as “Creepy the Clown,” chasing himself and Simon around our house and yard. Usually it’s hard to get them to cooperate with an elaborate plan like this, but since the grueling filming schedule for this movie included instructions like “play with Legos” and “run around the yard screaming,” they seemed to do okay. The results, in a subjective estimation of my own progeny, are priceless. Click through to YouTube, or watch it below:
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Throughout These Lenten Days
Update: For sheet music or to adopt this tune, head over to gregscheer.com.
Have you ever tried to find a good Lent hymn? That is, a hymn about the season of Lent? There are not many, and they are not very good. My favorite is James Gertmenian’s text “Thoughout These Lenten Days,” which is paired with TALLIS CANON in Sing! A New Creation. I love the Tallis tune–I even was in a rock group named after it–but it felt too static for the movement that takes place in the six verses of Gertmenian’s text. So I wrote this sweeping melody that is reminescent of English cathedral melodies such as KING’S WESTON. One of my choir members liked the tune so much that he took to calling me “maestro” ever since he sang it. Because the tune earned me that title, I thought it would be an appropriate title for the tune as well. You can download a PDF of the tune MAESTRO at gregscheer.com or hear how we used the song in Sunday’s worship service at COS (MP3).
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The Four Gospels
Today’s post features four gospels–no, not Matthew, Mark, Luke and John–the gospel according to Colin and Greg. That is, four gospel songs I wrote to lyrics by Colin Gordon-Farleigh. Since Colin works with both country gospel and black gospel singers, he wanted music that could swing either way. Wanna get your praise on? Check ’em out:
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Hosanna in the Highest
Update 3/16/22: Sheet music for this song is now available at gregscheer.com.
Starting to do your Palm Sunday planning? Think about using this song I wrote for last year’s Palm Sunday service. The tune is the Jewish tune associated with “The King of Glory Comes,” but the text is brand new.
I kept wanting to use “The King of Glory Comes” on Palm Sunday, because the mood is right and it’s in the ballpark thematically. However, the verses of Jabusch’s text don’t fit. What I really needed was something I could use during our Palm Sunday procession. So I wrote one that captured the “Hosanna in the highest!” of the crowd in the refrain, and some of the associated Old Testament scriptures (Ps 24, Is 40) and narrative subtext in the verses.
You can almost imagine Jesus coming closer as the song progresses: The verses begin with prophecies of the Messiah with which the crowd would have been familiar. Everything is pomp and circumstance until Jesus comes into view, at which point there’s some head scratching–what kind of King rides a donkey? Verse 5 includes what is missing from many Palm Sunday songs–a foreshadowing of what was to come. By verse 6, the crowd does what crowds do, and the people are back to their festivities.
Here is the MP3. If you ask nicely I can send you string parts, and perhaps by the end of the week some brass parts.
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Sneak Pique
Last night I had a rehearsal with The Choral Scholars. (You’ll remember TCS from our CD Global Songs for Worship.) We sang through 20 songs, the first of many marathon sessions coming throughout the spring and summer. All of this work will result in a CD of Psalms that will be released in conjunction with the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship‘s new Psalm collection.
I’m pretty excited about this. As you can hear from this rough recording of the rehearsal, TCS sounds great even when they’re sight reading. And they’re fun to work with, too! Pique your interest in the project by taking a listen to my arrangement of Bruce Benedict‘s Thou God of Love (Psalm 120).
Update 2/8/22: Sheet music for this blog is now available at gregscheer.com.
I had an unfortunate opportunity to reflect on mortality this summer when my friend Christina Mandang was hit by a car. Her sudden and senseless death at the age of 38 reminded me once again how fleeting our lives are. It is truly ashes to ashes and dust to dust, with precious little time in between. The good news is that the God who breathed life into dust to create Adam and who resurrected Jesus from the grave, is the same God who has promised to raise us from death to eternal life. Now that’s Good News!
When Christina died I was reflecting on all this and a short refrain came to me, “from the dust you shall raise us up.” I sang it to myself as I mourned her death, wrote it down, and it has remained in my idea folder ever since. Ash Wednesday gave me another chance to consider all these life and death issues, and I revisited that short refrain. I decided to pair it with the words of Psalm 103 in which God, the loving Father, “remembers we are dust.” This was an especially appropriate image, because my friend Janice had just lost her father, Frank Diehl.
Here is my sung prayer of thanksgiving for Christina and Frank, and my sung prayer of hope for the rest of us: From the Dust, You Shall Raise Us Up.
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Better by the 1/2 Dozen
I finished 6 new country Gospel songs with Colin Gordon-Farleigh last week, but haven’t had time to upload them to my blog because I was so busy finishing Be My Everything (have you voted yet?). Here they are:
Let Go and Let God
Old-Time Gospel
One Saint at a Time
The Armour of the Lord
The Gospel Singer
Walking with Jesus
By the way, Colin posts a new hymn to his blog every day. (Take that Charles Wesley!) And why wouldn’t you want to visit the website of a guy who once looked like this?:
The last few days have been a marathon of writing, mixing and recording my latest lunge for lyrical longevity. Yes, it’s contest time again, people! This one is the “16 Love” song contest, the winner of which will be featured in a teen romance movie about two tennis players.
I wanted to make the song something that would fit well thematically and make sense to the teens who will be watching the movie, but not something so specifically tennis-oriented that I’d never be able to use it again. (I learned my lesson with the TopGolf theme song.)
I present to you “Be Your Everything,” sung by Laura Stapert. (I decided her 16-year-old voice would be a lot more convincing than mine.) Normally, I link directly to an MP3 hear at my music blog, but this time I’m going to make you follow an external link to hear the song (and watch the trailer) because I want you to vote for the song!