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 written to sound nice reverberating around a hall, which happily it does.
Later in the spring, when Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows was making her first visit to St. John's, our church choir director asked me to write an organ part so we could perform it as an anthem. That turned out nicely, too, but I still prefer the voices-only version.
(special thanks to Dr. John Zimmerman, the videographer whose audio I used for part of this mix; and to Ed and Sue Fain, who lent me their copy of the DVD).