Music Notes 1-7-24

As we ring in the New Year, I would like to wish you all a very happy New Year, and express my gratitude for the kindness and warmth you have all shown me in my first 10 months at 1st Pres.  It’s been a busy year, with a lot of refurbishing, restoring and renovating of the music department.  And now that it’s mostly done, we can focus on the future.  I’m looking forward to a wonderful year of music and worship, of working with our marvelous choir and all the talented people we have involved with the worship service.  

Starting this Sunday, we are going to start adding a contemporary worship song to each service.  If you don’t follow that particular bandwagon, I’ll be mentioning the name of the song here in this article each week, so you can check it out on YouTube so you’ll be ready to sing on Sunday.  This week, we’re singing a barn-burner called Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone by Chris Tomlin.  The familiar half is easy, and the other half is very singable.  I think you’ll love it.

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).   Ave Verum Corpus is a short motet for choir and strings that Mozart wrote for his friend Anton Stoll, who was the musical coordinator for the parish of St Stephan in the town of Baden Bei Wien, near Vienna.  The year was 1791 (6 months before his death), and he was in the middle of writing his opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), while his wife, Constanza, pregnant with their 6th child, was staying at a spa in Baden.  Exquisitely beautiful, it is considered to be one of the most perfect pieces of music ever written.

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 God Of This City was written by a worship band from Belfast, Ireland called Bluetree.  They composed the piece (and I’m not making this up!) in Padia, Thailand at a bar that also doubled as a brothel.  Chris Tomlin heard the song at concert of worship bands in Belfast when the band took him aside and played the song for him.  He was so inspired by the message that he gave the song his own unique treatment and recorded it on the 2008 album Passion: God Of This City, which won the Dove Award in 2009 for Special Event Album of the Year.  His song Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone was part of the album See The Morning, his 4th 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.