I am busily preparing to get on a plane tomorrow.

On Monday, I began work on a setting of the new Roman Catholic English version of the Gloria.

My composer group that I meet with in Grand Rapids decided this would be our next assignment. Not necessarily the Gloria  but some new text.

The Catholic music group, The National Pastoral Musicians organization, is sponsoring a contest for new settings. One of our members is planning to enter this contest. We thought it might be fun for all of us if we all did some settings.

I am very disinterested in the Roman Catholic church right now. I think it’s been very good to me in providing me a livelihood for most of my kids’ childhoods. But now it has changed so much and I have changed. No longer a feasible match.

I decided it might be fun to do a Gloria setting in the style of Arvo Part. This I have completed. Since the silly text is copyrighted, I think I will follow the practice of MP3 blogs and post my setting temporarily. So for the curious here are links to my final rough draft: pdf link finale doc link. I think there will be some changes in it before I show it to my composer group, but nothing significant.

This setting is entirely not practical on many levels. It violates my usual goal of congregaional participation. And it is based entirely on the technique of another composer. It’s actually kind of an compositional study to see if I could work out a piece in Part’s style.

Composing this piece has made me want to dig a bit deeper into Part’s music. This I am doing.

I had a list of stuff to do yesterday which I accomplished. I have another list of stuff to do today which include get subaru fan belt fixed, straighten choir area in church, take Mom to lunch with Sarah, take Mom to Kohls, get more cash for Mom from her bank, email mp3s to choir, bring plants in from outside for Eileen, clean kitchen, do laundry….

I still can’t get the vacation vibe going. If you’ve read this far, I should tell you that  my daughter Elizabeth says I will have limited access to the internet, so I figure this blog will be static for about a week.