The Musical Diary of Greg ScheerFrom 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s my birthday today. (If you’ve forgotten to get me a gift feel free to head over to my Amazon wish list and buy something.) A birthday is a time to remember, celebrate, and look forward to one’s slow descent into a certain death. And for a man of my age, it’s a time to have a mid-life crisis. While I feel no great desire for a sports car, have no need to flaunt death with skydiving, and am entirely happy with my current woman (when my mother turned 40 my father threatened to trade her in for two 20s), I seem to be grasping after youth in a musical way: rap.
A few days ago, I submitted a spoken/rapped version of Acts 1:8 to Faith Alive. They liked it enough that they requested similar treatment of Psalm 23. I was a little reluctant. After all, Psalm 23 is sacred territory. But I gave it a try, and now I’m glad I did. It came out really well (if I don’t say so myself.) So take a listen to the MP3 while you read the lyrics below. Yo, MC G out.
He makes me lie down in fields of green
Walks with me along quiet streams
He restores my soul and gives me rest
Guides me in paths of righteousness
For his name sake and even though I take
A journey to the valley of the shadow of death
There’s nothing to fear, because you are with me
Your rod and staff bring peace and uplift meThere is nothing to fear
Because my Shepherd is near.You’ve set a table full of good things
In the presence of my enemies
With oil you anoint my head and bless me
And my cup is filled to overflowing
Goodness and love will be with me
Every day I live brings brand new mercies
It will never end, because I’ll be a guest
In the house God forever find my rest.There is nothing to fear
Because my Shepherd is near.
A while back NPM (National Pastoral Musicians) held a contest for new musical settings of the English Mass which was recently approved by the US Roman Catholic bishops. For those of you who aren’t Catholic, even small changes in the language of the mass can be a pretty big deal, with publishers scrambling to release new versions of mandated text.
Of course, you know how I am about composition contests. You’ll remember that in the calm before the storm of this year’s Calvin Worship Symposium, I completed a Robot Dance Music contest entry (I won) and started a mass. I made enough progress on the mass before the symposium started that I was able to complete it during the event. This was helped along by my friend Kelly at GIA who was gracious enough to give me excellent feedback from her symposium vendor’s booth, and by Jeremy Begbie, who was kind enough to overlook that guy in the back who was editing a mass while he gave a lecture.
Fast forward a few months. I lost the NPM contest, which is not entirely unexpected. But I can’t just let 13 pages of music languish because of something as benign as losing a contest. So I did what any reasonable person would do–I asked for a second opinion in the form of YouTube. That’s right. I’ve published a “bouncing ball” version of the mass on YouTube so you can sing along while watching the music scroll by.
I named this setting “A Humble Mass” not because I think it’s a cool name like… I don’t know–Missa Lunesta or Mass of the Proletariat–but because I just couldn’t find a great name. I wanted to convey that this is a simple mass that is quite usable in congregations that only have a keyboard available to them. And it’s quite singable, with a few themes tying the whole mass together. But you never really know how effective a piece is until it’s sung by a living, breathing congregation.
If any of you would like to give this mass a go in your congregation, let me know and I’ll get you a PDF file of the mass.
If you’re looking for a 10.10.10.10 tune, give this a try.
I’m helping with worship at the WCRC event in G.R.usalem this week. On Wednesday morning there’s a band and a string quintet leading the worship service. I thought it would be nice to put them together at some point in the service. After all, the theme of the conference is “unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace.” Shouldn’t that include praise bands and string quintets joining together in sweet harmony?
So I wrote an intro for the Delirious song “Shout to the North” that bats the main theme back and forth between the strings in fugal fashion. Once they finish the intro, the band comes in. The strings come back with a more traditional pop string line when the refrain comes around.
I normally don’t post arrangements of copyrighted material, but this bears such little resemblance to the original that I thought Martin Smith would be okay with it. Martin, take a listen to the MP3 or look at the PDF score and let me know if you want me to take it down, okay?
As a worship planner, I try hard not to put my own musical preferences over my congregation’s. However, during certain liturgical seasons I insist on singing a short list of songs that are my personal favorites. This could be considered selfish, but they’re all really good songs, so in a way I’m doing everyone a favor. In any case, during Lent and Holy Week any church of mine will sing “What Wondrous Love Is This” (MP3) and “Ah, Holy Jesus” (MP3).
“What Wondrous Love Is This” is from the Shape Note tradition. Like the best of these early American songs, the tune is beautiful but slippery (what key is this in, anyway?), the words are simple yet deep as death, and it loses much of its charm when it moves from the stark Shape Note harmonies to the sweeter harmonies of modern hymnals. People keep writing new arrangements of the song, but I don’t think anyone will ever get it right. It is a song of elusive perfection.
Knowing that I, too, would fail to pen the perfect arrangement of the song didn’t deter me from composing one. I decided to transplant the song from its original folk tradition to a more modern folk tradition of guitar and voice. I’ve been singing this arrangement for a number of years and finally recorded it this afternoon. I also wrote a piano arrangement that we sang at COS a few weeks ago. (You can email me for the PDF.)
“Ah, Holy Jesus” is a song that has fallen out of favor in modern hymnals. That’s too bad, because Johann Heermann’s text and Johann Crüger’s tune are a one-two-Holy-Week punch to the heart. Without being overly sentimental, the hymn personalizes Jesus’ crucifixion and forces the singer to take some responsibility for Jesus’ suffering. This is a song I discovered in the old Presbyterian hymnal when I first began music ministry at Bellefield Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. I still remember riding the bus into town trying to memorize the song before the Good Friday service.
Even though I know I’m treading on hallowed ground–re-harmonizing Crüger’s music–I’ve continued to sing this folk version through the years. The last time I sang it at COS, an older man–a real straight shooter–came up to me and told me, “You need to know that was a horrible rendition of a great song.” I can’t remember if he went on to describe it as despicable, deplorable, or a sacrilege, but you get the point. Interestingly, that got me written into his will in a roundabout way. It said, “No guitars or drums at my funeral.” I actually liked this man a lot. You knew exactly where he stood on things, and he didn’t seem to harbor any lasting malice–he just didn’t want me messing up a perfectly good hymn or funeral with guitars.