The Musical Diary of Greg Scheer
I’m very pleased to have Brooks Ritter sing my song “Lord God, Now Let Your Servants Depart in Peace” on The Gospel Coalition’s new CD, Songs for the Book of Luke. The whole project is great.
What are you waiting for? Get out your credit card and go buy it!
Also, I just added a new page for the song at my website, where you can download a leadsheet and SATB/piano accompaniment, and hear the demo I made a few years ago.
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.
Last summer, an email arrived at Hymnary.org from Germany. A woman there was working on a translation project and was looking for an English translation of “Ich steh in meines Herren Hand” by Philipp Spitta. Interestingly, she was translating the diaries of a German woman at the request of her grandson. The grandson had moved with his parents to America, and shortly after their arrival both parents died. The newly orphaned boy was raised by an American family and soon forgot how to speak German. Now he is learning about his family’s history through the diaries he inherited from his grandmother.
Spitta’s hymn was especially meaningful to his grandmother during the turbulence of the war, and through the process of researching the hymn, I’ve fallen in love with it, too. Here is my new tune for Richard Massie’s English translation, “I Place Myself in Jesus’ Hand“: MP3, PDF.
Update 12/11/21: Sheet music for this song is now available at gregscheer.com.
I’ve had this song hanging around for over a decade, and due to a contest sponsored by Fuller Seminary (Brehm Center/Fred Bock Inst. of Music) finally decided to polish it up and send it out the door.
Psalm 148 is a call to praise three parts, starting with the heavenly realms, moving to the creatures of the earth, and finally calling all people on earth to praise the Lord. I’m not the first to write a three verse setting of this Psalm, but I’m probably the first to use a hip hop/black gospel style and an alternate third verse that modernizes the kings, princes, young and old of the original Psalm to scientists, theologians, bards and politicians!
This is a one-hour demo (that is, a 2.5 minute demo that took me about an hour to record), so try to be forgiving: MP3. (I know what you’re thinking: “couldn’t you have spent a few more of those 60 minutes tuning your guitar?…”)
A few weeks ago I posted a refrain based on Psalm 114. On February 28 I had a deadline for turning in a recording of said Psalm. I completed the recording at 5:30am that morning. Now my sleepless night can be enjoyed in a compact musical form on the new Cardiphonia compilation, Hallel Psalms.
My promise to Bruce Benedict, the wizard behind the Cardiphonia curtain who asked me to contribute to his project, was that it would be “Philip Glass meets Brother Roger, performed by Mike Oldfield.” There might be a bit of Tom Waits and Monks of Solesmes in there as well. Decide for yourself. Better yet, listen to the whole Hallel Psalms CD. It’s great.
Six years ago I was standing in the parking lot of a hotel in Uganda, waiting for the group to gather. It was a beautiful East African morning–the kind that is going to burn like a furnace at mid-day, but is dawn-of-creation perfect until 10am–and I began to fiddle around with a little idea on the guitar. Somehow that riff paired up with the text “There’s a Wideness” in my head, and I’ve been trying consummate the union ever since.
Many songs I write come out fully formed, whether because I tapped into some well-spring of creativity or because a pressing deadline forces quick completion. But this one just wouldn’t settle down. I have a theory that things are harder to articulate the more they mean to you, so maybe it was the combination of beautiful hymn text, fond African memories, and can’t-get-it-out-of-my-mind melody that was tripping me up. In any case, I was definitely breaking my Write Once/Edit Twice rule of composing.
We’re singing various settings of “There’s a Wideness” at Church of the Servant during Lent, so I said, “Enough’s enough. I need to finish this thing!” Instead of continuing to hem and haw about minute changes that could be made, I decided to trust my instincts and bring my editing to a close. Here are three ways/places the song has been sung in the last two weeks:
Calvin LOFT, via COS intern Laura de Jong. (Thanks Laura, Paul, and the LOFT team!) Go to minute 29:10 of the video.
Update 3/12/22: Sheet music for this song is now available at gregscheer.com.
This is it, people. This is the last of the Hallel Psalms; that is, 118 of 113-118. Now that all the songs are completed, I still need to write two more instrumental sections to complete the whole cantata thingy I’ve been working on.
A word on Psalm 118. When you’re turning a Psalm into a song, there are a million ways you could go. In the case of Psalm 118, it is all over the place thematically, ranging from “this is the day the Lord has made” to “open the gates of righteousness” to “I will exult over my enemies.” Really, the Psalm deserves a rhapsodic composition rather than a simple song. Which is exactly what I did a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKXjkRaEZ8M.
But this time I wanted something more congregational. I pulled two major themes from the Psalm: death/imprisonment versus life/freedom, and the eternal nature of God versus the fleeting nature of human power. It still makes for somewhat of a sprawling song, but manageable by a cantor and congregation.
MP3 (By the way, Psalm 118 is the lectionary Psalm for Palm Sunday and Easter. Hint, hint…)
This is my second attempt at Psalm 115. (The first is here.) It’s interesting to see the two different directions one Psalm can go musically. The first version was prettier and more compact, but I like the earthiness of this one better and it will fit into my Hallel Psalm collection better. All that’s left from my Hallel project is a song for Psalm 118 and some instrumental connective tissue!
This, the shortest of Psalms, is made up of two, diminutive sections. The first is a call to all people of the world to praise God, the second gives the reason for praise: God’s steadfast love. In a process very unlike rocket science, I have dedicated a verse to each of those themes. I was pleased that I was able to get all the lines of the first verse to begin with the word “all” and the second with “great.” It’s not a big deal, but little touches like this help tighten up a song.
For the record, I no longer equate lots of notes with good writing. There’s a time to explore the thresholds of complexity.* But there’s also a time to keep pruning until nothing remains but the simplest, most pure form of what you want to say. Nowadays I’m more concerned about pacing than showing off my chops. That is, does the music unfold at the right pace? Does each new moment seem simultaneously inevitable and refreshing? At the end, do you feel both satisfied and left wanting more?
This is one of those heavily pruned pieces. I have 3 or 4 completely different sketches for this one, and this version is the result of 3 or 4 rigorous pruning sessions. A song whose theme is “be at rest” needs to feel restful. But not boring. It’s a fine line.
*My first composition professor, Dr. Gibbs, used to get a delighted look on his face if I handed in a lot of music at my lesson. He would take out a pair of reading glasses, look over the music and say, “That’s what I like to see: lots of notes!”