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Guerrieri: ¡Alégrense! (2016) (PDF, 49Kb)

One of the side benefits of a church-music gig is that you get to spend a fair amount of time living in the future. For instance, we're only halfway through November; but, thanks to preparation needs and Thanksgiving eating a rehearsal whole, I'm already well into Advent. Here's this year's introit: a bright, feisty 35-second riposte to 2016. Kick it to the curb! There's work to do.

Beatus cuius

Guerrieri: Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob (2016) (PDF, 45 Kb)

New program year, new introit. This one recombines a gradually-unveiled 12-tone row into triads and near-triads, which then more or less skip down their own evolutionary path. I always like writing this way: you get cadences that are the harmonic equivalent of handbrake parallel parking. Sure, you could play the organ part on two different coupled manuals, but I kind of like having the hands crowding each other out. We'll give this one a run tomorrow morning. Seatbelts fastened? OK, then.

This I know

It seems that this space is destined to be updated only in transit. The last post (five months ago?! yikes) was written in the midst of a change of abode, and now we are preparing to move Soho the Dog HQ yet again. It's like our own Year of the Three Kings, except, instead of monarchs, it's places to live. Which means we're about to start living in the residential equivalent of... Richard III? I think that analogy ran off the rails somewhere.

At any rate: as proof that I have not been completely idle, the list of Score columns over on the sidebar there has been finally brought up to date. That's 141 installments (and counting) of oblique musicological speculation for your summer reading entertainment. I should also link to this article that Molly coaxed out of me for NewMusicBox, which ended up with a pleasant amount of break on its curve, I thought. Plus, there was this Messiaen introduction for Red Bull Music Academy Daily, which led me down the garden path of echoes between Messiaen's idiosyncratic theology and that of the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec.

Oh, yeah, and this went down, which at least resulted in some flattering sympathies from smart and nice people—thank you! Like I've said before: I have a knack for getting into careers in their categorical twilight. On the other hand, it does leave more time for composing:

Guerrieri: Shining Throne (Prelude on "Jesus Loves Me") (2016) (PDF, 48 Kb)

And a low-fidelity phone recording:



The registration is only a suggestion, i.e., what happens to work on my particular church organ. (I am, now and forever, a sucker for a good—or even not-so-good—celeste stop.)

And with that, it's northern-hemisphere summer. Whatever critical scrapes I manage to get myself into will be duly noted here. Or not—I picked up some Apuleius for a dollar at a library sale today, and, I have to say, it's a better-looking prospect than a lot else that's going on out there. But Apuleius probably always is.

Footsteps here below

Guerrieri: Sonos in Aere (I Love to Hear the Story) (PDF, 46 Kb)

This year's Christmas carol was supposed to be one of two: I wrote a sweet one and a not-so-sweet one, but the text permission for the not-so-sweet one has yet to come through. (Coal in your stocking this year, U.S. copyright law.) So here's the sweet one, at least—it was bumped from my Christmas Eve service, so now it is yours. I have a sneaking, cynical suspicion that the not-so-sweet one will still be pertinent next year.

That said: Happy Holidays! However tenuous your relationship to the season, you can still frolic and play the Adelaide Keen way:

Sinners, reconciled

arr. Guerrieri: The Wexford Carol (PDF, 99Kb)



Happy holidays from everyone at Soho the Dog HQ! Here's a carol arrangement to cleanse your aural palate in between walls of indiscriminate seasonal noise. Honestly, this has been one of those years when I think Christmas might be better off as, say, a quadrennial affair, like the World Cup. You know how the World Cup comes along, and people with no previous interest in the sport are straightaway really into it, to an unprecedented degree? Imagine if you could pull that off with platitudinous Christmas sentiments. ("Peace on earth? Goodwill to all? I suddenly find these notions INTRIGUINGLY COMPELLING" *strokes chin as eyes widen and flash*) Comfort and/or joy to everyone out there.

BONUS STOCKING STUFFER

"Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" (descant and harmonization by me, 2014) (PDF, 57 Kb)
The same thing in a lower key (PDF, 57 Kb)



A characteristically nutty descant I wrote for an otherwise beloved carol. I like my angels heralding in screaming bright G major, but that might be just a bit high for the end of a full lessons-and-carols service, and a half-century of Presbyterian hymnals have insisted on F, so take your pick.

Something's coming

Guerrieri: Zeal and Patience (2013) (PDF, 73 Kb)



Hey, Matthew, did you pencil in a new Advent introit for this year and then forget to write it until the last possible minute?

Of course nooooeeeeeh, maybe.

To be sure, we hadn't been doing the last one for a while, and even the really-for-Lent substitution was getting a little musty, so out with the old, &c. I figured I'd put it up here for anyone whose church-music planning is as behindhand as mine.

In my apostatical way, I've always thought that Advent is the church-calendar equivalent of a cult movie. Most people just want to cruise right past it into Christmas, but there is a hardy band that's all "seriously, this is some of Carl Weathers' best work" (or whatever the theological equivalent of Carl Weathers is) and watches everybody else jump to yuletide conclusions with a kind of benevolent pity. But honestly, with Christmas colonizing more and more of the calendar—even as I was assembling Hallowe'en supplies this year, most stores already had Christmas displays—Advent is taking on the aspect of some weird temporal origami: a kind of of Marvel-comics-like pocket dimension, a pleasantly disconnected parallel limbo to the normal time-space continuum of conspicuous consumption.

Done Changed

arr. Guerrieri: The Angels Changed My Name (2013) (PDF, 213 Kb)



Sometimes, you (and, by you, I mean I) want to color in an otherwise nice spiritual arrangement with every crayon in the chromatic box. In spite of myself, I think this one is not bad. I actually wrote it back in September, but gave it the benefit of two months of edits via rehearsal and, this past Sunday, performance (by this faithful crew). Which went well! Except for the recording, which is why there is a computer-realized placeholder until a) I get a good recording, or b) I tweak the realization so it's less clunky. (Unsurprisingly, neither is likely in the near-term.)

This tune has, itself, after a fashion, changed its name a fair amount. I used the version in J. B. T. Marsh's The Story of the Jubilee Singers (1880), which I think is the earliest version in print. (Marsh's book is a really interesting document of the push-pull of trying to write about the African-American experience for white 19th-century readers—the story is told pretty much exclusively through the eyes of white observers, but then Marsh includes biographical sketches of each of the Jubilee Singers, which is by far the most fascinating part of the book.) Probably working from Marsh's version, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor included an arrangement of "The Angels Changed My Name" in his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, published in 1905; when Coleridge-Taylor sent a copy to his former teacher, Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford, Stanford replied that the tune was, in his estimation, almost certainly Irish in origin. In 1939, Harry T. Burleigh reworked the tune into the hymn tune "McKee," altering the contour to fit the words "In Christ There Is No East or West," by English writer William Arthur Dunkerley. For his part, Dunkerley, too, enjoyed changing his name—he also wrote journalism under the name Julian Ross, and poetry and fiction under the name John Oxenham—a surname Dunkerley's daughter Elsie, a successful writer of children's books, also adopted.

This night so chill

arr. Guerrieri: Still, Still, Still (2012) (PDF, 191 Kb)

This year's holiday card is a two-voice-and-piano arrangement of one of my favorite carols. Seriously, if I had to make out an intellectual Christmas list, "the chance to repeatedly harmonize an arpeggiated triad in increasingly odd fashion" would rank somewhere near the top. It's the simple things, really.

In the meantime, I am considering ringing in the new year with this concoction, courtesy of Jennie June's American Cookery Book (1866):

OXFORD SWIG

Put into a bowl a pound of sugar, pour on it a pint of warm beer, grated nutmeg, and some ginger, also grated; add four glasses of sherry and five pints of beer, stir it well, and if not sweet enough, add more sugar, and let it stand covered up four hours, and it is fit for use. Sometimes add a few lumps of sugar rubbed on a lemon to extract the flavor, and some lemon juice. If the lemon rind is pared very thin, without any of the white skin left, it answers better, by giving a stronger flavor of the lemon.

Bottle this mixture, and in a few days it will be in a state of effervescence. When served in a bowl fresh made, add some bread toasted very crisp, cut in narrow strips.

There's, like, the Galleria

Guerrieri: Overchoice Rag (2011) (PDF, 4 pages, 153 Kb)

Ethan was giving me a deserved hard time for letting the rag-a-month project from a couple years ago drift off into a senescent fog after a mere four installments. The lesson: be careful what you wish for! This one is reasonably classically-proportioned, it just can't decide what key it wants to be in. Equal temperament, you disorientingly large-inventoried emporium, you.

No MIDI, since my usual computer is in the shop, and I've been magically transported back in time to a golden age of slower, far less powerful operating systems. Instead, here's me playing, wrong notes and all. Be careful what you wish for, &c., &c.

The triumph song of Heav'n

Last week, the church that has provided me with much of my gainful employment for the past decade, The Presbyterian Church in Sudbury, celebrated its 50th anniversary, so I wrote an anthem for the occasion. Score below, where also, behind some ambient Presbyterian noise, you can hear the premiere (thanks to Doug Nicholls for the recording).

We Love the Place (2011), SATB chorus and organ (PDF, 170Kb)



The words are by William Bullock, Anglican missionary to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Numerous versions of Bullock's poem were already floating around by the end of the 19th century; I mixed and matched stanzas I liked. Supposedly, when asked why there wasn't a stanza of "We Love the Place" devoted to the church's pulpit, Bullock replied that he would have been compelled to write:

We love thy pulpit Lord,
For there the word of man
Lulls the worshiper to sleep
As only sermons can.

No sweeter sound than this is heard

Guerrieri: Rejoice, Rejoice! (PDF, 87 Kb; plastic-imitation MIDI here)

It's Christmas carol time. This one sets a text by William Chatterton Dix, better known for writing "What Child Is This?" (Surely the most leading question in Christmas carol history, outpacing "Do You Hear What I Hear?" by a wide margin. I've always wanted to hear a version of "What Child Is This?" where the baby isn't Jesus. Twist ending!) Dix was also the manager of an insurance company, which makes him the Charles Ives of hymn-writers, I suppose. At any rate, this carol manages to be both cheerful and consistently unsettled, which is how I imagine pretty much everybody spends their holiday season.

By the way, previous years' carols can now be accessed with the handy "Carol" tag at the bottom of this post. Four years on, and I've finally come around to blog tags! To be fair, the tags put a bit of strain on my 2400 baud modem.

Till the stock of the Puritans die

My lovely wife picked up a degree from Harvard today—good Lord, I can't possibly deserve a woman this smart—so we took in the entirety of Harvard commencement, which is kind of like the academic version of a live Ring cycle: long, sometimes fascinating, sometimes boring, but worth experiencing at least once in your life. (I mean, one of the comic highlights—no kidding—was an oration in Latin.) Wynton was awarded an honorary doctorate—


—and played a little (you can hear a bit of his "America the Beautiful" here).

The big advantage of attending Harvard commencement as a family member instead of an actual graduate is that you spend hours on end sitting around instead of hours on end standing around. I used my downtime filling the margins of my program with a reharmonization of John Knowles Paine's "Harvard Hymn" that would probably have gotten me kicked out of Harvard by A.T. Davison back in the day:

(Click to enlarge; MIDI here.) I love doing four-part writing this way: just sort of let the voice-leading wander like a curious dog on a long leash. (This is why it took me multiple tries to pass the chorale section of my doctoral comps. "Resist the temptation to be interesting," the department chair finally told me.)

I'm a big fan of varied academic regalia, and Harvard's faculty provides some prime robe-spotting opportunities. The best regalia we saw featured round hats covered in fringe, kind of like this:


According to the Internet, this—the birrete—is a Spanish thing. I think it might be worth my while to get a degree from the Complutense just so I could wear one.

Bend sinister

Guerrieri: Steel Flea Rag (2009) (PDF, 4 pages, 236 Kb; MIDI here)

Not surprisingly—that is, if you know me at all—the rag-a-month project (previously: 1, 2, 3) is now a month behind, for which I will not apologize, since it's all free. Anyway, this month's entry is a left-hand only rag, just for fun. I will admit that, one-handed, this one is pretty hard—and the difficulty is compounded by my reference point being my own grotesquely gangly paws (seriously, if Lurch and Thing had a baby, it'd be my hands)—so go ahead and use both if you want. It's the thought that counts.

Anybody wants to start a pool as to when I actually get back on schedule, you can put down ten bucks for me on 2011.

Foliage of the Heart

Guerrieri: Now Once More (2009) (PDF, 2 pages, 122 Kb; MIDI here)

I've never ended up hiring trumpets for Easter, since I'm always miffed at how much they want to gouge me. But a very nice person at my church had the wherewithal to recruit a couple players from the local high school this year, so I wrote an introit for them. I'm not sure I like it as much as our usual Easter introit, but when life gives you trumpets, make trumpetade. (Plus, the first line makes a good Beckett-like title.)

In other news:

• Geoff Edgers profiles one of the best musicians I know.
• President Obama's gift to the Queen of England—an iPod loaded with showtunes—was actually rather spot-on.
• "ACCESS TO QUALITY MUSIC EDUCATION SHOULD NOT BE ONLY FOR THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD IT. THE BENEFITS ARE TOO GREAT." Emphasis Linda Ronstadt's.
• Andrew Lloyd Webber, anti-piracy crusader! The original Phantom of the Opera is public domain, right? Puccini as well? Just sayin'.
• Although I would certainly not turn down some of that filthy lucre in order to bid on an original edition of the Kandinsky/Marc Der Blaue Reiter almanac, including facsimiles of song manuscripts by Schoenberg ("Herzgewächse"), Berg ("Warm die Lüfte"), and Webern ("Ihr tratet zu dem Herde"). Christie's gives an estimate of $40,000-70,000. (Compare that with the number quoted in the first item in this list.)

"I took many a lump, but 'twas all in good fun"

Guerrieri: Clog Dubh Rag (2009) (PDF, 4 pages, 264 Kb; MIDI here)

This month's rag (previously: 1, 2) celebrates St. Patrick's Day in typically loud and chaotic fashion. The Clog Dubh Phádraig, the "Black Bell of St. Patrick," is now in the National Museum in Dublin. William Wilde (Oscar's father) described it thus in his 1867 book Lough Corrib, its Shores and Islands:

It was believed in the locality that this bell was a present from an angel to the saint, and was originally of pure silver, but that it was rendered black and corroded, as at present seen, "by its contact with the demons on Croaghpatrick, when the Apostle of Ireland was expelling them thence."

One legend connects the bell with Patrick's driving the snakes out of Ireland—the snakes were so persistent in their harassment during Patrick's mountaintop hermitage that he finally threw the bell at them, which scared them sufficiently that they didn't stop slithering until they were in the sea. (Hence the C strain, which makes liberal use of "Banish Misfortune" from the Petrie Collection.)

Coming up short

Guerrieri: Epitome Rag (2009) (PDF, 5 pages, 313 Kb; MIDI here)

This month's rag (previously) honors February's oddball brevity with 28-bar strains in place of the usual 32. It also gets awfully MGM-esque towards the end, which I attribute to a lingering excess of Valentine's Day candy. (I think Valentine's Day is a bit of a scam, but chocolate-covered torrone is OK by me no matter how sketchy the pretenses.)

(Word builder: the original title was "Brachylogy Rag." I am a big nerd.)

"In Paris they call it American Music"

Guerrieri: New Year Rag (1995/2009) (PDF, 5 pages, 267 Kb; MIDI here)

That's right—the original version of this one was written at the beginning of 1995. But now the notation is cleaner and it has a better ending.

Writing ragtime is one of those things that, for me at least, the more you do it, the longer it takes. As a result, I have a folder bulging with unfinished bits and pieces. One of this year's resolutions is to finish them all up, so I think a new rag every month ought to go a long way towards that. (Seriously—there's one that's been stuck in the same harmonic cul-de-sac between the C and D strains since 2000.)

Anyway, this is probably the closest to "classical" rag style that I've ever gotten, the D strain feint towards the Neapolitan notwithstanding. Yes, we're ringing in the new year with an old piece in an older style—along with the promise of future installments. The present is so elusive, isn't it?

Post title via James Weldon Johnson.

Drede ye nought, sayd the aungell bryght

Guerrieri: Be We Mery in This Feste (PDF, 163 Kb; not terribly subtle MIDI here)

Here's a nice, crunchy, part-of-this-balanced-breakfast Christmas carol that I'll toss into the season's general musical maelstrom. Merry Christmas, every one! This will probably end up being this year's Christmas Eve choral introit—sometimes you just want something in-your-face to shake everyone out of their cookie-induced torpor. Can I augment that harmony? Sure! Can I throw on all the mixture stops? It's Christmas, isn't it? Why do Tudor sources add so many extra letters to otherwise normal English words? Hey, it's the thought that counts.

If the macaronic inclusion of ecclesiastical Latin is too sober for your holiday, you can always set the Wayback Machine to last year's wassails. And it's as good a time as any to remind everyone that charity-supporting t-shirts are a great way to distract your friends and loved ones from the coming financial apocalypse. (Buy eight for Hanukkah!)

Suavity of harmonious strains

Guerrieri: Divino Nombre (PDF, 70 Kb; cheap MIDI rendition here)

I've noticed that somebody perusing this space might think that all I ever compose are sacred choral pieces. Not true—they're just all I ever finish anymore. I'm ridiculously deadline-driven, so unless there's a performance on the calendar, most things just remain lazily hanging about in the notebook. I may not be very religious, but I suppose that makes me at least somewhat millennial.

Anyway, here's a little introit for the coming stretch of ordinary time. This would work just as well up a whole step or so, but I love the sound of a full choir laying into a low B-flat; I always find the difference between middle C and that B-flat like the difference between lowfat milk and heavy cream. Poetic, no? I'll regret it the first Sunday I only have six choristers show up.

Early to rise

It's Lent already? As of last Wednesday, yes. For those of you who got to play outside rather than go to Sunday School, Lent is the 40-day period of preparation for Easter in the Christian calendar. It coordinates with Passover, which corresponds with the lunar calendar, which means it moves around a lot. (Trivia: the last time Lent started this early was 1856.) Then, of course, Orthodox Christians figure their Easter a little differently; and they're split between old calendrists and new calendrists. This was much easier when I was in Catholic school—one day they'd haul you off to church in the middle of class, which was usually the first inkling you'd have that Lent had started. Once you become a church musician, you actually have to plan for this sort of thing.

Which is why this year's Lenten introit was finished the day of rehearsal. (I have become more deadline-driven than Edmond O'Brien.) Download it for free—for free—and you can decide for yourself whether the nuns would have given me a gold star or sent a note home to my parents.

Guerrieri: I Wait for the Lord (2008) (PDF, 74 KB; MIDI here)