For over 50 years, pop musicians in all genres have explored the meaning and significance of Jesus in their music. The result is a rich collection of songs that consider important spiritual questions like faith, doubt, and prayer in unique and often provocative ways. Delvyn Case and I both have a deep interest in the ways faith is expressed in and through pop music in all its many guises. In a recent series for HeartEdge we attempted to tap our differing interests and knowledge by choosing four songs for each festival we discussed. In this post I’d like to share the 4 songs we chose for Easter.
Read More
The connection between composition and performance is part of what music is. In English the word ‘music’ can mean both the musical score and the sound product, but as states the Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff in his Works and World of Arts book[i], “to be composed” and “to be performed” are complimentary predicaments of the ontology of music. However, even if a same piece can receive different performances, cases as du Pré connection with Elgar’s Concerto make us thinking whether could be a final performance – the consummation of the expressive potential of a piece of music.
Read More
For over 50 years, pop musicians in all genres have explored the meaning and significance of Jesus in their music. The result is a rich collection of songs that consider important spiritual questions like faith, doubt, and prayer in unique and often provocative ways.
Read More
In 1967 Bob Dylan was living in Woodstock, a town in the Catskill Mountains, having recently bought a property in Byrdcliffe. It was there that he recuperated after his motorcycle crash. As the crash led to the cancellation of his 1967 tour, he was joined there by his backing band, then known as the Hawks…
Read More
It is impossible to listen to Ralph Vaughan William’s gorgeous and transcendent piece, The Lark Ascending, without imagining a lark climbing, diving, turning, soaring as the violin’s flurry of notes floats above the orchestra below, the lush harmony a forest canopy of green dotted with geographical landforms. Peaceful and picturesque as it is, however, we should not dismiss the piece, or the poem by George Meredith which inspired it, as merely Romantic sentimentality, arousing feelings of nostalgia in listeners.
Read More
‘Epiphany’ is a hymnlike lockdown song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift which is from her album Folklore released in July 2020. ‘Epiphany’ begins with Swift imagining the wartime experiences of her paternal grandfather who fought at the Battle of Guadalcanal in the Second World War…
Read More
In legend, Saint Sylvester is the saint who converted emperor Constantine, and he is celebrated on the last day of the year by western churches (eastern churches celebrate him on the 2nd of January). Typical celebrations for this feast feature a Watchnight service or midnight mass. While I get the idea that this feast is quite celebratory, again, there is little music to be found to celebrate this by art music composers. However, I found this excellent Irish early music singer named Caitriona O’Leary who has a carol whose subject matter is Saint Sylvester (she also has one on the feast day of St Stephen, too).
Read More
“On the first day of Christmas………” Yes - I know the words of the song (and so do you, having heard it every year since 1781). But it seems to me that most of us in these United States really don’t know what the twelve days of Christmas are, or indeed when they’re celebrated. I know that I and many of my friends assumed that they were the twelve days leading up to the 25th of December instead of Christmas Day being the first day of the twelve. Since many of the best of the carols (in many languages) focus on Advent, I decided to investigate the music that might tie in to the various ‘labeled’ days of the twelve days of Christmas, especially pieces written by art music composers. What is the music from the time between Christmas day and Epiphany? Most often these are associated with various feasts, most often celebrated in churches with established calendars and saints. Here is a very unofficial sampling with some history and some commentary.
Read More
This December, the Church began praying what are known as the “O Antiphons” each evening during Vespers, or Evening Prayer. Outside of Vespers, the O Antiphons are more familiar in their adapted form as the verses for the quintessential Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”
Read More
As believers and nonbelievers alike join in rousing and relentless caroling, they profess at least a basic understanding of the Christmas message. However, the popular litany of carols tends to be one-sided, resounding with Christmas cheer before reckoning with holy fear. Although rejoicing is an appropriate response to Christ’s birth, it is worth remembering the truth of the Psalms: that stillness and reverence beget knowledge (Psalm 111:10, 46:10). For this reason, “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” offers a much-needed text and tune which compel hearers to “be still and know” the One of whom they sing. Other carols may sing of silence, but they rarely evoke silence in response.
Read More
This Christmas season marks our second advent in a post-COVID world. For many Canadian musicians, the road back to normalcy has been much slower than our American counterparts; we persevered through a second lockdown and our concert halls currently are only just being filled with live patrons at heavy capacity limits instead of virtual ones.
Read More
Advent is a strange time for the Christian, who often finds herself caught between two calendars: on the secular calendar, the moment the last bite of Thanksgiving goes down, the Christmas season begins, and will stretch until the magic of Christmas morning, after which it is fairly immediately extinguished. But on the Church calendar, we are in a season of waiting, of expectant longing, right up to the fall on darkness on Christmas Eve, at which point we begin a season og rejoicing too intense to be confined to one morning, and so which stretches through the following twelve days. The soundtrack of this now and not yet double season, controlled as it is by secular concerns, is mostly skewed towards premature celebration. But some of its songs strike the right chord of expectation for the Christian. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is one of those.
Read More
There are many reasons to internalize Scripture. Writing a jazz album is typically not on that list. However, when continually reminding oneself of the truth of God’s promises, it is possible, and even hoped, that the Word comes out in all that we do. I composed “Fear Not” in a season of my life where outside pressures and stresses threatened to overwhelm me. In the same manner that the song progresses by repeating a memorable theme, I overcame these challenges by returning again and again to God’s promises found in the Bible.
Read More
Caroline Shaw is quickly rising in her status as a composer, especially since becoming the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music at the age of 30. Narrow Sea (Nonesuch Records, 2021), helps listeners long for another world that is free from darkness, strife, and suffering; in the liner notes, Shaw dedicates this piece to “all humans seeking safe refuge.”
Read More
Today, I’m going to use my setting of O Magnum Mysterium as a springboard to make some observations about the issues I consider important in my work as a composer of sacred music and to offer some commentary on my own approach and techniques in setting a sacred text, using illustrations from this piece.
Read More
Integrity is the standard by which we judge the quality of Art. Paul’s famous line from I Corinthians well states the ultimate standard of quality in any person’s life: “Without love. . . ” any effort is pointless. I find it interesting that one of the examples he expressly cites is that of public speaking. This was an Art he much admired and was gifted in (both physically and spiritually, I believe). Any expression is futile if we have not love. Although I use the word “integrity” to encompass more than just “agape,” that self-denying love found only in things of God, let us examine first the role of agape in a Christian artist.
Read More
This month’s Composer Spotlight guest is Ko Matsushita – a prolific Japanese composer whose vibrant choral works have gained international attention. He studied music composition at Kunitachi College of Music and conducting Kodály Institute (Hungary), and his music includes Masses and motets, as well as works based on traditional Japanese music. His works are published in Japan by Edition KAWAI, Pana Musica Edition, and overseas by SULASOL (Finland), Carus-Verlag Stuttgart (Germany), Annie Bank Edition (the Netherlands) Porfiri & Horváth Publishers (Germany) and Santa Barbara Music Publishing (USA) among others. He is currently a special guest professor of Kobe College.
Read More
C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the 20th century, transitioned from atheism to theism but laughed at the idea that we could ever “know” our Creator any more than Hamlet could “know” Shakespeare. It later occurred to him, however, that this might be possible if Shakespeare wrote himself into the story. If Creator came in the form of the Created perhaps the Created could know and be known. Infinity entering finitude, Word becoming flesh, perfect love and light taking on human form: that is the glorious truth that Christmas proclaims. And it is followed by the equally bold claim of Good Friday – that God shares in our suffering, that Christ, “who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing…and he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death - even death on a cross!” (Phil. 2:6-8, NIV) This reality comes as both sword and salve; it mends the broken and breaks the proud. That God participates in our suffering and invites us to participate in his suffering as doorway to abundant life in Christ – this is a paradoxical and profound reality that has fueled artistic creativity around the world for centuries. With that in mind, here are three recent works that explore the mysterious beauty, goodness, and truth of Holy Week.
Read More
This month’s Composer Spotlight guest is Fr. Ivan Moody – a prolific English composer and priest within the Eastern Orthodox tradition now living in Portugal with his wife, singer Susana Diniz Moody, and family. He studied music and theology at the Universities of London, Joensuu and York, and studied composition with Brian Dennis, Sir John Tavener and William Brooks. He is also a conductor and musicologist. As a conductor, he has directed choirs throughout Europe and in North and South America, especially in early and contemporary repertoire. As a musicologist, he has published extensively on the music of the Balkans, of Russia and of the Iberian Peninsula, with special emphasis on contemporary and sacred music. He has contributed to the Grove Dictionary, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology and the Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky. His book Modernism and Orthodox Spirituality in Contemporary Music was published in 2014, and reprinted in 2017. He is a Researcher at CESEM – Universidade Nova, Lisbon; Chairman of the International Society for Orthodox Church music; and a Protopresbyter of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, being Rector of the Orthodox Parish of St John the Russian in Estoril, Portugal.
Read More
In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1). And that the world was made through the Word. And that nothing exists but that the Word created it. Therefore, the Word was an Artist.
We differ from the Word in many respects, but, for our purposes, it is to be noted that we are provided Material: we do not create it. The Material is given that we may create, and that we may create according to the inspiration that is given us by the Word.
Read More