I moved to Scotland this month. And in order to ease the transition I wrote 14 songs, including my first Anthem in about 10 years! Other people may have other coping mechanisms, scrolling, drinking…I write songs. Take a look and listen and tell me what you think!

I like to do “minorizations” of major fuges. As an exercise, as a way to understand fuges better, and, most importantly, to see if they’re any good to sing. I think this one pretty much works. I’ll be looking for a new text if you have any suggestions.

Also, I think it needs to be in a different key. Even though Montgomery is in C Major. C Minor feels a bit outrageous for this alto part. I re-wrote it in A which now feels a bit low. Maybe I need to re-write it in B. This is the downside of the paper-based lifestyle.

I was thinking about Montgomery in minor for a couple of weeks and singing the tenor part in my head. It seemed pretty good but I didn’t have time to actually try it until I landed in Edinburgh.

I have been on a multi-year quest to write some earnest Temperance hymns. A lot of the texts are really terrible. I contorted myself a lot to make this text say something I found interesting. I’m not sure it’s totally successful but the tune is tuneful.

I do a lot of recording early in the morning and in shared spaces. Leads to a lot of whisper-singing in these working recordings.

I must admit that I find Anthems a bit indulgent and I don’t often indulge.

I have a children’s book about this poem by Emma Lazarus called Emma’s Poem, written by Linda Glasser. Every couple of years I read it to my children and it invariably makes me weep. I don’t know if it has this happens to everyone, but it occurred to me, right around the end of July, that this made it a good text for a Sacred Harp tune.

There was a call made in 1883 to prominent poets of the day to contribute poems to raise money for the building of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. Before Emma’s poem there was no particular association between the Statue of Liberty and immigrants. But her poem “The New Colossus” created words spoken by the giant woman directly to the immigrants journeying to NY.

I think now it’s almost impossible to imagine it any other way.

I’ve moved to an island in the sea. And next to it is a bit of water called “The Sound”.

I was doing some Harp Of Ages singing with Clara Potter-Sweet and thinking about “I am a stranger here below”. So then I thought, what if I turned that song into a song in 3 beats. It then almost became Idumea again, but not quite, in a way I think is pretty interesting.

Faith personified as a woman as well as a light! Unseen worlds!

I wrote this arangment of “House of the Rising Sun” because I think it’s a perfect tune and the words seemed to fit. But I wrote another one in the spring. So I looked at them both side-by-side and wrote a third with what I thought were the best qualities of each song.

Is it the best of the bunch? Only time will tell.

The tunes almost always come from a text. So I had a text that had a very interesting call and response between the Watchman and the Traveler. I really like that structure as a premise. But then the things they were saying to each other we pretty anodyne and weren’t as potent as biblical passage the text comes from. So I found another text and I sort of knitted together the best bits of the second text with the structure of the first.

August 2025 Songs- Work In Progress Report