C.D.Short - Church Music for People

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...