When Eileen and I prepared to walk home from church yesterday, we had an unexpected walk through falling snow. It is beautiful but I think we’re all ready for Spring here.
Yesterday’s Palm Sunday service went very well. I decided to have only the choir accompany the congregational singing on the Anglican psalm chant and that worked nicely. For the choral anthem I divided up David Hurd’s lovely melody for “O Sacred Head,” having solo sopranos and a solo tenor set up a kind of call and response between themselves and the rest of the high or low voices. Hurd’s melody surprised me the first time I looked at. It’s quite sophisticated in the way it incorporates gospel and jazz, something I don’t expect from the pen of this writer who is sort of a stalwart Anglican. Although he has done some lovely settings of Negro Spiritual melodies for organ and written at least one good hymn tune.
If you don’t know the melody, this choir does a pretty good job with it. Although I wonder where the accompaniment is coming from since the organ bench that you can see is unoccupied.
I didn’t have the energy to go back to church to practice last night even though I have quite a few organ pieces coming up that could have used the rehearsal. Instead I sat and did some reading.
This morning when I got up and resisted writing a bulletin article I promised myself I would put together for the Easter Sunday bulletin. Instead I did Greek and my usual poetry/other reading. After that, Eileen was still not up yet so I felt like it was a good time to write the article. I’m pretty happy with the result. You can read it here if you want. I thought it might be helpful to explain why I was using music based on Easter chorales we don’t sing.
I continue to feel the relief of getting close to being done with my recent compositional foray. I’m probably going to take a hiatus from working on it today despite the fact that Jordan emailed me a little bit ago with some excellent suggestions. It’s flattering that he took my work so seriously but not surprising that he had such insights into what I was trying to do. What a dude!
I’m almost inspired to finish the tango movement which I have barely started. Almost.
Anyway, not today.
About the time Eileen got up I decided to make some weird corn cakes improvising on a Lustig recipe substituting the Masa Corn mix and Oat flour I have sitting around for corn meal and semolina flour. The result was too thick so I watered it down a bit. I loved it. Eileen improved her serving with slices of cheddar cheese from Zingerman. I tried it and that did improve them.
