C.D.Short - Church Music for People

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 a

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

In 2018, I started composing a series of anthems for the four Sundays of Advent. As of this writing, nearly two years later, two of them are finished, and one has been performed. This is that one! Intended for the second Sunday, this is a setting of a portion of Micah's prophecy regarding a messiah to come from Bethlehem. The text jumped out at me thanks to the title phrase--"o Bethlehem Ephratah" just has an innate, undeniable musicality. From that little seed grew a rather lively piece, considering its minor modality and momentous message: set in dizzy 6/8 time with a flowing, pumping organ line, it's always felt very Middle Eastern to me (aptly, I think). And, as ably directed by Dan Booher for the Crawfordsville Community Chorus's 2018 Christmas concert, it never feels too much like a haunted carousel. There's a fine line, y'all. (Special thanks to my wife, Jessica, for getting a really good phone recording!)

In early 2019 I bought a copy of the Reina-Valera Bible (1909), in search of lyrics to set. A lifelong sporadic learner of basic Spanish--formally, I took V semesters of Latin instead--I figured that composing in a different language would, at the very least, present an interesting challenge. More than that, though, the project promised liberation: starting with words that aren't completely  familiar, I hoped they'd make it possible to write with a bit more abandon than usual. And so it was with my first Spanish song, taken from a few verses of my favorite 62nd Psalm (supplemented with a bit of Psalm 61 for good measure). There's something very asymmetrical about the chorus--I haven't actually charted it to see how extensive that is, because I originally performed it as a solo piece during summer church--but it felt, and still feels, very natural. The variation in the second-verse melody sounds like it's trying to escape the song's orbit altogether. All th