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Our Father, Vindicate (Unfinished)

  • audio
  • faith and theology
  • writing workshop
By michael lee ⋅ August 5, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

The results of today’s little discovery! I’ve spent most of the summer writing a new composition for men’s acapella ensemble. It’s part of a campus wide series of scholarly presentations on the transmission of The Lord’s Prayer into English. Some people are presenting papers, the art department is presenting two shows (one juried, one curated), and the school of music commissioned new works by a handful of composers, to be performed during the school year.

This is about 50% of the piece I’ve been writing. The focus of both the text and the music is on The Lord’s Prayer as an apocalyptic prayer, a call for the immanent arrival of the Kingdom of God. I wanted to capture an epic film kind of sound with the piece, to match that idea.

My throat feels like it’s going to fall off. I’ve got some kind of swollen gland or something back there, and I can barely swallow. Spending 6 hours tracking extreme-range vocal parts probably wasn’t the best way to soothe that …

Enjoy! I’ll post more as I get a chance to complete it.

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Discussion

17 comments for “Our Father, Vindicate (Unfinished)”

  1. Phil keeps telling me that this piece is basically unsingable. Well, take that, Phil! I just sang it.

  2. I was wondering how you were able to book Take 6 for this gig.

  3. Wow - so, autotune went a little nuts in between me listening back, and the final bounce. Some of those notes definitely shouldn’t be drifting like that. I’ll try to upload a better version tomorrow.

  4. It actually reminds a little more of Glad’s A capella projects than Take 6… though, your harmony is far cooler than Glad ever got. Great stuff. You are going to need a very good choir or vocal jazz group to pull it off.

  5. If only there were a school with literally hundreds of awesome choral singers wandering around, looking for a challenge, and an entire choral faculty basically stolen from USC.

    Hmmm. Where, oh where, can we find such a place?

  6. Stick, I was thinking the exact same thing! The tone and texture are much like Glad (you know, that weird tonal thing that happens when you double your own voice so many times). But also, as you said, definitely some more interesting harmonies.

    Maybe I should finish my MC arrangement, now that I think about it…

  7. I love the harmonies, but it does seem really hard to sing - but I’m not a singer.

    Sidenote - I used the Kyrie Yeshua loop for Logic Project 1 last year, and I just realized that was you singing it after listening to this. I always wondered where that loop was from…

  8. Scott… finish it. You should finish it. :)

  9. Oooh that’s a hip suspension resolution at 1:10.

  10. Thanks. You can check the ink on it here:

  11. top two staves are written in 8va treble clef, by the way. Just for you super sight readers who just threw a fit. Everything else in bass clef.

  12. That’s phat.

    I want to SEE IT ALL!!
    Later, maybe??

  13. Oh yeah Mikey… don’t be such a tease. Show us the whole thing. Ooooh yeah, gimme more of those minor 11 chords….

    YES! YES! YES!

  14. Y’all are dirty.

  15. I just really, really like minor 11 chords.

  16. I like it. It’s nice to hear it now, instead of Mike trying to explain to me what he’s writing. :) Looking forward to the other half.

  17. [...] is identical to the previous demo, up to the 2:00 mark. After that, a whole new section completed today, a Kyrie plopped right in the [...]

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