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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.

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Quirky Rock and/or Roll

Spring Cleaning: Swimming

When I was an undergrad at URI I had access to a small recording studio with an 8 track reel-to-reel machine. On reflection, it was probably some seriously sweet equipment, but at the time I had no idea what was going on. I would just hole myself up with the instruments I had available, stick a mic in front things, and hit record. In this case, the instrument I had available was my electric bass, so I recorded track after track of the bass–sometimes slowed down, sometimes sped up–and then layered a fledging Choir of Greg on top of it, singing the hypnotic and groovy “Swimming.”

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Choir Church Congregational Songs

Spring Cleaning: The Lord Bless You

One of my early church compositions, we also used “The Lord Bless You” at Pitt Men’s Glee Club concerts. Both this two-part choir and a leadsheet version are available. It’s a perky little thang, ain’t it?

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Art Music Finale demo

Spring Cleaning: Vocal Invention #1

Inspired by Bach, I wrote a series of instrumental and vocal “Inventions.” Some of the instrumental inventions ended up getting rolled into other compositions, but I haven’t done much with the vocal inventions. Vocal Invention #1 is based entirely on a phrase I read in a newspaper article about a local art gallery: “‘People,’ she said, ‘want, and need to have their souls fed'” Here it is simply played back through the Professional Composer software that I used before I began my long and frustrating relationship with Finale.

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Demos Quirky Rock and/or Roll

Spring Cleaning: Who Can Know What Will Be?

No one said this was going to be pretty…

In this demo of “Who Can Know What Will Be,” you will find Greg at his most navel-gazing of musical moments. And “pitchy,” as Randy Jackson would say. I doubt I’ll ever do anything with this song again, but if I did, I could imagine it morphing into an extended tabla and sitar improvisation at the end.