Jesus What A Wonderful Child - Piano

This is a fun little string trio which resulted from a grad seminar assignment. It applies techniques of minimalism, tintinnabuli, and pan-diatonicism, hence the name, Min Tin Pan Trio. It's not demanding of any of the players, yet offers a tantalizing musical palette that would make a wonderful addition to a recital or concert program.

Min Tin Pan Trio

A solo piano fantasy on motives from Felix Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Overture," better know as "Fingal's Cave."

Fingal's Fantasy - Live

David’s Kyrie is a mixture of ancient and modern. The text is taken from selected verses of Psalm 51 in which David makes his great confession and petition for mercy for his adultery with Bathsheba. As the first half of the psalm is much like the traditional Kyrie in the Christian mass, the form, melody, and title of the piece are all inspired by medieval chant. The form employs antiphonal discourse between cantor and choir in three stanzas. The cantor role, intoned in the tenor solos, uses a tune derived from the medieval Kyrie Cunctipotens Genitor (being, roughly, “Lord, all powerful father”) and is harmonized over a bass line liberally employing perfect fourths, fifths and octaves as would be found in medieval chant. The cantor is answered by choir using late Twentieth-Century styled chord clusters which resolve into a cadence on extended tertian chords. In the third stanza, the cantor is replaced by the chorus, typically building from a single voice into dense clusters shimmering between dissonance and consonance.

David’s Kyrie is a suited to the advanced high school or higher level choir for the concert stage, or would make a wonderful addition to the sacred repertoire of the adventurous church ensemble.

Davids Kyrie

It Is Not Death to Die is a new setting of French poet Henri Abraham César Malan's Non, ce n'est pas mourir as translated by George Washington Bethune and adapted for this work. Why this text? It first came to my notice shortly after the passing of Billy Graham, who was known to paraphrase D. L. Moody,    "Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more     alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God." Graham's bold proclamation and Malan's poetry motivated me to focus anew on the resurrection, re-remembering it as the pivotal element of the Christian faith.  For if there is no resurrection, Paul says in 1 Cor 15, our faith is useless. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead! Unfortunately, singing about heaven has, perhaps, been neglected of recent decades. We seem to have focused more on the "already" to the detriment of the "not yet." But it is important to remember that this life is not all there is! Quoting Paul again, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18). Yet, if Christ delays, the grim inevitability of our transition into eternity is a certain experience we all face. Malan's poetry so poignantly and eloquently captures this tension that it has compelled me to compose a fresh musical setting that attempts to captures the mixture of dread and hope borne out in the acclamation that “death is swallowed up in victory!” I pray that this setting aids the Church to remember the great hope and promise Christ has granted us:    “O Death, where is your victory?      O Death, where is your sting?”

WheatMyer Music