Three Anthems!
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, It Is Well, and Joy In The Morning
I included the introductions for two of these pieces, the first and the last. We don’t normally have introductions, but this time we did.
The solo is rubato, while the choral backing is in strict tempo. Our director had to keep this straight in his head, and guide us with his hand.
A anthem arrangement of the hymn, with rubato solo.
We had a YouTube glitch during our third anthem, Joy in the Morning by Natalie Sleeth, that cut out the ending, skipping to the hymn that followed! I hesitate to post it like this but I really enjoyed this piece, putting a lot of time into learning the alto part, and here it is, minus the ending. Besides, I had already written the rest of this post and I didn’t want to have to redo it.
There is a full sample recording on the publisher’s page.
The sermon this week, God’s Heart for the Hurting, drawing from Matthew, John, Psalms, Isaiah, and Revelation, was the second in a series of three entitled The Heart of God. The service hymns, anthems, and instrumentals always align with the sermon topic, but this week we went a little further, as you can see from the anthem selection. It is unusual for us to sing more than one anthem, but the topic was unusual and we sang three, the first as the call to worship, the second in the regular anthem spot, and the third as the sermon response.
Doing things like this is part of the reason I belong to a church, church skeptic that I am. It's a family. I don't have to agree with or even like everything the family does, but being a childless only-child senior whose parents died more than four decades ago, I don't do well without one.
We’re not an especially large church, but we have both contemporary services with their band (meeting in a different building) and this traditional service with choir, orchestra, and bells. There is not much like it left in town. I'm in something like my 22nd choir season spanning six different churches. It is physically difficult now, but somehow still sustaining. What we do serves a purpose -- music can reach where mere words cannot, and that alone makes it worthwhile.
The anthems and other service music were chosen with this in mind. We did not know why we were doing Motherless Child until last week. We had been practicing it, but we didn’t learn which sermon it would go with until a few days before. Then we got the idea.
This being the last Sunday of the month, we had the bells and orchestra as well as the choir, and the remaining two anthems were chosen accordingly. This is not easy to do. In addition to the choir, orchestra, and bells there were two worship leaders, a piano accompanist, a 5-person tech team, and three pastors. And there were the rehearsals, the final one at 8:30 AM that morning.
This is the warmup. There’s lots more coming in March.
[Some of the author/publisher information didn’t make it into this post. I’ll see about editing it in at a later time. I didn’t want to delay it any longer.]
Recorded at Christ Community Church, Carmichael, California, February 25, 2024
Excerpted from this livestream.