Music Notes 3-10-24
It was, as always, a great joy to have our wonderful band with us last Sunday. The next big musical extravaganza will be Easter morning. I’ve mentioned this before, but the various holidays in the Christian calendar suggest different things to me musically. Christmas celebrates the birth of a baby – as a musician, this translates to me as a sound world of harp and strings. Easter, on the other hand, is a party. There have been many prophets over the millennia, but ours actually rose from the dead. His resurrection is the reason we’re here, celebrating his life and messages, spreading his philosophies and living by his commandments. Now that’s a reason to celebrate. From a musical standpoint, that suggests brass and timpani to me. Over the years I’ve developed my musical language and my concepts of the ideal Easter ensemble. I’ve been busy writing orchestrations for our Easter celebration, and it’s going to be spectacular. Of course, we might have to get a permit from the city to relocate the roof of the church out onto Balboa Blvd., but I promise you, you’ll walk out of the church on a cloud. Spread the word.
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 is based on Psalm 91 and was written for a commission in memory of Margaret Ashworth Craig in 1996.
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 1st 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.
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.