The Musical Diary of Greg Scheer
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.
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.
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.
“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.
If I remember correctly, movement 2 of the Brass Quintet was the first movement I composed. It may have started as a piano piece and then morphed into a brass piece by necessity (i.e. the clock was ticking on a semester project), but it’s all a dim memory now.
By the way, did I tell you that it won an award? The piece was chosen to be played at the University of New Hampshire’s Horn Festival. That may seem awfully…narrow, but it was a pretty big deal to an undergraduate composer.
This was one of the first serious pieces I composed–multi-movement, multi-instrument, boring title–it had it all. Here’s movement #1, which is, more or less, a prelude and fugue.
I used to listen to a lot of great folk and Celtic shows on the incredible WRIU. Come to think of it, many of my most memorable and formative music listening experiences centered around this station–post-punk under my pillow, afternoons getting schooled in the hip hop that was at that point completely under the radar, and eventually doing a little DJing at the station.
But I digress.
“The Halls of the Heart” is a traditional ballad–a story of love and loss in a village by the sea. Not my typical style at the time–or even now–but it has a certain charm, don’t you think? By the way, the chorus is taken from Phantastes by George MacDonald. If you haven’t read it and Lillith, do yourself a favor and read them.
I was quite the musical entrepreneur, even in my college days. While an undergrad, I decided that I needed to compose something for a large ensemble, so I simply went to the conductor of the URI wind ensemble, Gene Pollart, and asked if he’d program something if I wrote it. He said Yes. Little did I realize what an unusual opportunity this was. (Thank you, Dr. Pollart!) The result was “Crying Bone,” a tone poem loosely based on the story some friends told me about their young daughter, who kept inexplicably bursting into tears. At their wits ends, they enlisted their other daughter in trying to find out what was going on. Eventually, she confided to her sister that “she had a crying bone (pointing to her ribs), and she couldn’t turn it off.”
It starts very quietly, so stick with it and don’t turn up the volume too high, because it will get a lot louder!