C.D.Short - Church Music for People

For Palm Sunday. This one poured out as I sat down at my piano, while I was supposed to be cleaning and organizing, following an especially stressful and depressing period that had lasted a few weeks. My troubles weren't anywhere near as bad as Jesus's during Holy Week, of course, but I was in that same emotional neighborhood anyhow... and after getting a quick demo down, I felt much better! This version is played with much (little-p) passion by the St. John's Crawfordsville music director, Jerilyn Yerkes.

I woke up on New Year's Day with this tune in my head, the solution to a puzzle I'd been working on for a few days. This year, our congregation is doing the important work of discerning the place and extent in our liturgy for expansive language . If you don't wanna click away, here's a primer: You'll likely have noticed that most of our language for God--the first person of the Trinity, that is, the creator/director/protector of the universe--is decidedly masculine. Meanwhile we, or at least many of us, don't actually have any deeply-held beliefs that God is male. The first person of the Trinity isn't even human, after all, and every facet of "fatherhood" that we apply in that metaphor is something that mothers do as well. It's all a bit of harmless fun, until you realize that Christian conceptions of God have influenced society just as much as society ever influenced that metaphorical language in the first place. As Mary Daly famously ...

This is the penultimate movement from my eclectic 2017 mass , Credimus , and the favorite of the conductor, Dan Booher. It functions as a reprise of the main theme from the Kyrie at the beginning, and a setup to the finale, a strangely rambunctious Southern gospel setting of the first bit of the Pascha Nostrum (with a bit of the Nicene Creed reprised for good measure). As for this movement, it's quiet and reflective, as an Agnus Dei should be. The altos carry the melody with the basses just below, and the upper parts doing a sort of otherworldly harmonic response. The overall effect is wistful and capital-R Romantic , as Dan liked to put it--I would specify very late  Romantic--and it builds to a nice long soaring note for the altos that sort of recedes into nothingness. Peace accomplished! There exists an anthem-length version of this, with some really interesting modulations that I'm not sure I could diagram if I wanted to. We haven't performed it yet, but do stay ...

A previous post mentioned that I got married during rehearsals for my first big choral work, the Credimus  mass. This is true--and I, for one, am still not sure how we survived that spring. In any case, before we started singing, I set about to arrange this old hymn as an offertory for the wedding. If I couldn't give a lot of my presence to the marriage in its first few months, I could at least make sure the ceremony set the right tone! For some reason,  Dennis  is the name of this hymn tune, but nearly everyone--and especially  everyone who, like me, grew up Baptist--knows it as "Blest Be the Tie That Binds." And not that our guests heard them, but surely they would have agreed that John Fawcett's 1782 lyrics were quite well suited for the occasion: Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love; the fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above. Anyway, this recording is the MIDI from my notation software, rather than the actual live ...

My second foray into the Reina-Valera Bible brought me to one of the most famous prophecies in all of the Hebrew Scriptures, Isaiah's "swords into ploughshares" vision--surely a message of perennial importance as we seek the Kingdom of God. Verse 5 makes a fantastic refrain, as it happens, and so that's how it's deployed here. Unlike my still-un-notated solo pass at En Dios Está , this one was scheduled for the fall (specifically the birthday of my son, whom you can hear singing along in the choruses if you listen closely). That meant writing harmonies for the chorus, and teaching the church choir to pronounce some Spanish words that are pretty tricky to non-speakers. I think they were pretty relieved that I sang the verses by myself :)

The first piece of church music I ever wrote was an entire mass. Why not? It's called  Credimus , because in the Episcopal Church we use the "we believe" form of the Nicene Creed (and because of all that Latin you may recall from my "En Dios Está" writeup). The centerpiece was a four-movement setting of the entire creed, and perhaps you'll hear excerpts from that a bit later. In any case, this Gloria was one of the first movements I wrote. It's also the first one we rehearsed in 2017, when Dan Booher, then director of the Crawfordsville Community Chorus , selected it to premiere at the spring concert--a concert held in the Pioneer Chapel at my alma mater, Wabash College. I also got married that spring, so to say it's all a blur is something of an understatement! This is the only a cappella movement in the mass. That's because the main motif sounded to me a bit like plainchant, which is also why it starts with just the men singing. It was...