This weekend: come and hear members of our Chancel Choir with The Singers Club of Cleveland and the Cinematic Symphony Orchestra.
Music-loving congregation members, this will be a weekend filled with special opportunities to hear your friends and neighbors in concert!
You can catch UUCC’s own Mark Binnig with The Singers’ Club of Cleveland in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a musical tour of Ireland and Scotland. There are performances this Saturday and Sunday, March 7-8, and you’ll find all the details here.
And several of our Chancel Choir members will be performing with the Cinematic Symphony Orchestra this Friday, March 6th in that group’s Hollywood Blockbusters concert at the State Theatre in Playhouse Square. Come and see Lucy and Mike Carney, Kristen van Kranenburgh, Nancy Lineburgh, Leon Michaud, and Joren Tengesdal performing selections from Star Wars, The Fellowship of the Ring, Avengers Endgame, and more. Follow this link for more information and to purchase tickets.
Music Notes – Sunday, March 8th:
This Sunday’s musician is UUCC Pianist Karin Tooley.
Centering Music: When Daffodils Begin to Peer and Live with Me and Be My Love (Shearing/Shakespeare)
George Shearing (1919-2011) was a British jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader. He wrote standards such as “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Conception” and received numerous accolades, including 2 Grammy Awards, a lifetime achievement award from BBC Jazz Awards, and a knighthood, bestowed in 2007 by Queen Elizabeth II. The two Shearing pieces Karin is playing as Centering Music this Sunday are from a collection titled Songs and Sonnets from Shakespeare, originally written for chorus with jazz piano and bass. These songs, along with the others in the collection, were commissioned and premiered by the Mostly Madrigal Singers of St. Charles, Illinois in 1999, with legendary British composer/conductor John Rutter directing, and a then 80-years-young Shearing himself at the piano.
Song: Morning Has Come – Shelton
Jason Shelton is an award-winning composer, arranger, conductor, song and worship leader, workshop presenter, and coach. He served as the Associate Minister for Music at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville, Tennessee from 1998-2017, and is now engaged in a music ministry at-large, focused on serving the musical resource needs of UU (and other liberal) congregations around the country (from jasonsheltonmusic.com). “Morning Has Come” (#1000) is one of many contributions Rev. Shelton made to our Singing the Journey hymnbook. In the words of the composer, “This song was composed for and debuted at a morning worship service during a 2001 UU musicians’ conference at the Mountain in Highlands, NC. As the story goes, it had been rainy and gray all week long, but when the time came to debut this song, the sun came out and shone gloriously through the chapel windows. Ah, the power of music!”
Special Music: Clair de Lune – Debussy
French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is considered the father of musical Impressionism, although Debussy himself disliked the idea of being categorized as a composer. Throughout his career, Debussy wrote music for a wide variety of performing forces, and his nontraditional use of harmony played a vital role in ushering in a new era of music at the turn of the 20th century. “Clair de Lune” is probably Debussy’s most universally beloved composition, and indeed one of the best-known works ever written by any composer, having been used in countless films, cartoons, commercials, and more. “Clair de Lune” was originally written for solo piano around 1890 or 1891 but was later revised by the composer before its publication in 1905 within a larger collection of piano works titled Suite bergamasque.
Offertory Music: Prelude No. 2 in C Sharp Minor – Gershwin
Groundbreaking American composer George Gershwin (1898-1937) composed his Three Preludes for piano in 1926, debuting them himself at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City that same year. All three of these pieces are frequently performed and recorded to this day, but “Prelude #2 (Andante con moto, often called “Blue Lullaby”) is the best-known of the collection, and it’s no understatement to say that Gershwin’s blend of jazz and classical elements in this piece changed the way future composers approached solo piano repertoire.
Musical Pause: Moonlight in Vermont – Suessdorf & Blackburn
“Moonlight in Vermont” is a jazz ballad, written in 1944 by American composer Karl Suessdorf (1911-1982) and lyricist John Blackburn (1913-2006), an Ohio native and longtime resident of Shaker Heights. Blackburn’s lyrics are unusual in that they do not rhyme, and each verse is in the form of a haiku. “Moonlight in Vermont” is considered a jazz standard, and has been recorded by Gerry Mulligan, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and hundreds of other artists. It is considered an unofficial state song of Vermont, and is traditionally the first dance at wedding receptions in that state.
Song: Breaths – Barnwell/Diop
“Breaths” (#1001 in Singing the Journey) is adapted from the poem of the same title by Senegalese poet Birago Diop. The music was written by Ysaye Barnwell (b. 1946), a UU songwriter, activist and former member of the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. In Barnwell’s own words: “Hearing this poem…affirmed my world view which includes and reveres my ancestors. When I heard the poem a second time years later, it began to sing itself to me, and I am glad that I have been able to share what I heard with you. (from uua.org)
Postlude: Phase Dance – Metheny & Mays
“Phase Dance” was written and released in 1978 on the self-titled debut album of the Pat Metheny Group. It was composed by guitarist and bandleader Pat Metheny (b. 1954), co-written with his longtime collaborator, pianist and composer Lyle Mays (1953-2020). Metheny’s music incorporates many different styles, including contemporary jazz, Latin jazz, and fusion. Still active as a composer and performer, Metheny has released 11 studio albums as a solo artist and 14 others as the leader of the Pat Metheny Group and Pat Metheny Trio. Among many other accolades, Metheny has received 20 Grammy Awards to date, and is the only artist who can claim to have won a Grammy in ten different categories.
-Mike Carney, UUCC Music Director