Music Notes 4-5-26

Easter is here! A time for joyous celebration. As the genie in the Bugs Bunny cartoon said, “Let

the bells ring and the banners fly!” Our wonderful sanctuary was designed for live music, and

we take full advantage of the fabulous acoustics on Easter morning. In addition to our fabulous

band, we welcome back our 6 incredible brass players. Over a dozen world-class musicians

gathered together to elevate our worship experience, not to mention our marvelous choir and the

guests joining the choir just for this service….we are truly blessed. The year we feature some

familiar favorites, like the Olympic Fanfare as our overture and a gang sing of the Hallelujah

Chorus at the end. We also will be presenting 2 new pieces for the anthem and offertory. The

anthem is unique, in that it was written in 5/4, like Take Five (or the Mission Impossible Theme).

The offertory, on the other hand is party music – straight ahead Jerry Lee Lewis rock and roll.

Craig Courtney is one of the dominant forces in the world of church anthems. He is currently the

Executive Music Editor for Beckenhorst Press in Columbus, Ohio, and was the protégé of the

founder, the legendary John Ness Beck. What his resume doesn’t tell you is how he started

composing (I got this information one day over coffee with him). He was a staff piano teacher at

the famous Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Sitting in his cubicle, day after day, waiting for

piano students to arrive (or not), he began to improvise and noodle. This brought about his first

big publication, Thy Will Be Done (which we happen to have in our library and have done before

during Lent). He sent that to John Ness Beck, founder of Beckenhorst Music Publications, and

the rest is history. Our anthem this week is The Tomb Stands Open Wide, a powerful, dynamic

piece in 5/4 (like Mission Impossible), guaranteed to make your hair stand on end. The 1980s

were stellar years for his musical output. He was new and fresh and innovative, looking to make

a name for himself, devising ways to make anthems easily accessible to smaller groups, yet still

impressive and powerful. Pieces like Coronation, One Faith, One Hope, One Lord and The

Tomb Stands Open Wide established him as the next composer to watch for.

Rick Muchow was Director of Music Ministries at Saddleback Community Church in Irvine

from 1987 to 2012. By the time he left, he was supervising over 1000 volunteers in the church

and its 6 campuses. He Arose, a straight ahead rock and roll tune, was written in 1992, and is the

perfect Easter celebration/party/dance song.

This Easter morning, the choral Call To Worship is a short, rousing piece called Sing Praise To

Him, Our Lord. It was written by James Christensen, who was the head of the music department

at Disneyland for many years. He wrote it in 1977 to be the opener for the Disneyland/Disney

World Candlelight Event, which, if you’ve never experienced it, is quite the experience. A 1000

voice choir, assembled from auditioned choirs from around Southern California (or Florida),

processes from the Small World ride at the back of the park to the train station holding electronic

candles and singing along to Christmas carols, played by brass and pipe organ, and coming

through the park’s speaker system. They file onto a set of risers behind a large orchestra and

present a program consisting of a dozen pieces of music with a celebrity narrator presenting a

reading that precedes each piece. I was introduced to Sing Praise To Him because I sang with

the Dickens Carolers at Disneyland for Christmas of 1983, and we participated in the Candlelight

as one of the featured artists. Mickey’s Christmas Carol had debuted that year, and we sang the

big tune from that movie – Oh, What A Merry Christmas Day – with the orchestra as the warmup

act (our celebrity narrator was actor Darren McGavin). I loved Sing Praise To Him and kept my

copy of it in my library for future use. The publication has been, sadly, discontinued, but that

won’t stop us from singing it this year. It’s a stirring piece that is reminiscent of the music

preceding the chariot race in the movie Ben-Hur and is a great way to start the Easter celebration.

Also Sprach Zarasthustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) is an orchestral tone poem by German

composer Richard Strauss, composed in 1896 when he was 32 years old. It was inspired by the

philosophical novel of the same name by Friedrich Nietzsche. The opening fanfare, which he

titled “Sunrise” in his program notes, became wildly famous when it was used extensively in the

1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001, A Space Odyssey. By the time of the 2 nd World War, Richard

Strauss was the most famous composer in the world. He had written orchestral works and operas

that had put him on the very short list of composers who were absolute masters of both melody

and orchestration. To this day, his opera Der Rosenkavalier (“The Knight of the Rose”) is

considered to be one of the very best in history, and the closing trio, even if you don’t

particularly like opera or understand the German language, is considered to be the closest thing

to musical ecstasy ever written. Listen to it on YouTube sometime – turn up the volume, because

with the specified 125 piece orchestra, it will blow your mind. Wanting to take advantage of his

fame, the Nazis appointed him, without his consent, to the position of music master of the Third

Reich. He took advantage of his position to save a number of Jews from prosecution (including

his daughter-in-law), then packed up his family and escaped to Austria, where he hid for the

remainder of the war. Ironically, the first Allied soldier to find him and tell him the war was over

was an oboe player from the New York Philharmonic, who recognized him and immediately

asked him to write something for oboe (he agreed).