The Musical Diary of Greg ScheerUpdate: Sheet music for this tune (still waiting for a text to call its own)
is now available at gregscheer.com.
Day 4 of my contest submission extravaganza is the second tune I entered in the St Lukes contest. Same text, new tune. This time the tune that came out was a straight up gospel hymn. So I decided to call it MY CROSBY. Hey, it’s better than MY FANNY, right?…
Feel free to write a new text for this: MP3.
You’ll notice that this week’s series of posts get progressively more quirky. In this, day 3 of my posting extravaganza, we once again tap into my submissions to Faith Alive’s Sunday School curriculum. They asked for hip hop, Caribbean, and other cool styles, so I figured I’d turn their request for Acts 1:8 songs into a scripture memory rap. Is that dope enough? Indeed. Here’s the MP3. It seems a little cerebral to include a score, but if you’re so inclined, knock yourself out with the PDF.
Update: Sheet music for this tune (still waiting for a text to call its own)
is now available at gregscheer.com.
Day two of our contest extravaganza finds Greg losing a hymn tune contest.
St. Lukes of Victoria, BC (that’s in Canada) held a contest for a composer to write a tune to go with Judy Trueman’s text “Celebrate God.” I wrote two. The first is this festive tune written in a minor key and named, appropriately, MINOR CELEBRATION.
It lost. Not only did it lose to 34 other entries according to the judges, but also according to a popular vote. Geez! Talk about adding insult to injury. They’ve announced the winners, but you can’t listen to them yet. So you may as well take a listen to the MP3 of my hymn tune submission. Better yet, download the PDF (at the link above) and write your own text to this new tune. Who knows? I may just post it to this blog where thousands of subscribers will peruse your poetry.
It’s going to be a week long extravaganza of contests, starting today!
The first song is one that I wrote a while back–1999 to be exact. “My Keeper” is a rendition of Psalm 121 that began its life as a Jars of Clay or Caedmon’s Call style acoustic rock song. I’ve always had a soft spot for this song, but it’s never quite worked as planned. The main problem is that the verse rhythm is fairly difficult, especially on the page. The second problem is that the refrain hit a high D on an “ee” syllable. That’s not particularly congregational friendly.
So when Faith Alive put out a call for songs based on particular scriptures, and one of those scriptures was Psalm 121, I knew I needed to take the opportunity to revisit “My Keeper.” In this case, the call was for “Caribbean-style” songs based on Psalm 121 for grades K-1, so I had to do some serious rethinking.
The Reggae style I used help me move the melody to a straighter, more congregational-friendly rhythm in the verse. I expect the straighter rhythm will work well even when not using the Reggae style. Recording the song–and struggling with the high Ds in the refrain–led me to repeat the first phrase of the refrain twice. Peaking at a B four times may not be as interesting of a compositional choice, but it works a lot better for the people singing the song.
Now all I have to do is wait to find out if Faith Alive feels the same soft spot for the song as I do. In the meantime, take a listen or look.
Faithful readers of this blog (and who isn’t?) will remember that Colin Gordon-Farleigh and I co-wrote a song in 2008 called “If Only I Had Wings.” Last year it was recording by Jennifer Douglas, and now it has been recorded again by Australian Grace Bawden. You can take a listen and download an MP3 at CDBaby Both singers do a beautiful job with the song, and it’s interesting to hear how each has arranged and “owned” the song in their own unique way.
At COS we’re doing a series on stewardship and this Sunday’s theme was “Stewards of Community.” We normally use the lectionary Psalm, but I thought it would be more appropriate to use Psalm 133 this week. My favorite setting of that Psalm is Barbara Boertje‘s “How Very Good,” and my initial thought was to pair it together with readings from the Psalm, John 13:34-35, and singing Taize’s “Ubi Caritas.”
But you know me–I just can’t leave stuff alone, and I started playing around with an idea to add solo verses to Barbara’s song. My study of the Psalm tells me that the oil represents–thinking broadly–the anointing that made Israel God’s people, and the dew represents God’s blessing through food and creation. Looking through New Testament eyes, we could interpret the oil as Jesus our anointed High Priest and/or the baptismal waters that set us apart as God’s people. The dew could become the bread and wine which are a foretaste of the eternal life promised at the end of Psalm 133.
With that in mind–and with Barbara’s permission–I wrote 2 verses to go with the original song. We sang it this Sunday morning and it worked well. The verses feel like they’re cut from the same cloth as the refrain and it expands Barbara’s original idea to include the text of the whole Psalm, without increasing the difficulty of the congregation’s part. Listen to the MP3 or take a look at the PDF. (The score doesn’t include the piano part for the refrain. I just pasted it in for the time being.)
Last year I wrote a song based on Micah 6:8 for the Church of the Servant Girls’ Club to sing. I guess it went well, because they asked me to write another one this year. This time, they chose the scripture I Corinthians 4:1-2 (“servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries”) to coincide with Pastor Jack Roeda’s series on stewardship. The basic idea is that we are not only called to be stewards of money, but of all the gifts God has given us.
So yesterday I wrote a draft and today I revised (ie. scrapped and rewrote) and finished it up. Late this afternoon I made a quick demo. Check it out: MP3, PDF.
A while back NPM (National Pastoral Musicians) held a contest for new musical settings of the English Mass which was recently approved by the US Roman Catholic bishops. For those of you who aren’t Catholic, even small changes in the language of the mass can be a pretty big deal, with publishers scrambling to release new versions of mandated text.
Of course, you know how I am about composition contests. You’ll remember that in the calm before the storm of this year’s Calvin Worship Symposium, I completed a Robot Dance Music contest entry (I won) and started a mass. I made enough progress on the mass before the symposium started that I was able to complete it during the event. This was helped along by my friend Kelly at GIA who was gracious enough to give me excellent feedback from her symposium vendor’s booth, and by Jeremy Begbie, who was kind enough to overlook that guy in the back who was editing a mass while he gave a lecture.
Fast forward a few months. I lost the NPM contest, which is not entirely unexpected. But I can’t just let 13 pages of music languish because of something as benign as losing a contest. So I did what any reasonable person would do–I asked for a second opinion in the form of YouTube. That’s right. I’ve published a “bouncing ball” version of the mass on YouTube so you can sing along while watching the music scroll by.
I named this setting “A Humble Mass” not because I think it’s a cool name like… I don’t know–Missa Lunesta or Mass of the Proletariat–but because I just couldn’t find a great name. I wanted to convey that this is a simple mass that is quite usable in congregations that only have a keyboard available to them. And it’s quite singable, with a few themes tying the whole mass together. But you never really know how effective a piece is until it’s sung by a living, breathing congregation.
If any of you would like to give this mass a go in your congregation, let me know and I’ll get you a PDF file of the mass.
If you’re looking for a 10.10.10.10 tune, give this a try.
When I lived in Pittsburgh I was part of a men’s organization called the Rascals, Rogues and Rapscallions. It was an awesome enclave of pseudo intellectualism and cigar smoking. I, of course, couldn’t help but write music for our meetings. In fact, the Rascals’ website is now named after one of my songs (http://thatinterestingthing.org/).
One of things I did at the time was to make a rough animation of the Rascal flag, and of course, it included a brief soundtrack. It was, to tell the truth, quite a low budget affair. You can check out the original animation and soundtrack on YouTube.
For some reason, I stumbled across this file on my computer a few months ago. As I listened to the music that accompanies the animation, I realized that the music could be retooled for use as theme music, a la the NPR theme or Windows system start up music. (Ka-ching!) I recast it in a more orchestral vein and polished the recording to prepare it for submitting it to production music companies.
But first I’m giving you, my faithful listeners, a chance to hear what is now called “Ten Second Sunrise.”