Music Notes 6-30-24
Next week, on the 4th of July weekend, we’ll be welcoming back our wonderful band. The musical menu will include music to uplift your soul, and music that will make you want to dance. So, spread the word – FPCE is the place to be Sunday mornings!
Wade In The Water is a negro spiritual that belongs to the genre “code songs”. Slaves were not allowed to congregate, for fear of fomenting revolution, but they were allowed to sing in the fields, as long as the lyrics weren’t too revolutionary. Biblical subjects were considered relatively safe, which gave birth to the “spiritual”. However, the slaves got past the problem of disallowed communication with code songs, which were spirituals that had a secondary meaning. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot referred to the town of Ripley, West Virginia, which was a station in the underground railroad. Slaves would make their way to the banks of the Ohio River and wait for the people of Ripley to come across in rowboats at night to take them to safety – “Well, I looked over Jordan and what I did I see….a band of angels comin’ after me…”. Wade In The Water was a code song that told the listener that there were slave hunters or bounty hunters ahead, and to go in the opposite direction. Harriet Tubman used the song to remind escaping slaves to get off the trail and into the water so that the dogs employed by slavers lost the trail. This groovy arrangement by Mark Hayes is immensely fun to sing. 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. The feel of the stride piano in this arrangement evokes the nightclubs of the 20’s and 30’s – I’ve been telling the choir to imagine themselves in the “Ink and Paint Club” (from Who Framed Roger Rabbit) or the nightclub from the Harry Potter prequel movie Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them.
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.