Music Notes 1-28-24

Next week we’ll be welcoming back our marvelous band to our worship.  We have some wonderful music planned, including Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and U2’s Love Rescue Me.  I would encourage you to come over after the service and chat with the members of the band.  They are all giants in the music industry here.  Jeff Colella, the pianist, was Lou Rawls’ music director for 16 years, and has several albums available on his website.  We are talking about featuring him with a piece from one of his albums for the postlude when the band is with us on March 3rd.  Drummer/percussionist Ed Zajac is a working professional in town and plays on movie soundtracks and in pit orchestras for musicals.  He is also a singer who has sung on the soundtracks of movies like Star Trek Beyond, Tomorrowland and Jurassic World.  When I started at the church, I brought him over to see the facility, and after taking one look at the sanctuary, stated that we couldn’t put a drum set in the sanctuary – it would overwhelm the room.  After several weeks of thought, he designed and created an ingenious kit that gets the flavor of a drum kit without the physical size or volume.  Bassist Bryan Fougner, who also comes out to sing with our choir when he’s in town (and when the band isn’t playing) has toured with Pat Benatar and has shared the stage with bands like Kansas, Loverboy, STYX, Grand Funk Railroad, Joan Jett and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.  My favorite story about Bryan is when he was playing with a Metallica tribute band.  While he was onstage, during the concert, instead of tuning his in-ear monitor to the music of the band he was playing with, he had it tuned to the online bible study that my wife was conducting and would contribute his thoughts between songs.  Guitarist Stan Ayeroff has been a friend and colleague for many years.  Years ago, he hired me to provide singers for a Christmas party at the home of Gene Roddenberry and the dance band he provided was the Tonight Show band.  He’s an acoustic guitar specialist but has played and recorded with Roger Daltry of The Who, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and has a YouTube channel where you can hear him playing solo pieces on his acoustic guitar.  He was especially prolific on YouTube during the lockdown, and has published several books on guitar, including several books of arrangements - his book of arrangements of Christmas carols for classical guitar is considered to be definitive.  I took Eileen to the Canyon Bistro in Topanga to hear him play for Mother’s Day a couple of years ago.

Hillsong Church is a Pentecostal megachurch based in Sydney, Australia.  Founded by Brian and Bobbie Houston in August of 1983, the church grew to the point where the word “megachurch” is utterly redefined by them, with campuses in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Newcastle, Gold Coast and Noosa.  In addition, they have international churches in London, Bermondsey (Greater London), Oxford, Guildford, Kent and Newcastle (United Kingdom), Cape Town and Pretoria (South Africa), Kiev (Ukraine), Paris, Lyon and Marseille (France), Konstanz and Duesseldorf (Germany), Stockholm, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Moscow, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Los Angeles, New York, New Jersey and 3 campuses in Arizona.  The band Hillsong United was formed in 1998 from close friends within the Hillsong youth ministry (called “Powerhouse Youth”).  So many songs were being written within the youth ministry that it was suggested they make an album.   Their song Oceans was released in 2013 on their album Zion and was certified Platinum – 1,000,000 copies sold.   It’s considered to be a “Top 10” song in the world of Christian contemporary music, and you can find it on YouTube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GGFb6LcX3U – if you’d like to listen to it.  It’s a profound, contemplative song that invokes images of nature and spirituality.

Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1809 and was only 38 when he died in Leipzig in 1847.  During that short period, he became one of the most renowned composers of his time and was responsible for renewing interest in the music of J.S. Bach.  Today, we know him for his incidental music for the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night’s Dream (within which is the tune we all know as the traditional “there goes the bride”, while the traditional “here comes the bride” tune was written by Richard Wagner for his opera Lohengrin) and the melody for Hark, The Herald Angels Sing.  He was an admirer of the oratorios of Bach and Handel and organized the 1st performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion since Bach’s death.  He was commissioned to write an oratorio for the Birmingham Festival in 1845, and created the oratorio Elijah, based on text by Julius Schubring.  He wrote it twice, once in English for Birmingham, and then revised in German, being careful to make the music fit the intricacies of the languages.  The Birmingham version was debuted August 26, 1846, and the German version was first performed on his birthday, February 3rd, 1848, a few months after his death.  He Watching Over Israel is arguably the most famous chorus from the work, being #29 in the work and based on Psalm 121 and Psalm 138.