budafulmusic

Another Christmas post.

Season of Light is a new Christmas musical from Majesty Music that I helped put together. It is my first endeavor with them with Christmas music. The focus of the musical is Christ, the Light of the world. In the drama, Mary and Joseph both have individual responses to this light and is contrasted with the wicked king Herod.

My favorite part of this program is at the end. It ends uniquely– not a seasonal song or medley– but with a wonderfully haunting, minor tune set to “The Light of the World is Jesus.” The recording for this piece turned out especially well.  Listen below.

Come to the light, ’tis shining for thee;
Sweetly the light has dawned upon me.
Once I was blind, but now I see:
The Light of the world is Jesus!

The Light of the world is Jesus!

Once finished, the choir and congregation join as one simply singing Silent Night, Holy Night by candlelight.

Light of the World

This fifth and final choral piece was actually the first that I arranged for Majesty this time around. The old hymn text has been set to a relatively popular new tune by Ben Nyce. This setting takes a rather restrained yet harmonically colorful approach to the text:

Complete in Thee! No work of mine
May take, dear Lord, the place of Thine;
Thy blood hath pardon bought for me,
And I am now complete in Thee.

Complete in Thee—each want supplied,
And no good thing to me denied;
Since Thou my portion, Lord, wilt be,
I ask no more, complete in Thee.

Listen to an audio sample here.

Here are two additional samplings of music that I arranged for Majesty’s new choral collection. It and the full recording will be released later this summer. 

The Fountain

This well known Cowper text is treated with a new melody by Ben Everson. I first heard this tune but didn’t care to much for it. I have to admit that it grew on me and now I think it is one of the stronger pieces in this collection. A very placid and calm opening with the lines “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins; And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.” My favorite lines are at the close of this arrangement: “E’er since, by faith, I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply, Redeeming love has been my theme, and shall be till I die.”

All Glory, Laud and Honor

The not so familiar text about the triumphant entry, All Glory, Laud and Honor is paired with the very well known hymn tune, Ellacombe. Very fanfare-ish in nature, this piece captures the excitement of the text and rises to a climactic and memorable end. When I first started with this arrangement, I was nervous. I new of no less than 6-7 exsisting arrangements of this tune and was concerned that I might copy something from one of them in some way. Sometimes having a really good aural memory can work against you.

It’s been a busy start to the new year. Here are some of the things that I’ve been doing musically over the past month and a half of blog silence:

• Composed musical score for a short animated video
• Wrote out a half dozen choral pieces, more on this to come
• Orchestrating some choral music for a recording project, more on this also to come!
• Working on ideas for two commissions

This past weekend, I received my first acceptance letter for a choral work. Hinshaw, a music publisher, was delighted with my choral anthem It is not Death to Die and will feature it in an upcoming production season. I posted the recording from the recital before this but it can now be accessed here as well:

It Is Not Death

I’ll be posting about this again as details solidify.

As an engraving editor at SoundForth, one of my responsibilities is to get piano books ready for publishing. Just in time for the Christmas season, this new advanced Christmas piano collection, arranged by Amy Herbster from Herbster Evangelistic Ministries, was one of my first projects. It is exiting to see it come to print. It is a companion to the previously existing recording.