Category: Psalms

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Church Congregational Songs Psalms

Psalm 1: Blessed Are They

Update 10/6/20: Sheet music for this song can be downloaded here.

First of all, my humble apologies for letting 9 days go by without posting a new song. I’m sure some of you have spent more than a few sleepless nights wondering if the well had finally gone dry. Never fear, my friends. The well is still wet, but there just hasn’t been enough time to tell you about the latest, refreshing drinks from the cool waters of my musical mind. (How’s that for a metaphor?…)

On September 9 at Church of the Servant, Cindy VanderKodde led my new setting of Psalm 1, “Blessed Are They.” Yes, there are lots of very good settings of Psalm 1 that I could have used, but two things pushed me to write a new one: First, as I was going through my files in preparing the service, I found a draft I had written a few years ago. It was too much for me to resist. Second, Psalm 1 has lots of “blessed are they (read: me)” set against the wicked who reject God and curse themselves to destruction. This sort of thing is bitter medicine for moderns, who see things in far less binary terms. A spoonful of musical sugar can go a long way with a Psalm like this.

And so, I finished this new setting of Psalm 1 and we sang it the following Sunday. Take a listen to the MP3 or print out a PDF of the music (see link above).

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, Praise the Lord!

When I returned home from my time in Europe, I kept in touch with Annegret. She was a music director and teacher at a church in the area. So when the Hermsdorfer Kirche had its 100 year anniversary she asked me to write a cantata for the occasion.

And that, my friends, is how a young man from Narragansett, Rhode Island has a cantata premiered in East Germany.

Preist den Herrn!/Praise the Lord!

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, The Needy

The Trübenbachs were awesome. They were a solid family trying to live right in an extremely stifling government and culture. Annegret was about my age, and she and her sister Julia took it on themselves to show me around the area. Our sightseeing included a stop at the Scheer bakery in Ernstthal, which was one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced: “Hi, I might be your relative.”

Den Armen/The Needy

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, Interlude

Indeed, the Trübenbach family from the Chemnitz area (Karl Marx Stadt at the time) invited me to stay with them. After my studies in Salzburg were done for the year, I hitchhiked my way through Hungary and Germany, with the goal of ending up in East Germany.

My plans were temporarily thwarted when I tried to hitchhike across the border. The guy who had picked me up got cold feet a mile from the border and let me out. I walked past a mile of cars trying to get a ride, then I got to the border on foot hoping to walk across the border. The border guards told me that I needed to take some sort of official transportation into the country, so I hitchhiked to the nearest train station.

By this time it’s getting late, I’ve been walking in the hot sun with a back pack all day, and I haven’t had anything to eat. Starving. The problem? I’m on a train in East Germany, and I’ve got no East German currency. I had a small bag of raisins which I nursed for the rest of the ride. When I arrived at my destination (a campground was the cheapest option while I waited for the Trübenbachs to pick me up the next morning) I was famished. I will not tell a lie–I traded some money on the black market so I could buy a soda and a bag of chips before drifting off to sleep.

Interlude

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, Who?

When I mentioned that my ancestors came from the Chemnitz area, she told me she knew some people there and could probably arrange a place for me to stay if I wanted to explore my roots.

Family folklore has it that my great-something Scheer came to America to seek his fortune, and then went back to his home town to fetch a bride. (That’s how they rolled back then.) He was from Ernstthal, where his family owned the town bakery, and his bride-to-be was from neighboring Hohenstein, where the family business was sausage. A match made in heaven?

Wer?/Who?

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, Lord of All

One of the excursions she invited me on was in the Black Forest. There I met a young woman who happened to attend a church that happened to have a sister church in East Germany.

Herrscher/Lord of All

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, You His Servants/From There

That au pair made good on her offer and invited me to her house in Steiermark when I had semester breaks in Salzburg. Then she began doing missions with Operation Mobilization. Once again, I was invited along for the ride. (If you’re getting any ideas–her intentions were purely evangelistic, and she eventually married her mission partner.)

Ihr Seiner Diener/You His Servants; Von Dort/From There

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, Halleluja!

So how does a young man from Narragansett, Rhode Island have a cantata premiered in East Germany?

First, he spends a year studying in Salzburg, Austria. No. Wait. First, he meets an au pair in Narragansett who is kind of enough to help him practice his German and dumb enough to say “If you ever get to Austria, I’d love to see you.”

Hallelujah!

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Art Music Choir Church Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Psalm 113, prelude

The next 8 posts are movements from a cantata based on Psalm 113 that premiered at the 100 year anniversary of the Hermsdorfer Kirche in the former East Germany. To make sure you don’t lose interest, I’ll tell a little bit of the the story with each post.

Psalm 113: Prelude

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Church Congregational Songs Psalms

Spring Cleaning: Shout for Joy

I’m always surprised at how well things can turn out sometimes when you have no idea what you’re doing. This setting of Psalm 100 was really a matter of me reading the Psalm and thinking, “Hmm… It sounds like this one could use some music.” Out came “Shout for Joy.” It turned out pretty well, and I’ve even returned to it a few times since then, updating it and creating an arrangement for piano and choir.

One of my favorite memories of this piece is when I lived in Salzburg in 1988/89, I attended a big Christian youth conference in Aachen, Germany. It turns out their praise band needed a bass player, so I volunteered. A few days into it I showed a few people this song, and they asked me to sing it during worship. I wrote an incredibly hard violin solo which I gave to an incredibly good violinist, and we sang the piece in front of a few thousand people that night.

This Ostertreff gathering, by the way, was a real turning point for me, faith-wise. Kind of an adult conversion. I went from being a temporary agnostic who hung out with Christians because that’s who was friendly to me, to becoming a Christian. It was a good Easter.