Bellus Canticum

The three choral works collected under the title “Bellus canticum (‘beautiful singing’ or ‘beautiful songs’ in Latin)” were not originally conceived to go together as an album. While they were composed around the same time, these were written for various ensembles I worked with at the time in the late 1990’s in Northern California.

I wrote these in my late 20’s within a year of a divorce which helped me stop and evaluate many things in my life—significantly, my experience of the divine Source (as Rick Rubin calls it in his fantastic book “The Creative Act”). I am a spiritual person and at this time in my life was finding new ways to connect to the Source outside of the traditions of Southern Christianity in which I grew up. This music marks the turn in my ongoing investigation of how I connect with the Source.

A note on the performance of these works: a friend who directed a high school choir in Napa where I was living at the time agreed to perform these for this recording which was part of my application to study music composition in graduate school. I sincerely thought I told him that there would be a small audience, but maybe I forgot. Anyway…he took time in rehearsal with his students to learn and perform these and, I believe, within about two weeks of me giving him the music. This is just to say that there are things in the compositions that have been edited since and the choir was very new to these works. TVP—thank you. Yes, I was accepted to grad programs. No, I didn’t go. Well, not then.

I was glad when they said unto me

I needed a song for the junior and senior high church choir I led to sing to set the tone for a special service. As a poet, I’ve always loved the Psalms and thought the text from Psalms 122 would work as a way to open a service.

For some reason I wanted to avoid melody and consider the choir as one voice because, really, the effect of listening is that a choir is one voice and so could I write something that was harmony-forward for voices(?). I wanted to try and create musical lines that worked together harmonically to create a sound, an atmosphere, a feeling. This did encourage some difficult harmonic structures with many close seconds and open harmonies. It also became more rhythmic than I considered since I wanted the voices to sing the text in unison as one voice. I think that it works ok since the song is short but would have become annoying if the song had gone on much longer.

The Aramaic Lord’s Prayer

I found the text to this song in a book called “Dancing with the Aramaic Jesus” by Neil Douglas Klotz. Klotz translates, or transliterates, “The Lord’s Prayer” as found in the book of Matthew in the Bible which begins with the text, “our father which art in heaven, hollowed be thy name.” Klotz tracks this text back through Aramaic in search of deeper meanings and connections through traditions older than Christianity and I found the Aramaic suggestions to have deep resonance without the feudalistic ideology that we find in the Biblical version. Klotz’s Aramaic interpretation become a daily meditation for me when working on this song.

Musically, I approached this song as a meditation and tried to create chant-like sections that the choir, and hopefully an audience, could experience the deeper meanings and resonances with the text. We printed Klotz’s English retranslation of the Aramaic in the program so the audience had a point of reference beyond the music.

I love how the choir performed this work and it really demonstrated to me how I really needed to spend more time in each section for these to fully unfold as meditations. I also wonder that some sections rely more on performative vocal gesture than I meant and would rewrite these if this was to be performed again.

Lo Tikadi ti Ada

I may have composed “Lo Tikadi ti Ada” first among these three songs but I don’t remember. I do know it came to me as I was transitioning from a religious pursuit of Christianity and seeking other ways of connecting daily and ritualistically with the Source.

Part of my departure from Christian practice was to find ways to connect directly and this song represents this in that I invented the text for the song so that language did not get in the way of the expression of joy and gratefulness I felt in the idea that I could connect directly with the divine Source. So the text was composed as an expression of gratitude to the divine in the first and repeated section and the second section as a request to help me stay aligned with the divine Source.

Musically, I wanted to create a song that a choir could learn without having printed music. Each of the four parts has its own melodic line and these are passed among each of the voices (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass) throughout so that there is very little music to learn and everyone learns all parts.

Performance note: I didn’t indicate a return to the original tempo after the second, slower section and so the choir begins slowly and builds up to the original tempo by the end which kind of works out to be really cool too.