I was lucky, when I did my "time" (8 months) with the Christian
Scientists, they had a pretty complete library of music that I could
choose from. Still, after a while I got a little bored with kludged
arrangements of Handel (who, not being alive to write songs for the CS
Church, instead had his melodies "lifted" from other works, and new texts
shoehorned onto them - ditto Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and others),
and songs by the likes of Beardsley van der Water
(who?), so I started looking for alternatives. By this time, I realised
that the #1 priority of CS is the *text* - they didn't really care about
the music (as long as it was classical) - but the TEXT had to be approved.
So what I often did was to find a really good setting of the week's text
by a composer I actually liked - e.g., Vaughan Williams' setting of the
23rd Psalm (the "Bird's Song" from PILGRIM'S PROGRESS), some of the Dvorak
psalm settings (the CSers are big on the Psalms). In a few other cases, I
did my own settings - I'd realise that the text scanned almost perfectly
on a song or aria I already knew; as a result, I came up with a few very
nice settings of psalms (#19 was one of these, set on "Loveliest of Trees"
by George Butterworth) and other texts. And in some cases, I discovered
that the CS versions of texts varied only slightly from some of the more
familiar versions of texts in sacred songs I particularly liked, like
Gounod's "O Divine Redeemer" - so I did some minor textual rewriting to
conform with the CS version, and voila! Actually, because I find it
dreadfully difficult to learn music to songs that I avidly dislike, I
found it was a lot less work to manipulate a text and make it fit on music
I already knew than to learn a song I really didn't like. Fortunately, my
CS Church didn't seem to mind my doing this as long as I didn't extend the
practice to the Mary Baker Eddy songs; luckily, I was always able to find
at least one setting of those that wasn't totally gross - usually I
settled for one of those "shoehorned" Handel versions.
I remember one of the most satisfying weeks musically was when I was
supposed to sing "Come unto Him all ye that labour" from MESSIAH - that
was the musical selection I liked best of the 3-4 I had to choose from
that week. Well, I asked the woman in charge of musical selections whether
I could sing the first half of the piece - "He shall feed his flock". She
didn't know what I meant, at first. She had, in fact, never heard OF
Handel's MESSIAH, let alone heard it. So I wrote the text down for her and
she took it to the weekly meeting of the vestry (or whatever they call it
in CS churches), and they were absolutely delighted to discover such a
beautiful text that they never knew existed before (I guess it never came
up in one of their weekly "sermons") - so I got to sing the whole thing,
alto and soprano part - which was a real pleasure for me. That, in fact,
was the week when I think I won their confidence enough for them to wholly
trust my judgement in choosing music that wasn't in their collection, as
long as the texts were the same.
I stopped working for the CSers because the church was 45 miles from my
house, and I didn't relish the idea of the roundtrip commute during the
winter months. But were I to take a regular church job again, I'd try to
find another CS church that allowed me similar leeway in picking my own
music - as long as I was scrupulous about using acceptable texts.
-----
Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt,
Der in den Zweigen wohnet;
Das Lied, das aus der Kehle dringt,
Ist Lohn, der reichlich lohnet.
-- J.W. von Goethe, WILHELM MEISTER
My NEIL SHICOFF Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/shicoff/shicoff.html
My Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
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