Music Notes – Sunday, December 11th:
This week’s musicians are The Chancel Choir and UUCC Music Director Mike Carney
Opening Hymn: #131 Love Will Guide Us – Rogers
Sally Rogers is an award-winning folk musician, songwriter, and children’s arts educator. 2019 marked Sally’s 40th year as a songwriter, performer, and educator, and she is still steaming ahead, warming hearts and minds wherever she goes. Her songs “Lovely Agnes” and “Touch of the Master’s Hand” have frequently been mistaken for traditional, while “Love Will Guide Us” and “Circle of the Sun” are now anthems for rituals of passage and protest (from sallyrogers.com). Rogers’ gospel-inspired “Love Will Guide Us” is #131 in our Singing the Living Tradition hymnal and is a favorite of many UUs.
Centering Music: Sowing the Seeds of Love – Orzabal & Smith
“Sowing the Seeds of Love” is a song co-written by a pair of British performers and songwriters, Roland Orzabal (b. 1961) and Curt Smith (b. 1961). Orzabal and Smith were childhood friends and classmates in Bath, England, and shared a love of music, which eventually grew into several shared projects, the most famous of which was the band Tears for Fears, which they formed in 1981. Tears for Fears was a staple of 1980s and 90s British New Wave/Progressive Rock, and produced numerous hit albums and singles, including “Mad World”, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, and “Shout”. Written and released in 1989, “Sowing the Seeds of Love” was the first and most successful single (reaching the top 10 in the U.S., U.K., and numerous other countries) from their third studio album, The Seeds of Love. “Sowing the Seeds of Love” was written in a Progressive Rock style, incorporating strings, oboe, and trumpet alongside more typical rock instruments, and utilizing backmasking and other special effects in a possible homage to the later albums of The Beatles. The song was somewhat controversial in the U.K., especially because of its thinly veiled criticism of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with the lyric “Politician granny with your high ideals – Have you no idea how the majority feels? – So without love and a promised land – We’re fools to the rules of a government plan.”
Offertory: We Walk in Love – Witkowski & Colon
“We Walk in Love” was written in 2017 by jazz pianist/composer Deanna Witkowski with lyrics from poet and author Lemuel Colon. The song was composed for The Justice Choir Songbook, an online resource that activists and musicians have been using for the last five years to support causes of racial, social, and environmental justice around the world. In the composer’s own words: “In early 2017, I responded to a call for scores for a new collection of social justice songs being curated by Abbie Betinis, Tesfa Wondemagegnhehu, and Ahmed Anzaldúa. The songs to be selected as part of a new movement called Justice Choir would be offered free of charge for anyone to sing for non-commercial use: at concerts, marches, protests, and in houses of worship…I immediately responded by sitting down at the piano. I wrote and harmonized a simple tune in 3/4- not rangy, no big jumps, something that everyone could sing. Next, I went to my living room couch with a large sketchbook on my lap. I started writing lists of nouns: ‘love, purpose, voice, compassion, truth, bridge, justice, kindness’. Then I pulled out the text to James Weldon Johnson’s hymn, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, and started adding more nouns: ‘hope, faith’…my boyfriend sat with me when I got stuck on a phrase or two and contributed to the lyric. We sang the three verses to each other multiple times before I returned to the piano and recorded myself singing and playing the song, ‘We Walk in Love’. I wrote out a lead sheet and emailed it along with the recording to Abbie. Soon I received a reply: ‘We love your harmony! Can you write a four-part SATB version?’ I scored the song for four parts and sent it back, hoping that it would be selected. ‘We Walk in Love’ made the cut and became one of 43 free-to-download songs in The Justice Choir Songbook. (from deannawitkowski.com)
Closing Hymn: #1014 Answering the Call of Love – 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). “Answering the Call of Love” (#1014) is one of many contributions Rev. Shelton has made to our Singing the Journey hymnbook.
Postlude: Hope Is Like the Wind – Schram
American choral composer Ruth Elaine Schram (b. 1956) wrote her first song at the age of twelve, and her first publication came twenty years later, in 1988. In 1992, she became a full-time composer and arranger and now has over 2,000 published works. Over seventeen million copies of her songs have been purchased to date. (from singers.com) “Hope Is Like the Wind” has a Northeast Ohio connection: the piece was commissioned in 2009 by a choir from Learwood School in Avon Lake, and the song’s text about hope and expectation was based upon texts submitted by Learwood students.
-Mike Carney, UUCC Music Director