The Musical Diary of Greg ScheerThis is the time of year when I catch up on all the projects I’ve put off while preparing for Christmas services. Now that the services are basically planned and ready to go I give myself the Christmas present of sitting at the piano for long hours doing creative work. Here is the first to be completed: A Child Is Born (MP3, PDF), written with Colin Gordon-Farleigh. It’s a melodic Christmas song that makes a nice follow up to our Emmanuel Now.
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.
Church of the Servant’s Lessons & Carols service is this Sunday at 6pm. I usually try to write something special for the occasion, and this time it’s an arrangement of the hymn “The God of Abraham Praise” which is paired with the scripture reading about God’s promise to Abraham. I’ve been working like a crazy person trying to finish it in time for tomorrow’s rehearsal. Now I’m done and the strings get to work like crazy people practicing it for Sunday. For their, and your, edification is Maestro Finale conducting the Synthetic Orchestra in a rousing rendition of The God of Abraham Praise.
On January 18, 2005, while giving Theo a bath, I had an idea for a song. It was a bouncy, happy affair* with a refrain** that proclaimed “Rejoice in the Lord always.” That little idea has been languishing on the Island of Misfit Song Ideas until recently, when Calvin College’s focus on Philippians*** brought it to mind again. I decided to finish it up in the hopes that it would be useful to some of the people who are studying the book and planning worship services around its themes.
Like the book of Philippians, the song is an exhortation to live faithfully and joyfully, even in suffering. I use the “through many dangers” verse of Amazing Grace as a bridge, because it sums up the themes so well. The bridge, by the way, is the recording debut of my fellow COS staff members Rebecca Jordan-Heys and Jan DeVos. You never know what you’ll get roped into when you show up to COS early on a Monday morning!
Take a listen to the MP3 demo or read the words below. As always, comments are welcome.
V1
The power of resurrection
Is sometimes bound in chains.
Give your living and your dying
To the glory of Christs name.
So keep on pressing forward
With confidence and faith.
Whatever lies before you
[I know] the way will be paved with grace
CHORUS
Rejoice in the Lord always.
Again I say
Rejoice in the Lord always
Again I say, rejoice!
V2
Rejoice! Do not be anxious.
Rejoice, and do not fear.
Take comfort that he hears you
The Lord is always near
And Jesus Christ our Savior
Will fill your hearts with peace.
The one who began this good work
Will make your joy complete.
CHORUS
BRIDGE
Through many dangers, toils and snares
we have already come.
T’was Grace that brought us safe thus far…
and Grace will lead us home.
CHORUS
*(as bath time songs often are)
**(on the minor V for those who care about such things)
***If you ever play charades on books of the Bible and you get “Philippians,” you can act out “flipping pans” and it should work like a charm.
I’m beginning to think I have OCD: Obsessive Compositional Disorder. I just can’t say no to a compositional challenge. Take this one that arrived in my email inbox Friday night:
DEADLINE: ASAP
TV series needs CHILDREN’S CHOIR religious and “early to rise” theme music.
1) Songs such as “Jesus Loves me” but very unpolished sounding, sung by a children’s choir. It’s supposed to sound like a small group of kids are singing this – impromptu – in the background of an auditorium.
2) We are also looking for more children’s choir hymns. Any religious songs you have sung by children are welcome. They really want a song about “early to rise..” or “getting up in the morning” or “morning prayer”. Any kind of rise and shine theme’s.
I knew I could come up with something for that, so I set to work and had a song finished by the end of the evening. Saturday morning I spent a few hours recording some basic tracks and I prepped them for mixing later that night. The next morning I got up early and laid down some bass tracks before church, and today I finished a rough mix. Wednesday night I’ll add the COS Youth Choir, and who knows? Maybe we’ll end up on a TV show!
But if you can’t wait until then, you can listen to an MP3 of the rough mix.
A few weeks ago I and some other songwriters got an email from Bruce Benedict asking if we’d take part in his latest musical venture–a re:hymned version of Samuel J. Stone’s Lyra Fidelium. This collection is Stone’s hymnic reflections on the Apostles’ Creed. Inspired by Brian Moss‘s version of “The Church’s One Foundation,” Bruce thought it would be cool if a bunch of us would contribute new tunes to these classic texts in time for All Saints’ Day.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.” I quickly chose Article V: He Descended into Hell. This may seem like an odd choice, but let me explain. First of all, it was one of two texts that others hadn’t chosen. Next, I felt it was penance for a job interview in which I submitted the Apostles’ Creed as my statement of faith and subsequently got grilled by one of the people on the search committee who asked if I *really* believed that Jesus went to hell. Very awkward.
The tune wrote itself fairly quickly. But a demo had to wait a week. When I had some free time to record the song on Friday, I spent the day laying down tracks that I realized by 2pm were sadly lacking. So naturally I brewed some coffee and assessed the situation. I started over with a more direct approach to the song. (See: Occum’s razor.) Somewhere around 4pm it all became an act of worship, and the arcane English worked its way deeper and deeper into my heart and the recording became an opportunity to explore Christ’s death, descending into hell, and resurrection more fully.
You can check out my All the Sacrifice Is Ended and a bunch of other songs at Cardiphonia Hymns of Faith page.
Update: Sheet music for this tune (still waiting for a text to call its own)
is now available at gregscheer.com.
Day 4 of my contest submission extravaganza is the second tune I entered in the St Lukes contest. Same text, new tune. This time the tune that came out was a straight up gospel hymn. So I decided to call it MY CROSBY. Hey, it’s better than MY FANNY, right?…
Feel free to write a new text for this: MP3.
Update: Sheet music for this tune (still waiting for a text to call its own)
is now available at gregscheer.com.
Day two of our contest extravaganza finds Greg losing a hymn tune contest.
St. Lukes of Victoria, BC (that’s in Canada) held a contest for a composer to write a tune to go with Judy Trueman’s text “Celebrate God.” I wrote two. The first is this festive tune written in a minor key and named, appropriately, MINOR CELEBRATION.
It lost. Not only did it lose to 34 other entries according to the judges, but also according to a popular vote. Geez! Talk about adding insult to injury. They’ve announced the winners, but you can’t listen to them yet. So you may as well take a listen to the MP3 of my hymn tune submission. Better yet, download the PDF (at the link above) and write your own text to this new tune. Who knows? I may just post it to this blog where thousands of subscribers will peruse your poetry.
It’s going to be a week long extravaganza of contests, starting today!
The first song is one that I wrote a while back–1999 to be exact. “My Keeper” is a rendition of Psalm 121 that began its life as a Jars of Clay or Caedmon’s Call style acoustic rock song. I’ve always had a soft spot for this song, but it’s never quite worked as planned. The main problem is that the verse rhythm is fairly difficult, especially on the page. The second problem is that the refrain hit a high D on an “ee” syllable. That’s not particularly congregational friendly.
So when Faith Alive put out a call for songs based on particular scriptures, and one of those scriptures was Psalm 121, I knew I needed to take the opportunity to revisit “My Keeper.” In this case, the call was for “Caribbean-style” songs based on Psalm 121 for grades K-1, so I had to do some serious rethinking.
The Reggae style I used help me move the melody to a straighter, more congregational-friendly rhythm in the verse. I expect the straighter rhythm will work well even when not using the Reggae style. Recording the song–and struggling with the high Ds in the refrain–led me to repeat the first phrase of the refrain twice. Peaking at a B four times may not be as interesting of a compositional choice, but it works a lot better for the people singing the song.
Now all I have to do is wait to find out if Faith Alive feels the same soft spot for the song as I do. In the meantime, take a listen or look.
At COS we’re doing a series on stewardship and this Sunday’s theme was “Stewards of Community.” We normally use the lectionary Psalm, but I thought it would be more appropriate to use Psalm 133 this week. My favorite setting of that Psalm is Barbara Boertje‘s “How Very Good,” and my initial thought was to pair it together with readings from the Psalm, John 13:34-35, and singing Taize’s “Ubi Caritas.”
But you know me–I just can’t leave stuff alone, and I started playing around with an idea to add solo verses to Barbara’s song. My study of the Psalm tells me that the oil represents–thinking broadly–the anointing that made Israel God’s people, and the dew represents God’s blessing through food and creation. Looking through New Testament eyes, we could interpret the oil as Jesus our anointed High Priest and/or the baptismal waters that set us apart as God’s people. The dew could become the bread and wine which are a foretaste of the eternal life promised at the end of Psalm 133.
With that in mind–and with Barbara’s permission–I wrote 2 verses to go with the original song. We sang it this Sunday morning and it worked well. The verses feel like they’re cut from the same cloth as the refrain and it expands Barbara’s original idea to include the text of the whole Psalm, without increasing the difficulty of the congregation’s part. Listen to the MP3 or take a look at the PDF. (The score doesn’t include the piano part for the refrain. I just pasted it in for the time being.)