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.
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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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.”
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.