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American Composer Participant-Listener Musical Musings

CDs/Songs: for worship and devotion

Leah Taylor - Faithful Friend

• In Christ Alone, of Newsboys renown
• Beyond the Tears
• Falling Up

Darrell Evans - Trading My Sorrows: The Best of...

• Trading My Sorrows
• Your Love is Extravagant

From Latter-Day Saint Paul Cardall - Songs of Praise - with guests Steele Croswhite and Cheri Magill

• Grateful
• Agnus Dei
• Green Hill

Rich Mullins - The World As Best I remember It, volume 1, 1991

• Calling Out Your Name
• Step by Step

Mercy Me, Spoken For, 2002

• Word of God, Speak

Samuel Barber: Prayers of Kierkegaard

Randall Thompson: The Peaceable Kingdom - excerpts from 1, 2 and 3 Isaiah juxtaposed and intertwined in a glorious cantata-style sequence for a cappella SATB chorus; I love it all, but esp recommend...

• Say ye to the righteous
• The paper reeds by the brook
• Have ye not known? and
• Ye shall have a song

secular vernacular variety assortment

David Benoit - Urban Daydreams, 1989

• Wild Kids - originally for a Charlie Brown Peanuts Special, glory in the sound of Eric Marienthal's sax!
• When the Winter's Past (Song for a Stranger) - with Jennifer Warnes
• Sailing through the City

Jewel Kilcher - Spirit, 1998

• Absence of Fear
• Life Uncommon
• Down so Long
• Innocence Maintained

Tracy Chapman - New Beginning - with wonderful photographs from the UC Santa Cruz Greenhouses

• The Promise
• Give Me One Reason

concert-hall array collection

Samuel Barber: Knoxville, Summer of 1915, 1947 - text taken from a prose poem by James Agee written in 1935, now included as the prologue to Agee's novel, A Death in the Family. If you sing and want to learn the piece to perform it; here's the vocal score with a piano reduction of the orchestral parts.

Roy Harris - Symphony No. 3, 1938 - 18 minutes long, 1 movement in 5 sections: raw, angular and elegant

Christopher Rouse - Phaethon, 1986 - started as a mini-concerto for orchestra to narrate part of the Greek myth, and turned out to be in memory of the Challenger's 7 astronauts

music to play for worship

Mark Hayes: Lord, Be Glorified - Keepsake Edition

• Lamb of God - Twila Paris
• He Is Exalted - Twila Paris
• We Bow Down - Twila Paris
• I Will Call Upon the Lord
• You Are My All in All

Glory to His Name! Charity Book Putnam

• Glory to His Name/Holy Manna Medley
• On Jordan's Stormy Banks--Southern Harmony's "Promised Land"

Stephen Nielson At the Piano

• Fanfare
• O For a Thousand Tongues

music to play mostly outside of worship

For piano scores I've linked to Sheet Music Plus, with its huge selection and fast, cheap shipping, too

Lukas Foss - Fantasy Rondo, 1944: I played this one-movement piece with its ever-changing key signatures, time signatures, textures and dynamics as prelude to worship on one Trinity Sunday; together with Leon Fleisher, Foss was on the piano faculty the summer I spent at Tanglewood; Scott Dunn plays Lukas Foss' Complete Piano works

Vincent Persichetti - 3rd Piano Sonata, Opus 22, 1943: Declaration - Episode - Psalm - amazing! I also love to play Persichetti's relatively austere Organ Sonata, Opus 86, 1960

Paul Creston

• Prelude and Dance, Opus 29, #2
• Prelude and Dance, Opus 29, #1

--Creston wrote a zillion pieces called "Prelude and Dance" for almost every instrument and instrumentation imaginable

...and two more...

Because I won't get to do this very often, in Latin, written by a German
Ernst Pepping - Te deum (1956) for soprano and baritone solos, SATB choir, woodwinds, brass, timpani, drums and strings. I got an ancient Deutsche Grammaphon recording on vinyl on eBay and couldn't find a CD anywhere I looked, but here's a Te Deum details page

from KiwiLand--New Zealander Douglas Lilburn brings us elegance with Aotearoa Overture