​A little over a decade ago, I composed a set of pieces for a collaboration with Dr. Benjamin Sung's violin studio while I was a graduate student at Florida State University. The idea was to introduce some things that violinists would encounter in 20th and 21st century music gradually rather than all at once. Unfortunately, that collaboration between the composition studio and violin studio did not actually come together, and I had the start of three pieces.

Two years later, I finished these pieces and they premiered at the Cortona Sessions for New Music. ​There were three pieces, each highlighting different components of modern violin writing, and thus I titled it Trivium, with its comparison to the three main aspects in classical education of expressing thought.

Later on, when Trivium was performed in 2023 at the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers conference, many people noted how much of the essence of the Trinity was there:

• "Incantation" is focused on the way a note speaks and its timbre (the Word -- Jesus),
• "Nocturne" is focused on the fundamental framework of intervals that are important (God), and
• "Rhapsody" is focused on moving through technique challenges (the Spirit).

A big thanks to Harmony Tucker for playing "Incantation" this week. While you are listening to this piece, I suggest you focus on how God speaks through each note and how timbre changes even while the note is the same. How does it relate to how God speaks to and through us now, individually and as a church? 

Sylvia G. Dunstan was an incredible pastor and prison chaplain who gave us a treasury of deep and meaningful hymn texts that continue to teach decades later, though her  life was tragically cut short by cancer at the age of 38. As we sing her hymn "Crashing Waters at Creation," focus on the power of those words as we sing them. Take those words with you. Revive the practice of speaking the words of the hymns we sing. Unpack the wealth of understanding of how God has worked and still is at work through water in each verse. The quote that follows is not from this hymn, but what I find to be the most powerful verse of her most powerful hymn text, "In All Our Grief": 

Marshall

This week's postlude is an arrangement is by a composer I really think should be more well-known than he is. Adolphus Hailstork's music leaps outside of every box we might want to contain him in. His work for band "American Guernica" really illustrates this and should force us all out of our comfort zone when hearing this work composed in remembrance of the young lives lost racially motivated killings at a Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. Watch here.

As part of the sermon, I will be performing an excerpt of Mark Applebaum's work "Tlon" which was written after witnessing an argument in sign language in relation to what Rev. Kimberly will be talking about in relation to the loss of language in relating the Tower of Babel and Pentecost. 

Mark Applebaum is another composer who takes us outside of the boxes we tend to want to contain music within or even the boxes of certain roles we want to put the composer of music in. His Ted talk is well worth watching and will certainly expand your ideas of what the many roles a composer will take on. Watch here. 

How might God be calling us to rethink our assumptions about music? How might God be calling us to rethink our assumptions about people? How might the explorations of music beyond the boxes we want to put music in help us to grow into who God is calling us to be?

Marshall

Gerhard Cartford's translation of this Brazilian folk song gives us such a glimpse of what has gone wrong with the church of the late 20th and 21st centuries in this country. We don't sing to please an audience, we sing because God has called us (11 times in scripture) to sing a new song. We sing because God has done wonders. We dance because God gave us the Spirit. We (singers, instrumentalists, etc.) offering our musical gifts in a service are not there to perform for an audience. We offer our gifts back to God in the hopes that God speaks through them. We live in a consumerist entertainment culture that has put this idea in our heads and it is evident in the way we respond to musical gifts offered. It is there in the way we complain when we don't like what was sung, or that something we really like isn't being sung. 

I don't think it's an accident that God calls us so many times to sing a new song. A new song is not comfortable. It may not be in a style we like. But what it always does is help us grow. It sheds new light on something about God, about ourselves, or about the world around us, and how we are called to interact with our neighbors. But what should never, ever be its purpose is to entertain us. How much more would we grow if we stop expecting to be entertained by worship, but rather expect to be changed?

Sing to the Lord a new song... not because it makes you feel good, but because God has done wonders. Dance for our God... even when you may not feel like it, because God gave us the Spirit. 

Marshall