Showing my work

I'm both a pianist and an organist, which means I've played a lot of Christmas Eve services. (Some years I played two services in one day, since the Disciples of Christ liked to get theirs done a couple hours earlier than the United Methodists.)

It also means that I've put a lot of time into composing Christmas Eve "special music." Much of what is currently on the market is dreadful, which is to say that it's both derivative and bland, and so I began writing my own arrangements to play at various churches because I figured that if I loved what I was doing, so would they.

And – because I do love what I'm doing – I'm going to share two compositions with you. The first is a medley I wrote in 2020, and the second is a medley I wrote this past month.

If you went back and looked at the opening number to MELISANDE, you'll notice that these two compositions are not precisely like my musical theater writing. They were written for a different purpose and a different audience (I mean, once we workshop MELISANDE some of the people at the Unitarian Church may attend the production, but that's not what I mean by audience in this context) and so they aim towards recognition rather than cognition.

The old familiar carols played wild and sweet, as it were.

Here's the one I wrote in 2020: