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 audio from that first performance. We didn't have a videographer at the wedding, and we couldn't set our phones to record it because we were busy collecting an offering... plus, you know, there were a lot of other things going on! But on such a day of joy and reflection, I was happy to hear it played so beautifully by Jerilyn Yerkes, our church's organist and choir director, who also happens to have been my grade-school music teacher. #smalltownlife