Category: Art Music

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Art Music Choir Church Congregational Songs Live Psalms

Psalm 118: This Is the Day! (Easter 2013)

Easter is always a big day for church music, and this year was no exception. What was an exception was the difficulty level of the piece I wrote for the day’s Psalm. I actually wrote this setting of Psalm 118 a few years ago, but this time around I got a good recording of it.

Psalm 118 is a sprawling, rhapsodic Psalm of emotional valleys and mountains. I wanted the composition to reflect that, but I also wanted to make it accessible to the congregation. What I came up with is a short, tuneful refrain that the congregation sings repeatedly throughout the piece. The choir, on the other hand, is given a number of episodes, each mirroring the feelings of the different parts of the Psalm. Put Laura de Jong on soprano, support her with strings, and throw in a timpani–and you’re in business!

Listen to the MP3 from Sunday, or visit the karaoke version of the score on YouTube.

 

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Art Music Church Finale demo Hallel Psalms

Hallel Post Rest

I know it’s Holy Week, but that doesn’t mean I can’t post to my blog, right? Actually, the week before Easter is usually pretty relaxed at church because the bulk of the planning and preparation is already done. So I take the opportunity to catch up on projects I’ve been putting off.

Here is the second to last movement of my slowly emerging Hallel Psalm cycle. Well, second to last to be written. It’s actually the 8th movement, coming after the song “Be At Rest” (Psalm 116) and before “All You Nations” (Psalm 117).

I gotta admit that I’m fond of this one: MP3, PDF.

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Art Music Church Hallel Psalms

Hallel Post-Nations

“What’s up with the goofy name–“Hallel Post-Nations?” you say. Indeed.

As promised, I continue to chip away at my multi-movement work based on the Hallel Psalms. All the Psalm songs are done, and now I just have a few instrumental movements to finish before bringing the composition to completion and setting a date for a premiere. This movement comes right after the Psalm 117 song, “All You Nations,” hence “post-nations.” (Now that I hear the title by itself, it sure sounds apocalyptic. No matter, I’ll change the title in the end.)

Astute listeners will hear that this movement is a fugue. Or as one person put it, I’m “channeling my inner Bach.” The big difference being that Bach improvised fugues, whereas this took me many hours. One of the fun things about this movement is that it combines the folk style of the songs with the classical style of the instrumental interludes. That is, this fugue will segue directly from “All You Nations” and the guitar and bass will continue to lay down a folkish boom/chunk-a-chunk groove throughout the fugue.

You won’t hear that very well on this mock up MP3, but you’ll see it in the PDF score.

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Art Music Church Hallel Psalms

Hallel Post-Glory

I spent the day writing just as fast as I could and spent the evening doing a read-through of my Hallel Psalms with some friends. Here is part of the fruit of our labors. Once again, I’ll come up with a better title for the piece at some point in the future. For now, the name “Hallel Post-Glory” identifies it as the movement in the larger Hallel piece that comes after the song “For the Glory of Your Name.”

It’s always fun to hear a composition played by real musicians (as opposed to Finale’s robotic playback) for the first time. That just never gets old.

Listen and look.

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Art Music Church Hallel Psalms Psalms

Hallel Prelude

Now that I’ve got most of the Hallel Psalm songs done, I can begin working on the instrumental parts of the piece. This “Hallel Prelude” (also known as “Hallel? Ooh Yah!”) is the lead off piece and will segue directly into the previously written “From the Rising of the Sun.”

All of the instrumental movements will be played by friends: alto recorder, flute, 2 violins, and a continuo of guitar/bass. The ensemble’s name is tentatively “The Grand Rapids Greg Scheer Consort of Old-Sounding New Music.” I’m open to other suggestions, though…

Sorry about the MP3 demo. I’m using Finale’s “Export to Audio File…” feature, and there’s something funky going on with it. Usually it just sounds robotic. This time it sounds robotic and distorted.

MP3, PDF

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Art Music

June 26, 1993

Tuesday was Amy’s and my 19th wedding anniversary. 19 years of wedded bliss. How cool is that?

As an ode to our love, here’s a post of the string quartet that I wrote for our wedding. In fact, this is the actual recording from our wedding. In honor of our marital achievement, take a moment to listen to these 3 movements, perhaps imagining a young Amy on her father’s arm, walking tentatively down the aisle, or young Greg trying to look confident at the front of the church, or the happy couple walking briskly out of the church to start their new life together.

processional, MP3

meditation, MP3

recessional, MP3

For a little extra fun, feast your eyes on this photo:

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, Praise the Lord!

When I returned home from my time in Europe, I kept in touch with Annegret. She was a music director and teacher at a church in the area. So when the Hermsdorfer Kirche had its 100 year anniversary she asked me to write a cantata for the occasion.

And that, my friends, is how a young man from Narragansett, Rhode Island has a cantata premiered in East Germany.

Preist den Herrn!/Praise the Lord!

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, The Needy

The Trübenbachs were awesome. They were a solid family trying to live right in an extremely stifling government and culture. Annegret was about my age, and she and her sister Julia took it on themselves to show me around the area. Our sightseeing included a stop at the Scheer bakery in Ernstthal, which was one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced: “Hi, I might be your relative.”

Den Armen/The Needy

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, Interlude

Indeed, the Trübenbach family from the Chemnitz area (Karl Marx Stadt at the time) invited me to stay with them. After my studies in Salzburg were done for the year, I hitchhiked my way through Hungary and Germany, with the goal of ending up in East Germany.

My plans were temporarily thwarted when I tried to hitchhike across the border. The guy who had picked me up got cold feet a mile from the border and let me out. I walked past a mile of cars trying to get a ride, then I got to the border on foot hoping to walk across the border. The border guards told me that I needed to take some sort of official transportation into the country, so I hitchhiked to the nearest train station.

By this time it’s getting late, I’ve been walking in the hot sun with a back pack all day, and I haven’t had anything to eat. Starving. The problem? I’m on a train in East Germany, and I’ve got no East German currency. I had a small bag of raisins which I nursed for the rest of the ride. When I arrived at my destination (a campground was the cheapest option while I waited for the Trübenbachs to pick me up the next morning) I was famished. I will not tell a lie–I traded some money on the black market so I could buy a soda and a bag of chips before drifting off to sleep.

Interlude

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, Who?

When I mentioned that my ancestors came from the Chemnitz area, she told me she knew some people there and could probably arrange a place for me to stay if I wanted to explore my roots.

Family folklore has it that my great-something Scheer came to America to seek his fortune, and then went back to his home town to fetch a bride. (That’s how they rolled back then.) He was from Ernstthal, where his family owned the town bakery, and his bride-to-be was from neighboring Hohenstein, where the family business was sausage. A match made in heaven?

Wer?/Who?