New Music

Who knew writing a piece of music could be this intensive. I have writen many peices before, but this one I'm writing now is amazingly complex.

A while back, Fr. Attila and I sat down and discussed what we could do to make liturgy and prayer more interesting for our school kids. One of those ideas was to use one of the Eucharistic Prayers for children. We decided I was going to write a new musical setting for that prayer and teach it to everyone involved - musicians, choir, ALL the school kids, and Fr. Attila (who has no small part in this).

I sat down months ago to begin. Once I had all the chord progressions down with the melody and ALL the words, I sent it off to a man in the parish who does some arranging for us. I got the second draft of the arrangement back this weekend, and it is really looking neat. I am so excited, yet kinda worn out by this process. Going through and evaluating a peice of music is hard. I have so much respect for people who do this for a living.

Through the whole thing, though, I am very hopeful that the end result will be fantastic and help the kids to give praise even more energetically. I think this is why I am still excited about my job, too. I need a creative outlet and I have plenty of opportunity for that. I feel like I'm being led by a very creative spirit most of the time. When I'm not, it gets very heavy.

I look forward to more and more of these experiences.