C.D.Short - Church Music for People

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 ...