This Little Light of Mine
Arranged by Howard Helvey
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 this section off there.
This Little Light of Mine
From the publisher’s page:
Howard Helvey offers us a new arrangement of this well-known spiritual that literally sparkles. Passing the melody between the voices, adding slight rhythmic variations in phrases, a brief foray into a newly-composed refrain and a jazz-based accompaniment all add up to pure enjoyment for your choir and congregation or audience.
I can’t really add to that. It was a lot of fun for the choir, and well-received by the congregation.
Behind the Scenes
This was the choir’s return after the end-of-year break, and we had just one rehearsal beforehand. Some had undoubtedly sung this one before, but there is only so much most of us can remember of something with such complex harmony and heavy syncopation. I don’t know about the other sections, but some of us altos had to improvise slightly in a place or two. Our harmony was not an easy read, especially the part with the C♭ and F♭ accidentals, if you know what I mean (if you don’t — never mind, some things are hard to explain).
This is the only choir I have belonged to, out of six altogether, that could do this after one rehearsal.
I would have posted this sooner, but I had new problems with the editing software that I have been using for several years. It crashed on me, and it eventually produced a humongous file containing only 2 1/2 minutes of music. I started over from the original download today, and was able to finish without crashing or file bloat. Whew!
Recorded at Christ Community Church, Carmichael, California, January12, 2025
Excerpted from this livestream.
