A
Son's Welcome, for mixed choir
| Soprano | Alto | Tenor | Bass |
| Erin Wegner | Jennifer Schroeder | Jason Martinoff | Craig Sparks |
| Christina Trahan | Teri Bowser | Mike Furniere | Allen Kessel |
| Alex Abele, conductor | Larissa Karp, piano | ||
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| As the name implies, I wrote this piece for my son.
I had been planning to write a choral work this past fall, and started
an exhaustive search for texts. I later found one I liked, and started
the process to get permission to use it. In the mean time, my wife
and I were planning our son's baptism. While looking for readings
on the internet, my wife found this one, an Omaha prayer to welcome newborns
into the tribe. I liked this one a lot better than the first one.
The prayer asks that the child's a soul's journey through life be smooth, using the metaphor of the four hills representing four stages of life: infancy, childhood, adulthood and old age. The text ends with the child, now an old man going beyond the four hills, into the afterlife. The setting is largely quartal. The texture gets increasingly more complex as each successive hill is reached. This is an unusual composition for me because I did not write from a theoretical angle as I usually do, I just sat down and let the text, and my intuition dictate the notes. |
| Sun, Moon, Stars, all you that move
in the heavens, hear us!
Into your midst has come a new life. Make his path smooth that he may reach the brow of the first hill! Winds, Clouds, Rain, Mist, all you that move in the air,
hear us!
Hills, Valleys, Rivers, Lakes, Trees, Grasses, all you
of the earth, hear us!
Birds, great and small, that fly in the air, Animals,
great and small that dwell in the forest, Insects that creep among the
grasses and burrow in the ground, hear us!
All you of the heavens, all you of the air, all you of
the earth, hear us!
-Omaha Indian
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pdf Download a .pdf file of the score (image quality suffers from pdf translation)