More Lowry

I like the words of Robert Lowry. Not always his music - sometimes, but not always - but his words are often very useful. When I was, many years ago, looking for interesting hymn texts, I came across this little number: We are Pilgrims of a Day. I wrote an anthem on that text, as yet unused, but that's not what I'm offering up today.

No, today is a straightforward, ready-for-Sunday hymn setting. Well, except for the meter shifting on you every which way.

The basic meter I chose was a seven-beat pattern, which I felt fit the words reasonably well, as such:
We--- are pil-grims of a | day ...
Trav---eling on our cheer-ful | way ...

and also in the refrain:

We | jour-ney. hand in hand, (rest)
to | Can-aan's hap-py land; (rest)
O | come ye friends and neigh-bours ...

And all of that was a lovely idea, but there are these repeated interjections of "homeward bound, homeward bound" in the first verse and similar moments in the other verses. The actual hymn meter is 7, 6, 7, 5 (numbers which may mean nothing to you if you're not a church musician - that's the number of syllables per line) and an eight line refrain with a 5, 6, 5, 5 / 6, 6, 7, 6 pattern. Seeing poetry of that rhythmic nature, I am unsurprised to find that Robert Lowry's words tend to go with Robert Lowry's music and with that of few others!

So with little more ado, my second Robert Lowry hymn setting. I'm taking all bets as to how long until I set "How Can I Keep from Singing." (incidentally, I have made an SAT arrangement of that particular tune...)

Click for PDF download

The text is of course by Robert Lowry; as for the music...

We are Pilgrims of a Day by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

First post, and first offering

So, I've decided to make my music available online. And also, to write a blog. Go me. We'll try and keep posting regularly, although "regularly" right now - just before a week of organ tuning, just before Christmas - is probably not often.

Anyway. The first piece of music I want to present to the world is this four-part hymn I set five years ago as part of my hymn project. My 2009 hymn project was an effort to improve my compositional skills by following a quote of Robert Schumann's, where he opines that the German parliament should pass a law forbidding composers to publish any work before they published an edition of good four-part chorales - that in so doing we might have better sonatas. And so, I wrote sixty hymn tunes. This isn't one of those sixty; instead, through my research I came in to contact with the writings of Robert Lowry and decided to set this hymn to some new (and hopefully interesting) music. But it's reasonably concurrent with the sixty.

And do please let me know if you use it!

(if anyone would like a PDF file, just let me know)

Mike

Chorus of Fire (music) by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Text by Robert Lowry, and is in the public domain