I think Greg Wilbur is one of the best living composers of music for worship. That he happens also to be the Chief Musician at Parish Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee means I have the privilege of hearing his music each week. (You know his music is really wonderful when your 7-year-old daughter sings it to herself when she’s coloring.) Greg recently teamed up with Ligonier Ministries to create a new CD of his songs called My Cry Ascends. Last week, Parish Pres came together to sing a number of those songs, many of which have been sung by the church for years. I am quite sure Greg’s music brings great pleasure to the Lord, who, like 7-year-olds, takes special delight in wonderful songs. If you have a minute, go to Ligonier’s site and sample some of his music for yourself. [If you'd like to watch the video in HD, just click the button in the upper right corner.]
Classical music is one of the perfect sources of music for film. There is a limitless supply. It is in the public domain so you can record it and own it outright. And, most importantly, it’s just great music. Even though I’ve been listening to it for over two decades, I am always finding some new composer to explore. Recently, I started digging deeper into the works of Franz Joseph Haydn, one of the three great Viennese classical composers (along with Mozart and Beethoven) from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His music is a pure delight to listen to; imagine every happy and beautiful emotion you can, and that’s Haydn. [click to continue…]
The birth of our Lord has inspired countless works of art, but this one is unique: a 16th-century painting of the sleeping Jesus by Francesco Albani inspired a 19th-century poem by Eduard Mörike which in turn inspired a 19th-century song by Hugo Wolf which was sung by the 20th-century soprano Kathleen Battle: Schlafendes Jesuskind (or, the Sleeping Christ-child). You can listen to it here for free (press the purple play next to the title, then the yellow player at the bottom) or buy it on iTunes (it’s the second song on the album). Although German Lieder is normally sung with just piano and voice, here it is transcribed for orchestra. It is marvelous, wonderful, and majestic – but to appreciate it fully you must listen to and understand the words. I’ve included the original poem and translation: [click to continue…]
I recently purchased the Paavo Berglund edition of all of Jean Sibelius’ symphonies and tone poems. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the symphonies and they are really magnificent. Sibelius wrote at the early part of the 20th-century, but eschewed a lot of the new musical trends going on in the rest of Europe (he was Finnish). Rather, his music has beautiful, sweeping and magnificent structures to it that are at times heroic, at times hymnnic, at times hushed.
It is the structure of his symphonies that intrigues me. I located a book by Lionel Pike entitled Beethoven, Sibelius, and the ‘Profound Logic’ that explores the internal, sometimes subliminal, structures inside his symphonies that make them unified and whole to the listener. (Apparently Sibelius was having a discussion with Gustav Mahler about the symphonic form and mentioned he liked it because of its ‘profound logic.’) The book explores the musicological structures in Beethoven’s music as a basis for the symphonic form, then uses that as a way to look into Sibelius’ symphonic works.
Classical music is one of the perfect sources of music for film. There is a limitless supply. It is in the public domain so you can record it and own it outright. And, most importantly, it’s just great music. Even though I’ve been listening to it for over two decades, I am always finding some new composer to explore. Recently, I started digging deeper into the works of 
