Category: Church

A Gluttonous Feast of Rejection, First Course

Post author By Greg Scheer
Post date October 21, 2011
1 Comment on A Gluttonous Feast of Rejection, First Course

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.

Arrangement Choir Church Live

Heinz Chapel Choir sings “Lo, How a Rose”

Post author By Greg Scheer
Post date October 20, 2011
No Comments on Heinz Chapel Choir sings “Lo, How a Rose”

Back when I was doing my masters at the University of Pittsburgh I studied conducting with John Goldsmith, the director of the Heinz Chapel Choir. Besides being a great singer, scholar and teacher, he was kind enough to try out my arrangement of “Lo, How a Rose.” He must have liked it, because 20 years later he included it on the Heinz Chapel Choir’s new CD, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

Nothing John does is half-baked. This recording is no exception: MP3.

If you like what you hear, why don’t you head on over to www.gregscheer.com where you’ll find the full arrangement. It can be sung a cappella, with piano, or even with string orchestra. And for $15 for your whole choir, you can’t go wrong.

Arrangement Church

My Jesus, I Love Thee

One of things I like about Church of the Servant is that we do funerals well. Everyone pitches in, whether at the piano or in the kitchen, to make sure the life of the person who died is celebrated and the family left behind are comforted. I think sometimes people are surprised at how heartily we sing on these occasions.

Such was the case at Jud Mereness’s funeral. Jud was a longtime member of the church and sang for a number of seasons in the choir. His wife Cele plays her viola at the church and has herself played in her share of funerals. So it was an honor to give a little something back to the family.

Cele asked if I’d sing “My Jesus, I Love Thee.” I’m never very comfortable singing at funerals (I cry), so I decided to sing only verse 1 as a solo and then invite the congregation to join me. I also thought that a string arrangement would be just right, so I wrote a new one. Here’s the recording from the service: My Jesus, I Love Thee (MP3).

Arrangement Church Congregational Songs Retuned hymn

Veni Creator Spiritus

Update 10/1/20: Sheet music for the final version of this song can be downloaded here.

Bruce Benedict is at it again. Last time it was a collection of songs based on the Apostles’ Creed. This time he’s assembling a group of musicians to compose and record songs for Pentecost. I have a real affinity for the Gregorian chant Veni Creator Spiritus, so I chose to contribute an updated version of this hymn to the project. Wikipedia has a good overview that includes the Latin, chant notation, an English translation, and an audio sample. CHeck out the original, then take a look at my first draft PDF or listen to an MP3 of me singing it directly into my laptop. As you can see, my version keeps the original chant melody intact, provides a new English translation from the Latin, and adds a refrain–“O Holy Spirit, come!”

Now I need your help before I begin recording. One of the difficulties I had was trying to wrangle the flowing, asymmetrical rhythms of the chant into a regular metered pattern. I chose 3/8 to give me the most flexibility of phrasing, but am still not entirely satisfied with how that plays out in measure 6 and 16. Is the tied pick up too fussy? How about the key signature? I’ve put it in E, but it really works better with an A drone. Should I put it in A? I sort of like the way it floats between the keys of A and E–it feels more chant-like to me–but maybe I’m just being stupid. And the translation? Anything you’d change? I like how each verse gives a name for the Spirit at the beginning, and am generally pleased with the rest of the text, but would appreciate any feedback you have on it.

Let’s make this better and then I’ll get to work on the final recording!

Church Congregational Songs Psalms

SINKING SHIPS 8.7.8.7 D

Update: Sheet music for this tune (still waiting for a text to call its own)
is now available at gregscheer.com.

Last night I had a rehearsal/recording session with The Choral Scholars as part of our upcoming Psalm CD. The recording is in conjunction with a forthcoming print publication from the CICW and Faith Alive that will feature multiple settings of all 150 Psalms. We’re reading through 20 or 30 Psalm settings each rehearsal; the “fair use” clips will go on the web, and we’ll polish up a few dozen songs for the CD.

As I was preparing for the session, I came across a great metrical setting of Psalm 12 by Adam Tice–and it’s not easy to write a great metrical setting of Psalm 12–that included a hand-written note “need another sturdy tune like Latvian hymn.” To a person who has OCD (obsessive compositional disorder), the words “need another tune” read as “Greg, write a new tune in the remaining 1/2 hour before rehearsal starts.” Which is exactly what I did.

Listen to an MP3 of TCS singing the song. If you like what you hear (and it’s hard to dislike anything TCS sings), head over to my website to download the PDF of the tune. I don’t have permission to use Adam’s text, so I’ve left the score blank. But that’s a great opportunity for you to write your own text in 8787D meter.

By the way, are you wondering why I named the tune SINKING SHIPS? What better tune name to go with a text entitled “Lying Lips”?

Arrangement Choir Church Congregational Songs Psalms

Odds and Ends, part 4

From the Dust You Shall Raise Us Up (Solo, SATB Choir and Piano)

I posted a song at the beginning of Lent called From the Dust You Shall Raise Us Up, with verses taken from Psalm 103. Here it is again, this time arranged as a choral anthem: MP3, PDF.

Arrangement Church Congregational Songs

What Wondrous Love Is This

Post author By Greg Scheer
Post date April 2, 2011
2 Comments on What Wondrous Love Is This

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.

Church Congregational Songs

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.

Art Music Choir Church Congregational Songs Finale demo

The God of Abraham Praise

In December I blogged about an arrangement of mine that we used in this year’s Lessons & Carols service at Church of the Servant. The hymn “The God of Abraham Praise” fits beautifully with the reading about the calling of Abraham, so I arranged it for string orchestra, oboe and flute. It worked so well that I convinced Robert Nordling to commission a full arrangement for the Calvin College Orchestra. It will premiere Saturday, March 5 at 8pm in the Covenant Fine Arts Center. I hope to see you there. In the meantime, you can listen to Finalified MP3.

Choir Church Congregational Songs

Incarnation

Christmas is a time of incarnation. Of course, the most important incarnation is the Incarnation in which God took on flesh in the form of Jesus. The most negative aspect of Christmas incarnation is when we step on the scale at the end of the season and see the results of all those holiday parties, Christmas cookies, and festive meals: too often we have incarnated in the sense that we have “taken on flesh.”

But this blogpost is about a different kind of incarnation. Two of my compositions went from being ideas in my head, to being notes on paper, and have finally “taken on flesh” in the form of performances and recordings. “A Mark of Grace” began it’s life last year around this time as a hymn of response for Neal Plantinga’s sermon and Cain and Abel at the 2010 Calvin Worship Symposium. “The God of Abraham Praise” is newly written, and was spurred on in part because of Adoro Music’s new series of instrumental arrangements for congregation singing, Everything that Has Breath.

These latest incarnations of my work took place at last Sunday’s Lessons & Carols service at Church of the Servant.