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?
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.
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.
I’m a little reluctant to even include this song in my Spring Cleaning series. On the other hand, if you’ve stayed with me so far, you won’t be too surprised that some of this music is, indeed, dirty laundry. So let me air it and be done with it.
During the Gulf War, I was sickened to see a seemingly endless stream of young people heading off to fight a war that appeared to have no noble cause. Back in the day, the people making the decisions rode out on the front line into battle. That would make you seriously consider what you have to gain and lose when declaring war. But in this war, the decisions were being made by people who had nothing to lose, and the price was being paid by young and generally poor people who were moved into harm’s way like plastic chess pieces. But now I’m unveiling my pacifist leanings…
In response to all these frustrated thoughts I wrote a musical satire called “Dancing in the Sand.”
When I directed the music at Bellefield Presbyterian, the choir would recess down the middle aisle each week and stand in the back until the benediction, at which point we’d sing an Amen.
You know me. It wasn’t too long before I was writing new ones. Specifically, I wrote a series of rounds. This one I actually notated on a circular staff. (I let the choir sing it from a normal score, though, because I thought it would be unwieldy to sing while spinning your music in circles…) Amen #1.
If you know the infamous PDQ Bach, then you know the geeky delight of classical music insider jokes. I decided to try my hand at creating a fictional composer, as Peter Schickele did with PDQ Bach. My composer’s name was Yang Gonzalez Bergermeister Heinz, the song of a Chinese naval officer and a Bolivian tin heiress. When young Yang made his way to America, he looked for a great librettist with whom he could collaborate. He didn’t find a librettist, but he did find a poem published on a plastic produce bag, and he immediately got to work composing music for this riveting new text. The result? Warning. A masterpiece of Sturm und Wrong.
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Spring Cleaning: Psalm 139
I think every Christian musician is attracted to the Psalms. First of all, it’s the one place in the Bible we can point to as validating our profession. Music can’t be that big of a waste of time–there’s a whole book of songs in the Bible! Plus, David was a stud. A singer/songwriter who fights lions–how cool is that?
In any case, way back before I had any thought of becoming a music minister (more accurately: back when I had specific thoughts about NOT becoming a music minister) I would find myself periodically writing songs based on Psalms I was reading. Here is one such song, Psalm 139.
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Spring Cleaning: Time, a song cycle
Today’s selection finds Greg getting down with his bad classical self. Time is a song cycle for soprano, guitar and cello using the poems of Emily Dickinson.
In the last of the three movements, you’ll notice an odd percussive sound coming from the guitar and cello. I got the idea from a song called “Land of the Glass Pinecones” in which the guitarist hit his strings with a drum stick. (Actually, when I saw it live, he did it with a beer bottle.) My composition teacher told me that no string player would ever hit their strings with a drum stick, chopstick or beer bottle. It took a little convincing, but I got them to do it (with pencils, if I remember correctly), and it sounded pretty cool.
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Spring Cleaning: Oh No!
“Oh No!” is another one of my early hits. (For a definition of “hit” as it relates to my music, see here.) If you’re looking for a song of full of youthful angst, especially one that begins in Eb minor, shifting to a chorus that cycles through the circle of fifths starting on E major, this is the song for you.
Probably my favorite of the three movements, this third movement is just plain fun. It’s sort of a peg-leg polka–dancing, but always landing slightly off-kilter. When the piece was premiered, the quintet got off, and the leader of the group was kind enough to stop the performance and tell the audience that they wanted to make sure the composer got a good recording, so they would start again.