Category: Finale demo

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Arrangement Congregational Songs Finale demo Global

Soft Rains of Spring (Korea)

I am neck deep in the Holy Week flood of services and feeling pretty overwhelmed. What does Greg do when he’s feeling burned out and cranky? He writes music.

Today I was reading through a packet of Korean songs given to me by Paul Huh, and I came across this beautiful tune written by Paul and Seung Nam Kim. I wasn’t satisfied by the arrangement that accompanied the tune–though it was written by a composer with a far greater reputation than me–and so I wrote a new one. Although my version may not look especially simple on the page, it takes a direct, chordal approach to accompanying the melody, whereas the other one was quite “noodly.” To my ear this clarifies and strengthens the beauty of the melody. Added bonus: it will sound good with guitar, too.

This is part of a project that Paul and I are working on to translate and arrange some of the core repertoire of the Korean church.

Look. Listen.

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Church Congregational Songs Contests Finale demo

A Gluttonous Feast of Rejection, Fourth Course

Update 3/22/22: Sheet music for this song is now available at gregscheer.com.

Our fourth course, a dessert of dismissal and dejection, is a tune for Stephen Starke’s text, “Jesus, Greatest at the Table.” This 8.7.8.7.8.7 Maundy Thursday text was the last one of the batch I wrote, and  at first I felt it was the weakest. It sounded too similar to a tune in Sing! A New Creation (I’ll never tell which one) and just wasn’t grabbing me. But this is was a situation in which experience and perseverance outweighed youthful enthusiasm and raw talent. I kept fussing with the draft over the course of a few days and now, though perhaps not the most beautiful belle at the ball, it is quite a pleasant, singable tune.

Pleasant and singable, or just a really nice personality? You be the beholder: MP3.

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Church Congregational Songs Contests Demos Finale demo

A Gluttonous Feast of Rejection, Third Course

Our third course of anticipated rejection is a new tune for “Blest are the Innocents” by Sylvia Dunstan. This text is about the Slaughter of the Innocents, when Herod killed every male under two in the hopes of killing Jesus, the prophesied King. So it’s no upbeat ditty, to be sure.

According to an article in Reformed Worship, Dunstan wrote the text with the 10.10.10.10 tune  SLANE (“Be Thou My Vision”) in mind. The editors of Reformed Worship, who are also the editors of Faith Alive’s new hymnal, feel that SLANE’s positive associations will be in tension with the grim subject matter of the text. In the RW article they suggested using SLANE in a minor key arrangement.

I stayed pretty close to SLANE in my new tune. It’s in C minor, which is the relative minor key to SLANE’s Eb major. It has four phrases in 3/4 time that unfold similarly to SLANE. It’s mostly pentatonic, which is what gives SLANE its folk flavor. The main difference is that I never let my melody peak on the high Eb in the third phrase. This might sound like a small deal, but pentatonic melodies are all about the shape of the line. Letting a melody slowly blossom to the highest note of the scale is a way of really making a melody soar. (Keith Getty, I know what you’re doing.) I decided that for a text of this nature, never quite reaching the melodic goal would convey the brokenness of the subject matter. It’s a subtle touch, but I think it works.

You be the judge: MP3, PDF

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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.

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Church Congregational Songs Contests Finale demo

A Humble Mass

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.

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Choir Church Finale demo

Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed

I was reading Bruce Benedict’s very excellent Cardophonia blog today, and he had a post with four different musical renditions of Isaac Watt’s text “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed.” That reminded me that I have never uploaded my choral version of that text, which uses the tune MARTYRDOM. Just in time for Holy Week, here’s the PDF and MP3.

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Church Finale demo

ALLITERATION: a new hymn tune in 8787D

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

Hymn tunes are funny things. They are compact little musical expositions that are given a few dozen measures to introduce and develop a theme. But more than that they are to be sung. A hymn tune may be musical genius in miniature, but if a congregation can’t sing it, it has missed its mark. I wrote the tune ALLITERATION as an alternative to RUSTINGTON. It gave me a chance to work out a few musical ideas, and now it’s your chance to pair it with an 8787D text and give it a try in a real life setting. Listen to the MP3, download and print the PDF (at the link above), and then write a text to go with it!

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Church Finale demo

Before the Cross

One of my favorite hymn tunes is O WALY WALY (often associated with the song “The Water Is Wide”) and one of my favorite hymn texts is “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” I often put them together, to the annoyance of those in the pews, but this Lent I decided to do something a little different. I paired Marie J. Post’s text “As Moses Raise the Serpent Up” with the tune O WALY WALY and put it in a medley with “When I Survey” paired with HAMBURG. Then I added a new refrain to wrap it all together into a meaty Lenten sandwich. Listen to the sinfully cheesy demo, or download a side of music score.

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Choir Church Finale demo

Oh Holy Night

On Christmas Eve we’ll sing my brand spanking new arrangement of “O Holy Night.” To help the musicians prepare, here’s an MP3, score and parts (choir/piano, strings, brass, percussion). Strings–get cracking on that high part in the refrain!

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Church Finale demo

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Here’s a little something I whipped up this afternoon: Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing. Okay, “whipped up” and “this afternoon” makes it sound too easy. I’ve actually been carrying around a rough draft of this in my backpack for the last 6 months and finally got a chance to complete it yesterday and today. The recording is one of my trademark cheesy Finale playback renditions, but it gets the point across.