The Narrow Way
By K. Lee Scott
What’s this?
It’s a section of this Substack containing videos of my choir’s anthems, along with my comments. A longer description can be found on the About page. If you subscribe to this Substack but don’t wish to receive notifications for this section, select Manage Subscription from the upper-right menu and turn it off there.
Because nearly all of my posts in recent months have been in this section, I have added it back into the main post listing, but you can still turn off notifications for this section if you wish.
The Narrow Way
This brief little anthem has so much to say. In the lyrics, it captures what we are here to do.
Publisher's page - “A lyrical setting of an 18th century prayer.”
Behind the Scenes
I haven’t posted here in the anthems section in a while because of ongoing technical problems, not to mention much of the choir being out sick the past two Sundays. The anthem two weeks ago had livestream audio issues that made me reluctant to use it, as I recall. All I remember clearly is that we had only two altos (I was one), plus two more that we ‘borrowed’ from bells and orchestra just for the anthem, that had almost no time to learn the music, which was not easy to learn. I searched for a musical term to describe what the alto part was doing and came up with “parallel polyphony”. That sounds about right.
I would normally have been running screens that week, but under the cirumstances I swapped with someone else on that team and I will be running screens this following week. I will still post the anthem, if the recording quality is good.
Last week’s audio was worse — there was no audio! The tech team managed to align the video with a local recording (or something — I didn’t ask). They uploaded it as a regular video, deleting the silent livestream, and that turned out well except for the anthem, where the choir mics didn’t sound like they were on for much of the piece. The anthem’s ending was good, though. At least we had four regular, rehearsed altos, even if our part couldn’t be heard.
I was very pleased with the audio quality this week. And by the way, if anyone new here wonders where I am, it’s top row, one seat left of center. The tall, strange-looking one that has trouble standing up, seeing the music, and holding the music folder. But I like to sing, and FYI I’m not the only tall alto.
And one more thing, if you ever wonder why I cut these excerpts the way I do, it is because the services run on a tight schedule, and the scenes are so close together that they overlap slightly. I limit the video shown here to just what belongs with the choir anthem.
Recorded at Christ Community Church, Carmichael, California, March 16, 2025
Excerpted from this livestream.
