Jim Raycroft 4/1/26 Jim Raycroft 4/1/26

Music Notes 4-5-26

Easter is here! A time for joyous celebration. As the genie in the Bugs Bunny cartoon said, “Let

the bells ring and the banners fly!” Our wonderful sanctuary was designed for live music, and

we take full advantage of the fabulous acoustics on Easter morning. In addition to our fabulous

band, we welcome back our 6 incredible brass players. Over a dozen world-class musicians

gathered together to elevate our worship experience, not to mention our marvelous choir and the

guests joining the choir just for this service….we are truly blessed. The year we feature some

familiar favorites, like the Olympic Fanfare as our overture and a gang sing of the Hallelujah

Chorus at the end. We also will be presenting 2 new pieces for the anthem and offertory. The

anthem is unique, in that it was written in 5/4, like Take Five (or the Mission Impossible Theme).

The offertory, on the other hand is party music – straight ahead Jerry Lee Lewis rock and roll.

Craig Courtney is one of the dominant forces in the world of church anthems. He is currently the

Executive Music Editor for Beckenhorst Press in Columbus, Ohio, and was the protégé of the

founder, the legendary John Ness Beck. What his resume doesn’t tell you is how he started

composing (I got this information one day over coffee with him). He was a staff piano teacher at

the famous Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Sitting in his cubicle, day after day, waiting for

piano students to arrive (or not), he began to improvise and noodle. This brought about his first

big publication, Thy Will Be Done (which we happen to have in our library and have done before

during Lent). He sent that to John Ness Beck, founder of Beckenhorst Music Publications, and

the rest is history. Our anthem this week is The Tomb Stands Open Wide, a powerful, dynamic

piece in 5/4 (like Mission Impossible), guaranteed to make your hair stand on end. The 1980s

were stellar years for his musical output. He was new and fresh and innovative, looking to make

a name for himself, devising ways to make anthems easily accessible to smaller groups, yet still

impressive and powerful. Pieces like Coronation, One Faith, One Hope, One Lord and The

Tomb Stands Open Wide established him as the next composer to watch for.

Rick Muchow was Director of Music Ministries at Saddleback Community Church in Irvine

from 1987 to 2012. By the time he left, he was supervising over 1000 volunteers in the church

and its 6 campuses. He Arose, a straight ahead rock and roll tune, was written in 1992, and is the

perfect Easter celebration/party/dance song.

This Easter morning, the choral Call To Worship is a short, rousing piece called Sing Praise To

Him, Our Lord. It was written by James Christensen, who was the head of the music department

at Disneyland for many years. He wrote it in 1977 to be the opener for the Disneyland/Disney

World Candlelight Event, which, if you’ve never experienced it, is quite the experience. A 1000

voice choir, assembled from auditioned choirs from around Southern California (or Florida),

processes from the Small World ride at the back of the park to the train station holding electronic

candles and singing along to Christmas carols, played by brass and pipe organ, and coming

through the park’s speaker system. They file onto a set of risers behind a large orchestra and

present a program consisting of a dozen pieces of music with a celebrity narrator presenting a

reading that precedes each piece. I was introduced to Sing Praise To Him because I sang with

the Dickens Carolers at Disneyland for Christmas of 1983, and we participated in the Candlelight

as one of the featured artists. Mickey’s Christmas Carol had debuted that year, and we sang the

big tune from that movie – Oh, What A Merry Christmas Day – with the orchestra as the warmup

act (our celebrity narrator was actor Darren McGavin). I loved Sing Praise To Him and kept my

copy of it in my library for future use. The publication has been, sadly, discontinued, but that

won’t stop us from singing it this year. It’s a stirring piece that is reminiscent of the music

preceding the chariot race in the movie Ben-Hur and is a great way to start the Easter celebration.

Also Sprach Zarasthustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) is an orchestral tone poem by German

composer Richard Strauss, composed in 1896 when he was 32 years old. It was inspired by the

philosophical novel of the same name by Friedrich Nietzsche. The opening fanfare, which he

titled “Sunrise” in his program notes, became wildly famous when it was used extensively in the

1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001, A Space Odyssey. By the time of the 2 nd World War, Richard

Strauss was the most famous composer in the world. He had written orchestral works and operas

that had put him on the very short list of composers who were absolute masters of both melody

and orchestration. To this day, his opera Der Rosenkavalier (“The Knight of the Rose”) is

considered to be one of the very best in history, and the closing trio, even if you don’t

particularly like opera or understand the German language, is considered to be the closest thing

to musical ecstasy ever written. Listen to it on YouTube sometime – turn up the volume, because

with the specified 125 piece orchestra, it will blow your mind. Wanting to take advantage of his

fame, the Nazis appointed him, without his consent, to the position of music master of the Third

Reich. He took advantage of his position to save a number of Jews from prosecution (including

his daughter-in-law), then packed up his family and escaped to Austria, where he hid for the

remainder of the war. Ironically, the first Allied soldier to find him and tell him the war was over

was an oboe player from the New York Philharmonic, who recognized him and immediately

asked him to write something for oboe (he agreed).

Jim Raycroft 4/1/26 Jim Raycroft 4/1/26

Music Notes 4-2-26

John Purifoy is an ASCAP composer and arranger with various published choral anthems,

cantatas and keyboard collections and works recorded by Carol Lawrence, Anita Kerr, the

Chicago Master Chorale and other artists. His work for chorus and orchestra, We Hold These

Truths, narrated by Alex Haley won the 1987 Freedoms Foundation Award for musical

programs. He is the composer and lyricist of the stage musical, Lambarene, which received a

workshop production at the state theatre of New Jersey in 1991. John lives in Knoxville,

Tennessee with his wife Vicki, a television news producer, and two teenage sons, Drew and

Michael. The Triptych for Easter Week was written in 2014 and was published by Hal Leonard

Publishing. The Triptych has 3 musical meditations on the various stages of the Passion – the

Garden, The Betrayal and the Crucifixion. Each meditation reflects on the emotions of the

moment, on the heightened senses common to moments like that. It’s a very powerful piece. I

discovered it for my first Easter Week here at FPCE and have been promising the choir we would

do the whole thing for Maundy Thursday “soon”…..“soon” is now.

O Sacred Head, Now Wounded is a Christian Passion hymn based on a long Medieval poem,

Salve mundi salutare, which addresses various parts of Christ’s body hanging on the cross – the

feet, the knees, the hands, the pierced side, the breast, the heart and the face. The last stanzas

that deal with the head, the ones the hymn is taken from, begin “Salve caput cruentatum” –

essentially, “Hello, bloody head”. The poem was translated into German in the 1600’s by Paul

Gerhardt and into English in 1752 by Paul Gambold – his version begins “O Head, so full of

bruises”. Gerhardt reworked the Latin words into something more meditative on the Passion of

Christ, and it first appeared in Johann Crüger’s hymnal in 1656. Since then, it has appeared in

virtually all hymnals in numerous languages, and has been the source for numerous musical

endeavors, one of the more prominent being the St. Matthew Passion of J.S. Bach, where the

hymn appears several times in several harmonizations.

What Wondrous Love Is This is a hymn that has a multi-layered past. The text’s author is listed

as “Anonymous”, which means that it could have gone through a variety of authors, iterations,

and rewrites before arriving in the form we now know. It was first set to the tune we know in

William Walker’s 1840 second edition publication of Southern Harmony. Interestingly, the tune

comes from an old English ballad about the infamous English pirate Captain Kidd:

My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed, when I sailed;

My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed;

My name was Robert Kidd, God's laws I did forbid,

So wickedly I did when I sailed, when I sailed

So wickedly I did when I sailed.

Jim Raycroft 3/29/26 Jim Raycroft 3/29/26

Music Notes 3-29-26

This week we have the unique opportunity to debut 2 world premieres – our anthem and our

offertory, both of which were written specifically for us and specifically for this Palm Sunday.

The musical Godspell was originally written by John-Michael Tebelak as his master’s thesis for

Carnegie Mellon University. The original production was performed in 1970 by members of the

Carnegie Mellon Drama school and was supposed to include Ted Danson, who had to drop out

due to a case of Bell’s Palsy. The show was brought to the attention of Angela Lansbury’s

brother Edgar by Carnegie Mellon alum Charles Haid, who wanted to transfer the show to off-

Broadway. Eventually, the producers hired Stephen Schwartz, another Carnegie Mellon alum, to

re-score the show. The only song from the original show that survived was By My Side, and the

show opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre in May of 1971. Later on that year, most of the original

cast came to Los Angeles to open the show at the Mark Taper Forum. The show was then

adapted for Hollywood and released as a movie in 1973, with John-Michael Tebelak writing the

screenplay. In addition to Ted Danson, the musical has had a number of familiar names attached

to it, including Jeremy Irons, who played John the Baptist/Judas in the London production, and

Paul Schaffer, of the Letterman Show fame, playing keyboards and conducting the first

Broadway production.

Stephen Schwartz is a composer and lyricist for Broadway musicals and movies. As a composer,

he’s written hit musicals like Godspell, Pippin and Wicked. As a lyricist, he’s provided lyrics for

movies such as Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Prince of Egypt and Enchanted.

He’s won 3 Oscars, 3 Grammys, 5 Drama Desk Awards and has been nominated for 6 Tonys. He

was born in New York City in 1948, studied piano and composition at Julliard and graduated

from Carnegie Mellon University with a BFA in Drama.

I began work on Prepare Ye The Way Of The Lord while on vacation last summer at a cabin in

the mountains. The song seemed like a great theme for Palm Sunday. The problem is that the

whole song is only 8 bars long – literally 15 seconds of music. The play and the movie both

stretch that 15 seconds into 3 minutes by singing the same 8 bars over and over again, so I began

looking for something to add to it. I found a reference to another song by the same title by

Ronald Gollner but could only find the lyrics. A search of YouTube revealed a single recording

of the song as an instrumental on a keyboard, with the lyrics in subtitles. I used this interesting

song as a bridge and the rest is history.

When our marvelous tenor section leader Kirk joined us last fall, he told us that his wife, Jessica,

was a soprano and a composer. I invited him to bring some of her music to us, and we were able

to do a trio for soprano, alto and tenor for one of our offertories. She offered to write a piece for

us for Palm Sunday, and Hosanna! is the result.

Jessica Berns-Garner is an opera singer, composer, and voice teacher. Ms. Berns-Garner grew up

in Los Angeles, where she began singing, playing piano, and composing music at an early age.

She studied Vocal Arts Performance at California State University, Northridge, where she studied

voice with Dr. Deanna Murray, and it was then that she met her future husband, Kirk Garner.

Graduating in 2013, she went on to begin performing with local opera companies, learning a

variety of roles, some favorites including covering and performing Phoebe in Yeoman of the

Guard, covering Juliette in Roméo et Juliette, singing Zerlina in Don Giovanni, and singing

Countess Stasi in The Gipsy Princess. In 2022, she began studying voice with Jessica Tivens-

Schneiderman, and afterwards she began to accept fuller roles, covering Blanche in Les Dialogue

des Carmélites, performing Second Maid in Daphne, and covering the title role in Anna Bolena.

She continues to work and maintain a private voice studio in Los Angeles. Her current projects

include singing Parasya in Sorochyntsi Fair by Mussorgsky with Independent Opera Company

and continuing to compose.

Jim Raycroft 3/22/26 Jim Raycroft 3/22/26

Music Notes 3-22-26

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most famous composers in history. Born in Eisenach,

Germany in 1685, he spent the bulk of his most renowned composing time – the last 25 years of

his life (1723-1750) - in Leipzig at St. Thomas Church, where he provided music for 4 churches

in the area. He was a bit of a maverick, disagreeing with his employers and taking unannounced

leaves of absence to go hear other musicians perform. There is even a story of him pulling a

sword in the middle of the street during an argument with a local bassoon player (Bach publicly

called him a “nanny goat bassoonist”…the bassoonist didn’t like it). He had 22 children with 2

different wives – Phyllis Diller used to joke that his harpsichord bench made out into a bed. His

music, however, is what he is most renowned for. His catalogue is enormous, containing over

1100 pieces of music (that’s what has survived – we know a lot of his music was lost after he

died), from small pieces for harpsichord to huge choral works (The St. Matthew Passion is

written for 2 orchestras and 2 choirs). He is the god of organ music, however, and organists

around the world defer to him and his music. During the time period between 1723 and 1729,

right after he moved to Leipzig, he wrote most of his cantatas – small performance works that

usually consist of a choral piece, a few arias and a couple of chorales (hymns). He wrote over

220 of these pieces, which were all written with orchestra. Probably the most famous single

piece of music to come out of his cantatas is the piece we call Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, which

is actually a chorale from cantata #147 – Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (Heart and Mouth

and Deed and Life). A wonderfully lilting countermelody underscores the main hymn tune, and

is probably his most universally recognized piece of music, other than the organ piece Toccata

and Fugue in D Minor, which owes its renown to Hollywood. His Magnificat, written in 1723

and revised 10 years later, is also universally revered as a masterwork. Roughly 30 minutes in

length, it has 12 movements that include pieces for chorus and soloists.

John Rutter is a British composer, born in London in 1945, and one of the most recognized

composers of church music in the world. His work includes carols (both original and

arrangements of familiar carols), anthems (including All Things Bright and Beautiful, our anthem

for this week), choral works and larger musical compositions. He has written for the King’s

Singers and regularly records his music with his own chorus, the Cambridge Singers. Many of

his larger works, including his Gloria and his Requiem, are considered classics and are part of

standard repertoire (our choir sang the first movement of the Gloria on Easter morning this year).

He’s also known for having reconstructed and published the original version of the Faure

Requiem. Gabriel Faure originally wrote his Requiem orchestrated for a chamber orchestra, but

his publisher suggested that he re-orchestrate it for full orchestra so that it would become part of

standard concert repertoire, which he completed in 1900. The original 1893 version was lost

until Rutter found Faure’s original sketch books in a closet at Faure’s church, the Madeleine

Church (or, more formally, L'église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine). This week’s offertory, A Gaelic

Blessing, was commissioned in 1978 by 1 st Methodist Church of Omaha, Nebraska for their

music director Mel Olsen. Over the years, FUMC of Omaha and Olson had a strong relationship

with Rutter, and they were responsible for the commissioning of several pieces of his that have

gone on to become modern classics, including his Gloria. Rutter has said that his Gaelic

Blessing was derived from an old Gaelic rune, and that he added the words “Jesus” and “Amen”

to make it Christian. The words talk about elements of nature - "running wave", "flowing air",

"quiet earth", "shining stars", "gentle night", "healing light", and in Rutter’s version, “Christ,

light of the world”. It is a modern classic and is considered to be one of the “top 10” anthems in

modern repertoire.

Jim Raycroft 3/15/26 Jim Raycroft 3/15/26

Music Notes 3-15-26

William Dawson is an icon in the world of spirituals, but he was, in fact, a classically trained

musician. Born in Anniston, Alabama in 1899, he studied at the Homer Institute of Fine arts,

where he got his bachelor’s degree in music. He later studied at the Chicago Musical College

and then at the American Conservatory of Music, where he got his master’s degree. His body of

music includes chamber, orchestral and choral music, but his spirituals are what he’s best known

for. It was during his 25-year tenure at the Tuskegee Institute (1931-1956) that he developed the

Tuskegee Institute Choir into a world-renowned ensemble, and he published many of his best-

known spiritual arrangements. Every Time I Feel The Spirit is a classic he wrote in 1946. He

passed away in May of 1990.

Sarah McLachlan is a Canadian singer/songwriter known for her emotional ballads and mezzo-

soprano vocal range. As of 2015 she had sold over 40 million albums worldwide. Her best-

selling album to date is Surfacing, for which she won two Grammy Awards and four Juno

Awards. In addition to her personal artistic efforts, she founded the Lilith Fair tour, which

showcased female musicians on an unprecedented scale. The Lilith Fair concert tours took place

from 1997 to 1999, and resumed in the summer of 2010. She also funds an outreach program in

Vancouver that provides music education for inner city children. In 2007, the provincial

government announced $500,000 in funding for the outreach program. Originating at the "Sarah

McLachlan Music Outreach", this program evolved into the Sarah McLachlan School of Music.

This program provided children with high quality music instruction in guitar, piano, percussion

and choir. In 2011 McLachlan opened the Sarah McLachlan School of Music in Vancouver, a

free music school for at-risk youth. The School of Music provides group and private lessons to

hundreds of young people every year. It is their goal that through music education, students will

develop a love of the arts and have greater self-esteem. On May 25, 2016, the Sarah McLachlan

School of Music expanded to Edmonton, Alberta (my hometown), opening in Rundle

Elementary School and Eastglen High School. The music school contains the same initiative as

the Vancouver school. Her version of The Prayer of St. Francis, simple and meditative, was

released in 2015 on the album Surfacing, noted above as her best-selling album to date.

Now Thank We All Our God is a popular Christian hymn. Catherine Winkworth translated it from

the German Nun danket alle Gott, written around 1636 by the Lutheran pastor Martin Rinkart.

Its hymn tune, Zahn No. 5142, was published by composer Johann Crüger in the 1647 edition of

his Lutheran hymnal Praxis Pietatis Melica. Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran pastor who came

to Eilenburg , Saxony, at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. The walled city of Eilenburg

became the refuge for political and military fugitives, but the result was overcrowding,

deadly pestilence and famine. Armies overran it three times. The Rinkart home was a refuge for

the victims, even though he was often hard-pressed to provide for his own family. During the

height of a severe plague in 1637, Rinkart was the only surviving pastor in Eilenburg, conducting

as many as 50 funerals in a day. He performed more than 4000 funerals in that year, including

that of his wife. Rinkart was a prolific hymn writer. In Rinkart's Jesu Hertz-Buchlein (Leipzig,

1636), "Nun danket alle Gott" appears under the title "Tisch-Gebetlein", as a short prayer before

meals. Composer Johann Crüger was active during the 1600’s, living most of his adult life in

Berlin, working as a teacher in a Gymnasium (basically, a college prep high school) and as

cantor at the Nicolaikirche, the oldest church in Berlin. In addition to numerous concert works

and editing the hymnal Praxis Pietatis Melica, the most important Lutheran hymnal of its time,

he also wrote the tune to Johann Franck’s hymn Jesu, Meine Freude (in English, Jesus, My Joy),

and Rinkart’s Nun danket alle Gott, which was set to it’s now standard harmonization by Felix

Mendelssohn in 1840 when he used it for the chorale for his Symphony #2. Translator Catherine

Winkworth was born in London and spent a year in Dresden, Germany, where she took an

interest in German hymnody. She published several books of translations of classic German

hymns, including From Heaven Above to Earth I Come ( Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich

her , Martin Luther, 1534), Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying ( Wachet auf, ruft uns die

Stimme , Philipp Nicolai, 1599), How Brightly Beams the Morning Star! (Wie schön leuchtet der

Morgenstern, Nicolai, 1597), and the Christmas hymn A Spotless Rose (Es ist ein Ros

entsprungen), known in our hymnal as Lo, How A Rose E’re Blooming. According to The

Harvard University Hymn Book, Winkworth “did more than any other single individual to make

the rich heritage of German hymnody available to the English-speaking world”.

Jim Raycroft 3/8/26 Jim Raycroft 3/8/26

Music Notes 3-8-26

The Brooklyn Tabernacle is a non-denominational, multi-cultural church in the heart of

downtown Brooklyn that began as a small congregation worshiping in a rundown building, and

has grown into a congregation of over 16,000. The husband and wife team of Pastor Jim

Cymbala and music director Carol Cymbala took over leadership of the 30 member congregation

in 1971. By the 1980’s, the church had grown enough to purchase the 1383-seat Carlton Theatre

and convert it into their sanctuary. By 2002, they had outgrown that facility and purchased

Loew’s Metropolitan Theatre, a former vaudeville theatre, and renovated it into a state-of-the-art,

3,200-seat worship facility. The choir began with just 9 members in 1971 and grew with the

church. Carol Cymbala began writing music for the choir, and they recorded their first album in

the 1980’s. Now numbering over 280 members, their music is sung all over the world, and they

sang at the 2013 inauguration of President Obama. The song Revival In The Land was written in

1983 by Renee Morris and was recorded for the 1989 album Live…Again.

Bridge Over Troubled Water was composed by Paul Simon in 1969 and came to him so quickly

that he frequently asked himself “Where did that come from?” Simon told his partner, Art

Garfunkel, that he should sing it alone “in a white, choir-boy style”, but added a harmony later

on in the piece. Despite rumors that the 3 rd verse “Sail on, silvergirl” referred to a drug user’s

hypodermic needle, it was actually about Simon’s then-wife, Peggy Harper, discovering her first

grey hairs. It was ultimately one of the last things they ever recorded together, and as their

relationship was unraveling, Simon often regretted giving the solo to Art. “He felt I should have

done it, and many times on a stage, though, when I'd be sitting off to the side and Larry Knechtel

would be playing the piano and Artie would be singing "Bridge", people would stomp and cheer

when it was over, and I would think, "That's my song, man..."

Dan Schutte is one of the most renowned of the contemporary composers in the Catholic world

and is one of the founding members of the St. Louis Jesuits, who popularized a contemporary

style of church music set to sacred texts sung in English. This was a result of the Second Vatican

Council of the early 1960’s (also known as Vatican II), which revamped and reformed the

Catholic liturgy in an effort to bring it closer to the people (before that, the mass was sung in

Latin and the priest kept his back to the congregation throughout). He is based in San Francisco,

has written over 120 popular hymns and mass settings, and continues to be one of the most

influential figures in the world of contemporary Catholic liturgical music. His most famous

composition is Here I Am, Lord, based on texts from Isaiah and Samuel. Despite its Catholic

origins, it is found in most Protestant hymnals and has been translated into over 20 different

languages. In 2008, a survey conducted by the United Methodist Church found it to be 2 nd

favorite after Amazing Grace.

Hailing from Marietta, Georgia, Third Day is a Christian rock band formed at YMCA Camp

High Harbour in 1991 by high-schoolers Mac Powell and Mark Lee. The name Third Day is a

reference to Jesus’ resurrection on the third day after crucifixion. Over the years, like most

bands, they had several different musicians playing with them and released their first

independent album, Long Time Forgotten, in 1994. In 1995, they signed a contract with Reunion

Records and released their second album Third Day in 1996. That year they were nominated for

a Dove Award for New Artist of the Year and their video Consuming Fire won a Billboard Music

Award for Best Christian Video. In 2004, they released their seventh album Wire, toured the U.S.

and Europe, collaborated on Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, played at the

Republican National Convention and were featured on 60 Minutes. Their hit single, Soul On

Fire, is from their album Soul On Fire of 2014, and spent 19 weeks on the Billboard charts,

peaking at No. 2 on Hot Christian Songs and No. 3 on Christian Digital Songs.

Andraé Edward Crouch, a Los Angeles native, has been referred to as “the father of modern

gospel music” by contemporary Christian and gospel music professionals. Known for his

compositions The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power, My Tribute (To God Be the Glory) - which he

told me had been recorded 2500 times - and this week’s closing song, Soon and Very Soon, he

was also known for his collaborative work during the 1980s and 1990s with Stevie Wonder,

Elton John and Quincy Jones, as well as conducting choirs that sang on the Michael Jackson hit

"Man in the Mirror" and Madonna's "Like a Prayer". Crouch was noted for his talent of

incorporating contemporary secular music styles into the gospel music he grew up with. His

efforts in this area helped pave the way for early American contemporary Christian music during

the 1960s and 1970s. His original musical arrangements were heard in the movies The Color

Purple and The Lion King, and in the NBC television show Amen. His awards and honors

include 7 Grammy Awards, induction into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1998 and a star on

the Hollywood Walk of Fame. After his father's death in 1994, Crouch and his twin sister Sandra

took over the shared duty of senior pastor at the church his parents founded, Christ Memorial

Church of God in Christ in Pacoima. I first met Andraé when we performed on the 1993

Grammy Awards ceremonies together. He was part of the team that had produced The Messiah,

a Soulful Celebration (a gospel adaptation of 16 of the pieces from the Messiah), which was up

for a Grammy for best gospel album. We were both singing with the choir that performed a

hybrid version of the Hallelujah Chorus for the show, and during rehearsals we talked at length

about the piece. He asked, “I wonder what Handel would have thought about what we did to his

music?” I told him “I think he would have loved it. He was always ripping off his own music

for other uses, but I think he would have loved the idea that someone could have taken his music

and made it relevant and meaningful to a whole new generation, culture and race of people.” I

still think that. Sadly, we lost him in January of 2015.

Jim Raycroft 3/1/26 Jim Raycroft 3/1/26

Music Notes 3-1-26

Engelbert Humperdinck – the real one, not the British pop singer who was born Arnold Dorsey

and who took his name – was a composer and music teacher who was born and trained in

Germany, but while in Italy became acquainted with the famous opera composer Richard

Wagner. Wagner invited him to join Wagner at his opera house in Bayreuth. He spent 1880-

1881 assisting Wagner with the production of his last opera Parsifal by copying the score and the

parts (writing that he “learned more about orchestration during those few weeks than he could

have in a conservatory in as many years”), and by taking charge of the training of the “Grail

Choir” in Parsifal, for which he chose schoolboys from Bayreuth. He also was music tutor to

Wagner’s son Siegfried. It was a suggestion from his sister to create a children’s musical play

that ultimately resulted in his most famous work – Haensel und Gretel, based on the Grimm’s

fairy tale. Wagner’s influence can be heard throughout the opera, and it was the first opera that

the Royal Opera House in London chose for their first live radio broadcast in 1923, and it was

the first opera transmitted live from the Met eight years later. The Prayer is a simple child’s

prayer that the children sing in the opera just before going to sleep. The text is based on an old

German children’s song, and the melody came from Humperdinck’s pen.

God Help The Outcasts is a song from the 1996 Disney movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame,

with words by Stephen Schwartz (of Godspell fame) and music by Alan Menkin. It’s the only

song of the character Esmeralda, and was sung by singer Heidi Mollenhauer (the character was

voiced by Demi Moore). It was considered for replacement with the song Someday, but

ultimately God Help The Outcasts, with its religious overtones (the song is sung by Esmeralda in

the church) was considered to be more appropriate. The pop version, for the end credits, was

sung by Bette Midler, and was dubbed by critics as being too sentimental and overwrought. The

original is a sweet ballad where Esmeralda asks God to shield the outcasts, like Quasimodo, and

the Roma, such as herself, from racism and discrimination. It was ultimately covered by such

artists as Canadian artist Lara Fabian, who released the song in an “official” French version, and

the voice of the little mermaid, Jodi Benson.

Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace is also commonly known as the Prayer of St. Francis.

However, it was almost certainly not written by St. Francis. The true author is unknown and it

was more probably written around the time of the outbreak of World War One. It is also

incorrectly called the Serenity Prayer of St. Francis. The Serenity Prayer is, in fact, a different

prayer from the 20 th century written by Reinhold Neibuhr. Sebastian Temple adapted the words

in 1967 to create the hymn that we know now.

Hailing from the small coastal town of Bangor in Northern Ireland, the Rend Collective is a

group of “twenty-somethings” that gathered at Rend, what the band describes as “a ministry for

spiritually hungry young adults, desperately seeking an authentic, raw and real expression of

church, which was informally pastored by bandleader, Gareth Gilkeson.” Their first album –

Homemade Worship by Handmade People – was released in 2012, and was followed by a string

of hits in the contemporary Christian music world. Their music is based around older

instruments - their native Irish folk instruments, old rock and roll guitars and assorted other

whimsical musical toys - and has a raw, uninhibited style that gets the toes tapping and the feet

stomping. They don’t call themselves a folk band, but insist rather “We are not actually an indie-

folk band - despite all the beards and bow-ties and banjos. We are a celebration band. It’s just a

coincidence that folk music and celebration make a great pairing!” Their song My Lighthouse is

a classic foot-stomper that never fails to engage the listener and was released in 2014 on the

album The Art Of Celebration.

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Music Notes 2-16-25

The month of June is going to be special for the music in our church, because the 1 st Sunday of

the month will feature the music of the band Chicago. Formed in Chicago in 1967, they created

a dynasty that exists to this day. In 1968, they relocated to Los Angeles, and the family of

sax/multi-reed player Walt Parazaider joined the congregation of FPCE. They were very active

in the church, with Walt’s wife JacLynn taking the reins of Christian Education for several years.

The Yamaha piano in the chapel was donated to the church by Walt and his family, and includes

what was, at the time, a state-of-the-art player system called Disklavier. There are a huge

number of logistical ducks to line up for this, so the June date gives us enough time to get ready.

Wind Beneath My Wings (sometimes titled Hero) was written by Jeff Silbar and Larry Henley in

1982. They recorded a demo of the song, which they gave to Bob Montgomery, who recorded

his own version. It was shopped to several artists, eventually being released in 1982 by Roger

Whittaker. It was subsequently recorded by Colleen Hewett, Lou Rawls, Gladys Knight and the

Pips, and Gary Morris. The version we all know and love is the version recorded by Bette

Midler in 1988 for the soundtrack to the movie Beaches, which was then released as a single in

early 1989. It spent 1 week at #1 on the Billboard Hot Singles chart in June of that year, and

went on to win Grammy Awards for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year in 1990. In

1991, Bette’s version was certified Platinum, selling over one million copies. It seemed to be

appropriate for the message of the week, and we’ll get a chance to hear Lauren again.

John Rutter’s A Gaelic Blessing, also known by its opening line Deep Peace, was commissioned

by the chancel choir of 1 st United Methodist Church of Omaha, Nebraska, and their conductor

Mel Olsen in 1978. The original text was not a specifically sacred text, but rather an old Gaelic

rune that made reference to elements of nature. Rutter added a line referencing Jesus and Amen

to it to make it a Christian anthem. It has become popular for baptisms, weddings and funerals,

and was performed at the funeral Mass for Tip O’Neil. It became a hit when a recording by Aled

Jones was released in 2003, and has been recorded often, including by the composer with the

Cambridge Singers and the City of London Sinfonia.

We Shall Overcome is a gospel song and protest song that became an anthem for the civil rights

movement. It is generally said to have its lyrical genesis in the hymn I’ll Overcome Some Day

by Charles Albert Tindley, which was first published in 1900. A modern version of the song was

said to have been first sung at a 1945 tobacco strike in Charleston, South Carolina. It was

published in 1947 as We Will Overcome in People’s Songs (Pete Seeger was a director and added

it to his repertoire). The version we know was created by Seeger and Guy Carawan, and was

introduced in 1959. In August of 1962, a 22-year-old folk singer named Joan Baez led 300,000

people in singing that song at the Lincoln Memorial during A. Phillip Randolph’s March On

Washington. Dr. Martin Luther King recited the words in a sermon at an interfaith service at

Temple Israel in Hollywood in 1965, and then again in his final sermon in Memphis on Sunday,

March 31, 1968, before his assassination. It has been pointed out that the first half sounds very

much like the Catholic hymn O Sanctissima (published in London in 1792), the second half

sounds like the 19 th century hymn I’ll Be All Right, and in general sounds a lot like the

Neapolitan art song standard Caro Mio Ben. It was sung by hundreds of thousands of people in

Wenseslas Square in Prague during the 1989 Velvet Revolution. In India, the renowned poet

Girija Kumar Mathur created a literal translation, which became a popular patriotic/spiritual

song, especially in the schools, in the 70’s and 80’s. In 2012, Bruce Springsteen performed the

song at a memorial concert in Oslo after the terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011.

Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace is also commonly known as the Prayer of St. Francis.

However, it was almost certainly not written by St. Francis. The true author is unknown and it

was more probably written around the time of the outbreak of World War One. It is also

incorrectly called the Serenity Prayer of St. Francis. The Serenity Prayer is, in fact, a different

prayer from the 20 th century written by Reinhold Neibuhr. Sebastian Temple adapted the words

in 1967 to create the hymn that we know now.

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Music Notes 2-9-25

Mark Hayes is a composer/arranger/pianist based in Kansas City whose music is renowned

around the world. He got his degree in piano performance at Baylor University, moved to

Kansas City to work as a music editor for Tempo Publishing, and now spends his time writing

music for the church and traveling around the world as a clinician and guest conductor. When I

met Mark in the late 80’s, I was struck by his pianistic skills – more specifically, the way he

manhandled the piano into submission to produce the most wondrous sounds. Mark’s writing is

superbly crafted, with influences of black gospel and jazz. He’s one of my favorite

contemporary writers, and our wonderful accompanist Paul plays a lot of his music for our

postludes and preludes. If you play piano and want some music that will both challenge you and

satisfy your appetite for delicious piano music, pick up a book of Mark Hayes piano

improvisations. You’ll love it. This week’s anthem, Grace, is a setting of the old American

melody The Water Is Wide, using the words of Amazing Grace by John Newton. I first came

across this piece on YouTube, a recording by a Texas church choir with a big orchestra. I was so

impressed with the piece that I contacted the music director of the Texas church and asked him

who wrote the orchestration. He wrote back that Mark Hayes himself had written it, and it was

commercially available. Someday…

When The Saints Go Marching In is an American gospel hymn. It originated as a Christian

hymn, but is most usually played by Dixieland jazz bands. The origins are unclear, although it

appears to have evolved from several similarly titled pieces, including When the Saints Are

Marching In (1896) and When the Saints March In for Crowning (1908). The first known

recording of the tune was in 1923 by the Paramount Jubilee Singers. Although the record title

was listed as When The Saints Come Marching In, the group sings the modern lyrics of When

The Saints Go Marching In. Most early renditions were slow and stately, but began to pick up

the tempo as time went on. Louis Armstrong was the first to record the tune as a secular dance

number in 1938. He wrote that his sister informed him that she felt the “secular performance

style of the traditional church tune was inappropriate and irreligious”.

For All the Saints was written as a processional hymn by the Anglican Bishop of

Wakefield, William Walsham How. The hymn was first printed in Hymns for Saints' Days, and

Other Hymns, by Earl Nelson, 1864. The hymn was sung to the melody Sarum, by the Victorian

composer Joseph Barnby, until the publication of the English Hymnal in 1906. This hymnal used

a new setting by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, during his stint as editor of the

English Hymnal, which he called Sine Nomine (literally, "without name") in reference to its use

on the Feast of All Saints, November 1st (or the first Sunday in November, All Saints Sunday in

the Lutheran Church). It has been described as "one of the finest hymn tunes of the 20th

century." Although most English hymn tunes of its era are written for singing in SATB four-part

harmony, Sine Nomine is primarily unison (verses 1,2,3,7 and 8) with organ accompaniment;

three verses (4, 5 and 6) are set in sung harmony. The tune appears in this forms in most English

hymnbooks (for example English Hymnal (641), New English Hymnal (197), Common

Praise (232) and American hymnals (our hymnal, for example, The Hymnal 1982 and

the Lutheran Service Book (677).

Chris Tomlin was born in Texas in 1972 and learned to play guitar by playing along with Willy

Nelson recordings. He has become one of the dominant forces in contemporary Christian music,

and in 2012 CCLI announced that his songs were played 3 million times in churches that year.

His 2013 album Burning Lights debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, only the fourth Christian

album ever to open at No. 1, and he was pronounced the most sung songwriter in the world that

year. In 2018, he was the 1 st Christian artist to receive the “Billionaire” award from Pandora for

reaching one billion Pandora streams. His song Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone was part

of the album See The Morning, his 4 th studio album that was released in 2006 and arguably was

the album that established him as one of the bright lights of the contemporary Christian music

world. In this song, he takes the beloved classic and adds a “chorus” to it, treating the words of

Amazing Grace as if they were the verses. His song Your Grace In Enough was released on the

album Arriving in 2004.

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Music Notes 2-2-25

This week we welcome back our wonderful band, with a special guest, alto sax player Mark

Markus. Our anthem required an alto sax, and I felt that, since we’ll have an alto laying around,

we might as well indulge ourselves and do Dave Brubeck’s famous alto sax tune, Take Five.

Take Five was written by Dave Brubeck’s sax player, Paul Desmond, and was recorded on their

1959 album Time Out. For several years in the early 60’s it was the theme song for the NBC TV

show Today, and by 1961 it was the highest selling jazz single ever. Paul Desmond assigned the

royalties after his death to the American Red Cross, which gets about $100,000 a year from it.

The gang will play it for the postlude.

This week’s anthem, God Is One, was written by a dear friend of mine, film composer Sharon

Farber. Sharon has won a Grammy, has been nominated for an Emmy 4 times and was the first

woman composer to be featured on the cover of Film Composer Magazine. Her mentor was the

late, great Shirley Walker, who wrote the music for the Batman animated series and established

the sound of the DC universe. Sharon is also the music director at the temple I sing at, The

Temple of the Arts on Wilshire Blvd. God Is One is one of many wonderful anthems she’s

written for worship, and my intention is to feature her music at one of our services and invite her

to join us for the event.

Show Me The Way is a song written by Dennis DeYoung, lead singer and keyboardist for the

band Styx. A devout Catholic, DeYoung wrote the song for his son Matthew as a pseudo-hymn

about keeping the faith “in a world so filled with hatred”. It was released on the album Edge of

the Century as the 2 nd single in December of 1990 and slowly climbed the charts until it reached

#3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it remained in the top 40 for 23 weeks, and #3 on the

Adult Contemporary chart, where it remained in the top 40 for 31 weeks. It was the band’s 4 th

and final top 5 single, and made Styx one of a handful of artists to have top 10 singles in 3

different decades (1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s).

Give Thanks With A Grateful Heart was written by Henry Smith in 1978. Following the

introduction of the song during a worship service at the Williamsburg New Testament Church in

Virginia, a military couple reintroduced it to a congregation in Germany. The song eventually

caught the attention of executives at Integrity Music. When Integrity's Hosanna! Music

copyrighted the song in 1986, the author was unknown. After Don Moen’s Give Thanks album

was released in 1986, the song was brought to the attention of Smith, who contacted Integrity

with authorship information. Integrity later included songwriting credits on all subsequent

releases, along with a writer-publisher agreement. As of 2010, the song has been recorded by

over 50 companies and published in songbooks around the world. It’s usually sung as a slow

ballad, but I thought it needed some hot sauce.

Matt Redman is an English Christian worship leader currently based in Brighton. He has won 10

Dove Awards for everything from Worship Song of the Year 2005 (for Blessed Be Your Name) to

Songwriter of the Year 2013. His album 10,000 Reasons was released in 2012 and the title track

went on to be #1 on the Billboard Christian Songs chart, where it remained for 13 weeks. 10,000

Reasons also won Grammy Awards in 2013 for Best Contemporary Christian Music Song and

Best Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music Performance.

Matt Maher is a Canadian Christian artist who was born in Newfoundland, studied jazz on a

scholarship from Arizona State University in Tempe and now lives in Nashville. He’s written

and released 7 studio albums to date, 3 of which have reached the top 25 of Billboard’s Christian

Album chart, and 4 of his singles have reached the top 25 of Billboard’s Christian Songs chart.

A practicing Catholic, he was asked to lead worship for crowds of thousands at the Rally for

Youth and Seminarians in Yonkers, New York during the visit by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008,

and in 2013 he sang Lord, I Need You for an audience of about 4 million, including Pope Francis,

for World Youth Day in Rio de Janerio. His song And All The People Said Amen was the title

track for his first compilation album, released in 2013. The album charted at #5 on Billboard’s

Christian Albums.

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Music Notes 1-26-25

In 1994, BBC executive Richard Curtis approached composer Howard Goodall about composing

the theme music for what was to become BBC TV’s classic comedy series The Vicar of Dibley.

In his own words: “I felt that the setting of a familiar sacred text – and the use of some real

choral singing – would offset perfectly the quirky humor of the storylines; as it had also been my

ambition to write a setting of The Lord Is My Shepherd (Psalm 23), I was delighted that the

creative team loved the idea. Thanks to the popularity of The Vicar of Dibley on British TV and

elsewhere around the world, I have managed to give a whole new generation of younger listeners

and singers a version of this wonderful psalm they can truly call their own. Indeed, this piece

has become a stand-alone choral classic since it was introduced to audiences through the TV

series, and I feel humbled when I realize that for many people under 30 in the UK and Australia

it is the only tune for The Lord Is My Shepherd that they now know. I consider myself blessed to

have been able to share my setting of it with so many others of all possible backgrounds and

beliefs.” It’s a delightfully pastoral setting to sing, and for many of us, brings back fond

memories of chuckling (or guffawing) at the wonderful antics of Dawn French and the rest of

that brilliant cast. If you haven’t seen the series, go watch it. It’s streaming on BritBox and

Roku.

Gershon Kingsley was born in Germany in 1922. His family, being Jewish, fled Germany a few

days before the infamous Kristallnacht riots and moved to Israel. His parents then went to Cuba

while he studied music at the Jerusalem Conservatory of Music, and then obtained visas to enter

the U.S., where he joined them. After World War 2, he became a pit conductor for Broadway

musical shows after he graduated from the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music in 1946. He

became interested in synthesized music in the mid-60’s and released an album in 1967 that

contained a cut called Baroque Hoedown. Baroque Hoedown was picked up and used by

Disneyland as the background music for the Main Street Electrical Parade. He then became a

proponent of the Moog synthesizer and became one of the most famous creators of music for that

medium. He also began to write music for Jewish worship in the late 60’s, encouraged by the

relaxing of formal restraints and growing acceptance of contemporary musical styles. His most

famous anthem, Shepherd Me, Lord, was written in 1971 and generated sales of over 2 million

copies just to Southern Baptist congregations, who were attracted by its gospel style.

Matt Redman is an English Christian worship leader currently based in Brighton. He has won 10

Dove Awards for everything from Worship Song of the Year 2005 (for Blessed Be Your Name) to

Songwriter of the Year 2013. His album 10,000 Reasons was released in 2012 and the title track

went on to be #1 on the Billboard Christian Songs chart, where it remained for 13 weeks. 10,000

Reasons also won Grammy Awards in 2013 for Best Contemporary Christian Music Song and

Best Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music Performance. One Day (When We All Get To

Heaven) is a song from his album Glory Song, released in September of 2017. Glory Song takes

a more “gospel” approach, using lots of background singers that gives the album a choral feel.

There is a video of Matt singing One Day with just a keyboard player and 6 backup singers that

was recorded on the roof of the Capitol Records building in Hollywood. Today, Matt and his

wife, Beth, are members of St. Peter’s Church in Brighton, England and have 5 children.

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Music Notes 1-19-25

Down To The River To Pray, also known as The Good Old Way and Come Let Us All Go Down,

has been described as a Christian folk hymn, a gospel song, an Appalachian song and an African-

American spiritual. The exact origin of the song is unknown, but research suggests it was

written by an African slave. The earliest known version of it was published in 1867 in Slave

Songs of the United States, and bore the title The Good Old Way. Since then, it has been

recorded by numerous artists, including Lead Belly, Doc Watson, The King’s Singers and the

Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Our rendition was written for the George Clooney movie Brother,

Where Art Thou in the river baptism scene, and was arranged for the movie by a friend of mine,

noted film composer and orchestrator JAC Redford who gave me a copy, which is the version

we’re singing this Sunday.

Andraé Edward Crouch, a Los Angeles native, has been referred to as “the father of modern

gospel music” by contemporary Christian and gospel music professionals. Known for his

compositions The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power, My Tribute (To God Be the Glory) - which he

told me had been recorded 2500 times - and this week’s offertory, Soon and Very Soon, he was

also known for his collaborative work during the 1980s and 1990s with Stevie Wonder, Elton

John and Quincy Jones, as well as conducting choirs that sang on the Michael Jackson hit "Man

in the Mirror" and Madonna's "Like a Prayer". Crouch was noted for his talent of incorporating

contemporary secular music styles into the gospel music he grew up with. His efforts in this area

helped pave the way for early American contemporary Christian music during the 1960s and

1970s. His original musical arrangements were heard in the movies The Color Purple and The

Lion King, and in the NBC television show Amen. His awards and honors include 7 Grammy

Awards, induction into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1998 and a star on the Hollywood

Walk of Fame. After his father's death in 1994, Crouch and his twin sister Sandra took over the

shared duty of senior pastor at the church his parents founded, Christ Memorial Church of God

in Christ in Pacoima. I first met Andraé when we performed on the 1993 Grammy Awards

ceremonies together. He was part of the team that had produced The Messiah, a Soulful

Celebration (a gospel adaptation of 16 of the pieces from the Messiah), which was up for a

Grammy for best gospel album. We were both singing with the choir that performed a hybrid

version of the Hallelujah Chorus for the show, and during rehearsals we talked at length about

the piece. He asked, “I wonder what Handel would have thought about what we did to his

music?” I told him “I think he would have loved it. He was always ripping off his own music

for other uses, but I think he would have loved the idea that someone could have taken his music

and made it relevant and meaningful to a whole new generation, culture and race of people.” I

still think that. Sadly, we lost him in January of 2015.

Chris Tomlin was born in Texas in 1972 and learned to play guitar by playing along with Willy

Nelson recordings. He has become one of the dominant forces in contemporary Christian music,

and in 2012 CCLI announced that his songs were played 3 million times in churches that year.

His 2013 album Burning Lights debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, only the fourth Christian

album ever to open at No. 1, and he was pronounced the most sung songwriter in the world that

year. In 2018, he was the 1 st Christian artist to receive the “Billionaire” award from Pandora for

reaching one billion Pandora streams. The song Adore is the title track for the album Adore:

Christmas Songs Of Worship, which was released in 2015.

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Music Notes 1-12-25

Craig Courtney is one of the dominant forces in the world of church anthems. He is currently the

Executive Music Editor for Beckenhorst Press in Columbus, Ohio, and was the protégé of the

founder, the legendary John Ness Beck. What his resume doesn’t tell you is how he started

composing (I got this information one day over coffee with him). He was a staff piano teacher at

the famous Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Sitting in his cubicle, day after day, waiting for

piano students to arrive (or not), he began to improvise and noodle. This brought about his first

big publication, Thy Will Be Done (which we happen to have in our library). He sent that to John

Ness Beck, founder of Beckenhorst Music Publications, and the rest is history. This week’s

anthem, One Faith, One Hope, One Lord, was commissioned by Meadowbrook United

Methodist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, in celebration of their 60 th anniversary in 1989. It draws

its text from Ephesians and has a calm, serene, majestic feel that reminds the listener of the

famous Elgar tune Pomp and Circumstance, which was also the inspiration for Courtney’s Easter

Week anthem Coronation, which we did last year on Easter morning.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is another of history’s most renowned composers. Born in 1756, he

was a true prodigy and his father Leopold, a composer and music teacher, began teaching him

pieces on the harpsichord at the age of 4, and he picked them up and played them flawlessly. By

the age of 5, he was composing small pieces that his father wrote down, including, believe it or

not, the tune we all know as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (he wrote it as a Theme and

Variations!). By the time he was 5, his father had begun taking him and his older sister, Nannerl,

on concert tours as child prodigies, and he composed his first symphony when he was 8. On one

such trip to Rome when he was 14, he heard Gregorio Allegri’s choral work Miserere, a closely

guarded Vatican treasure of the Sistine Chapel Choir, and wrote it out from memory. Instead of

being excommunicated, as was the required punishment, the Pope was so impressed that he gave

Mozart a commendation. He met Joseph Haydn in 1784, and they became friends, occasionally

playing together in an impromptu string quartet (a string quartet jam session). Ultimately, he

went on to write over 600 pieces of music during his short life, many of which are considered to

be pinnacles of symphonic, concert, chamber, operatic and vocal music. The movie Amadeus,

adapted from the stage play, creates a fictional story around his relationship with composer

Antonio Salieri (who, in real life, was one of the few who attended his burial and who actually

paid for Mozart’s funeral) and the writing of the Requiem, which he never finished (that story is

indeed fiction). The most recent hypothesis regarding the cause of his death in 1791 is a severe

kidney ailment, which probably could have been resolved by him drinking a lot of water (but the

medical technology of the time was to bleed him with leeches). This week’s offertory, the

Laudate Dominum, which is a setting of Psalm 117 and is considered to be one of the most

“perfect” pieces of music ever written, is the 5 th movement of the Vesperae solennes de

confessore, or the Solemn Vespers of the Confessor. The Vespers is a 6 movement work that was

written for the Salzburg Cathedral in 1780 when he was 24 years old, and is the last choral piece

written for the Cathedral before he moved to Vienna. The orchestration is unique in that it was

written for strings, but without violas. When the movie Amadeus was in the theatres, one of the

local choral conductors thought it would be a good marketing move to do an “Amadeus Live”

concert, featuring the Salieri Requiem (considered the best thing he ever wrote) and the Mozart

Solemn Vespers (considered to be middle-of-the-road Mozart). I sang on that concert, and it

wasn’t even close. Middle-of-the-road Mozart was head and shoulders better than the best thing

Salieri ever wrote.

Francesca Battistelli is a Christian recording artist who was born in New York in 1985 and

released her first independent album in 2004 titled Just A Breath. She released her first studio

album under the Fervent label in 2008 titled My Paper Heart. Her single Holy Spirit, written by

Bryan and Katie Torwalt, was released in 2014 as part of her 3 rd studio album, If We’re Honest,

and it went on to win a Grammy in 2016 for Best Contemporary Christian Music

Performance/Song.

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Music Notes 1-5-25

2025 is here, and the New Year brings to us a new soprano section leader, Lauren Doyel. Lauren

Michelle Doyel (Soprano), is a genre-bending, classically-trained singer/songwriter, soloist, and

chorister based in LA and Ventura County. She graduated with a B.M. in Vocal Performance

from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2008, then landed in Los Angeles in 2010, where she

sang jazz at the House of Blues, Indie rock at the Viper room, and plenty of classical/choral

music sprinkled in between. She regularly performs with the LA Master Chorale, the LA

Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Arete Vocal Ensemble, she is a wife and mother of two children,

and is a champion for the expressive liberation of other professional vocalists through her

business, Singing and Soul Work. We’re very fortunate to have Lauren joining us. Watch for a

solo from her next week.

In This Very Room is considered to be one of the all-time “Top 10” modern Christian songs. It

was written by Los Angeles-based composer Ron Harris, who, at the time, was music director for

Carol Lawrence. Over coffee at Starbucks one day, he told me the story of how he was on the

road with Carol and had been away from home for over a month. He was in New Orleans and

had just gotten off a one hour phone call to his wife. He was sitting on the bed of his hotel room,

feeling lonely and miserable, and, looking around at the walls of the room, suddenly came to the

realization that there was more to the room than just the 4 walls. Pulling out his electronic

keyboard, he began writing a melody to the words that had popped into his head - “In this very

room there’s quite enough love for one like me….” It’s been performed as a solo, as a choral

work, with piano, with orchestra, a cappella, and to date, is known to have been sung in the

Upper Room – the room generally accepted to be the room where the Last Supper took place – at

least twice.

Sir John Stainer was an English composer (1840-1901) who was very influential in the musical

world of the Anglican Church, especially as a choir trainer and organist. A parallel can be drawn

between him and Antonio Salieri of the movie Amadeus fame in that his music was very popular

during his lifetime, but very little of it has survived and is performed today. He ultimately ended

up as the organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and upon retiring there due to bad eyesight, he became

a professor of music at Oxford University. One of his biggest contributions to modern musical

literature was in the publishing of Christmas Carols New And Old (1871), which he followed

with a second volume the next year due to its success. In these volumes, he capitalized on a

renewed interest in Christmas carols, and filled the books with arrangements of tunes that have

become classic and are still in use today, such as his arrangements of Greensleeves (What Child

Is This), In Dulci Jubilo (Good Christian Men, Rejoice), Good King Wenceslas and God Rest You

Merry, Gentlemen. The one original piece of his that is still performed, especially this time of

year, is his cantata The Crucifixion, which he published in 1887. It was scored for SATB choir

and organ, and Stainer insisted that “it would be within the scope of most church choirs”. By

today’s standards, the music is very dated, and ironically, Stainer himself described the piece as

“rubbish”, but in the middle of the work (#9 out of 20 pieces) is a gem of an anthem titled God

So Loved The World, using the classic text from John 3:16. It’s written to be sung a cappella, and

has become a standard in the world of church choir music.

I Love You Lord was written in 1974 by Laurie Klein. She was a young mother and homemaker

in Oregon and was “feeling the poverty of my life keenly at that point, both emotionally and

physically.” She sang the first part of the song spontaneously, and felt so intrigued and moved

by the words that she thought “maybe I should write this down.” She stopped long enough to get

a pen and then the rest of the song came just as easily. Her husband Bill recognized the simple

beauty of the song and encouraged her to play it for a local pastor and some visiting musicians.

Eventually the song surfaced at Jack Hayford's Church on the Way in Van Nuys. There Buck and

Annie Herring learned the song and included it on Annie's Kids of the Kingdom. But its greatest

exposure was on Maranatha! Music's Praise 4 in 1980. Since then, it has been estimated to have

been recorded over 75 times. A notable, rather earthy cover of the song was released by the rock

band Petra in 1997 on their album Petra Praise 2: We Need Jesus.

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Music Notes 12-22-24

Once again, Christmas is upon us and I’m delighted to be able to bring to FPCE the Christmas

Story According to St. Luke, which I’m intending to make a yearly tradition. The piece is a

particular favorite of mine, and I was lucky enough to have performed it under the baton of its

creator, the late, great Roger Wagner. The piece involves a narrator, so I’ve asked a friend of

mine, the wonderful actress Marta Kristen, to help us out. In her words:

“Adopted from a Norwegian orphanage at the age of 5, it is always a wonder to me that I am

standing in front of an audience here in California doing what I love most, storytelling. I have

been fortunate to work in many movies, commercials, and TV shows, most notably in the classic

“Lost in Space." In theatre, I was a founding member of the esteemed theatre company, “West

Coast Ensemble,” voted as the best small theatre company in Los Angeles by NPR. My late

husband, Kevin Kane, an elder abuse lawyer, was introduced by June Lockhart to the

incomparable Jim Raycroft, who leads the "Legal Voices", chorus of the Los Angeles Lawyers

Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus. I now, too, have the honor to work with Jim--and your

singers and musicians--to read the story of the wonder of the birth of our Christ Jesus. I dedicate

this reading to Kevin, my daughter Lora and my granddaughter Lena...and to you. Thank you.”

In 1963, NBC contacted the legendary Roger Wagner about creating a Christmas show to be

broadcast live. The result was a 20 minute concert of Christmas carols, separated by incidental

music that underscored a narrator, who narrated the story of Christmas according to St. Luke.

Roger chose a selection of 8 carols, some familiar like We Three Kings and Joy To The World,

and a couple less familiar – Gesu Bambino by Pietro Yon and The Virgin’s Slumber Song by Max

Reger. Pietro Yon was an Italian-born organist and composer who was organist at the Vatican

when he was offered a job as organist at St. Francis Xavier Church in Manhattan in 1907. It was

during this tenure that he wrote Gesu Bambino (1917), and in 1926 became assistant organist at

St Patrick’s Cathedral, and then in 1928 became music director at the Cathedral until his death in

1943. Max Reger was a German composer who worked primarily in the Leipzig area from the

late 1800’s to the early 1900’s and wrote hundreds of pieces of music. The Virgin’s Slumber

Song was originally a folk song to the tune of the German Christmas carol “Joseph dearest,

Joseph mild”, and Reger took this song in 1912, near the end of his life, and transformed it into

an art song, originally called Maria Wiegenlied. Edward Teschemacher supplied the English

translation we now know. The show was broadcast in 1964, sung by the Roger Wagner Chorale,

accompanied by the NBC Orchestra, conducted by Roger and narrated by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

An accompanying album was released by Capitol and is still available on Amazon. From that

year on, The Christmas Story According to St. Luke was the closer for every Christmas concert

performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and was always narrated by a celebrity narrator,

like Jean Stapleton and Orson Wells. I was fortunate to have experienced the last such concert

(Christmas of 1985), as Roger retired from the Master Chorale at the end of that season. The

narrator that year was Pernell Roberts, star of the hit television show Trapper John, M.D. (and

Bonanza before that), and I recall that the concert was so long (2 hours and 45 minutes) that it

forced the Chorale management to pay us overtime. I’m fond of this piece, as I think it has a

strong appeal to young and old – classic without being trendy – and brings the story of the first

Christmas to life in a way that’s accessible to pretty much everyone.

2024 saw the sad closing of Panorama Presbyterian Church. There was a bright spot, however.

They agreed to gift their handbells to FPCE, and their handbell director and resident bell trio

came with them. Director Sherron Corner works for LA Unified as a crossing guard and is not

only a knowledgeable bell director, but she has a marvelous alto voice and has begun singing

with the choir. The Belfry Trio - Dawn Corner, Megan Lee and Sherron Corner – have already

begun to bring their magic to our services and are joining us this Sunday to add their unique

music to the celebrations.

Jim Raycroft 12/11/24 Jim Raycroft 12/11/24

Music Notes 12-15-24