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.