Composition Lab 1: From Simple Scale to Working Warmup for a Children's Gospel Choir

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As much as I have needed to take refuge in the classical side of my musical life, and specifically the deep, dark voice of Kurt Möll and also a few of his sweet-voiced bass colleagues in the pain of this last few weeks, I also have had to maintain my responsibilities toward the community and younger musicians I serve. One might say that I did have to take the lesson from last week and get onto applying it -- by the weekend! Move on and compose on the fly!

Two years is a long time to not be singing even an adapted version of the "Hallelujah" chorus ... keeping the voice up through two years of no choir was a challenge for me (complete with a bout with Covid-19), so I could hardly expect children, dealing with all the other changes that came with the lockdown, to keep that up. It's my job to get everyone working with me back up to snuff -- so, given that we have been scheduled by our church to reprise our holiday performances at long last, I have 2.5 months to help everyone to get their vocal strength, vowels, and stamina back up.

I do love classical music, but my wheelhouse of work is the music of my African American ancestors, and I mix jazz and gospel on the regular in my daily and weekly work while still thinking like a classical composer because that is the approach that I studied in terms of how to build pieces up. The end goal here was to have a working warmup that could be performed as well as used at every rehearsal ... so, a simple scale became a walking bass with key changes and jazz chords to make for an interesting musical texture... simple words to get all those vowel sounds back in place -- "O Hallelujah! O, thank You, Lord!" -- up and down an octave and back again.

The first performance of it at my church this last Sunday went well -- like I said, I had to get it together by last Sunday -- but, no videographer! I'll work on that for Christmas so you all can see this fully realized, but for today, enjoy the building of the instrumental side of this piece of music, and the story of how I built it all out!

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