Albums 20: To You Who Bow (2017, GIA)

Finally. I'm so happy and proud to be able to introduce to you the latest recording from the Cooney-Daigle-Donohoo trio, To You Who Bow, released by GIA today at the 2017 NPM Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio.

We have been working a long time on this recording. I suppose I've told part of the story before when introducing Like No God We Had Imagined in 2015. We had recorded about half a dozen of these songs with the new songs on Like No God, thinking that it was an album. But when we stopped and listened to the results, it was difficult to imagine that anyone would want to listen to a recording with half Christmas songs and half regular "Sunday" songs at any time of the year, no matter who recorded them and no matter what the concept was. So we opted to take the Christmas songs we had recorded and take some "legacy" seasonal music from Safety Harbor, Stony Landscapes, Today, and Terry's wonderful 1998 recording On Christmas Day in the Morning, and create Like No God which was released two summers ago for NPM.

The title song from this recording, "To You Who Bow," was premiered at NPM in 2014 and was very well received, and was chosen to be included in the new edition of RitualSong which is being released this summer at the music conventions, including NPM. We had been negotiating with GIA since late 2013 on getting some new songs published, and after a long series of emails and meetings, by February 2014 we had letters of intent for about a dozen songs, including the new Christmas arrangements that were to appear later as Like No God, to be recorded. By November, the songs from the original agreements had been recorded, and I had already begun to express misgivings about releasing them together. In April of 2015, Michael Silhavy met with us, and we decided to go ahead an release the album of new Christmas music mixed with some legacy music, and explore recording some more songs to make a truly new collection of songs for liturgy.


After a meeting about content shortly after Christmas, in February of 2016, Michael thought that "If You Had Faith/Si Tuvieras Fe, a translation and SAB arrangement I had done of the Spanish folk song sometimes called Montaña, would fill a gap that GIA had in their NPM lineup for that year, and he asked us to go ahead and record that song right away so that a version could be ready in the summertime. At this time, we knew that we were going to include two songs from a 2013 compilation album called Gathered for God, those songs being Gary's lovely James Tayloresque version of Psalm 23 "The Lord Is My Shepherd," and my song "God Is Love," which ties together the statement about God in 1 John 4:16 with St. Paul's paean to agápe in 1 Cor. 13. We had recorded "Turn Around," "Gathered and Sent," "Send Out, Send Out," "Acts of God," and "To You Who Bow" with the Christmas music back in 2013-14. We decided to record seven more songs to make the new album complete.

For the tracking, we called in some of our friends from the olden days, notably Beth Lederman and
Matt McKenzie, along with Randy Carpenter, a childhood neighbor and lifelong friend of Gary's with whom he'd grown up playing in bands and making music. Beth and Matt both played with Gary in one incarnation of his ensemble while working at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, AZ. Beth is an amazingly talented jazz musician who is one of the busiest working women in the Phoenix area, with a great sensitivity to many Latin rhythms as well, so she is in great demand. Matt moved to Nashville back in the 90s, and has worked with Lyle Lovett, Don Williams, Patty Loveless, and most recently has toured with Olivia Newton-John's band. This incredible trio of musicians did the rhythm tracks for those last seven songs in less than three days in the spring of 2016.

Matt McKenzie

With the rhythm tracking done, Gary turned to a group of singers gathered by Paul Rausch, a McHenry choral director who had built a great program at McHenry High School over the years, and who had a group of alumni who were always ready to work with him again. Terry and I were constantly impressed and amazed at the way this group worked together, how whenever they felt out of synch on a vowel sound or an articulation they would confer on one member or another and come up with a solution in seconds. Four of Paul's sons, also alumni, also sang in this ensemble. An impressive group.

Over the next few weeks, Gary took the opportunity to add instrumental overdubs to the tracks. Over the years since writing the songs, most of them had acquired small orchestral scores; some, in fact, had been commissioned for small church orchestras. To achieve a consistent sound on the recording, Gary tends to seriously adapt parts I've written, substituting much smaller groupings of instruments for what I wrote, and the results, I have learned, are invariably better. In this case, we also got the help of local saxophonist and arranger Jim Gailloreto to write pop horn arrangements for "Si Tuvieras Fe," "Jesus Christ the Cornerstone," "Eyes on the Prize," and "Mary, Don't You Weep," and his parts are both playable for most players we tend to use in our churches and wonderfully adapted to the style and feel of the songs themselves. By the end of September, 2016, the recordings were pretty much in their final form. In November, Gary was able to deliver the mastered CD to GIA.

Terry doing her thing

It was a wonderful surprise that John Flaherty asked to use "O Agápe" at the 2017 LA Religious Education Congress in March of this year. John is one of the folks I like to bounce new material off of, and he remembered this one when he was in planning sessions for the Congress liturgies, and used it for a call to worship. Unfortunately, we were not able to have an octavo ready in time for the conference, but at least the song got some unexpected exposure on the left coast!

This is the list of tracks in play order:

Acts of God 

To You Who Bow

Gathered and Sent 

God Is Love
Eyes on the Prize (Hold On) (African American Spiritual, text adapted RC, arr. RC)

Jesus Christ the Cornerstone

Psalm 18: I Love You (ICEL text)

Psalm 29: The Temple and the Storm
Psalm 23  (ICEL text, music by Gary Daigle)

Turn Around 

Psalm 13: How Long
O Agápe
Psalm 104: Send Out, Send Out (ICEL text)
If You Had Faith/Si Tuvieras Fe (Latin American folk, arr. Rory Cooney, English text by Rory Cooney)

Mary, Don’t You Weep (African American Spiritual, text adapted RC, arr. RC)

Matt and Beth working it out

The “beating heart” of this collection is that Jesus is the “face of God’s mercy,” or as the gospel puts it, “whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” If Jesus is one who puts aside glory to be a person of service, healing, and reconciliation, that is also what God looks like, and the Holy Spirit who is the life of God enables us to live that life in God in this world in a community of mutuality. There are other gods that want our allegiance, most of whom are idols devised by us ourselves, and propagated by us when we decide that we have a better idea about civilization than the Sermon on the Mount. There are gods of war, gods of violence and threats, gods of money and influence. But we cannot serve two masters. The gospel invites us to listen to the voice that calls us with unswerving love in our creation and baptism, and to follow the way of Jesus to a world formed by loving service. The songs in this collection, in one way or another, orbit around that axis. Thus the title song, “To You Who Bow,” honors the God who “did not cling to godliness, but took the form of a slave,” showing us the slow, peaceful way to transforming the earth.

Two of the songs, "Acts of God" and "Gathered and Sent" were commissioned by Old St. Patrick's Church in Chicago for various events, thanks to the generosity of the parish and Bill Fraher, the music director at the time, who continues to direct their special events choirs after passing the liturgical baton to Dominic Trumfio, Jennifer Budziak, and Mark Scozzafave since that time. That parish's great tradition of energetic sung worship and supporting the arts in general continues to be a model for Chicagoland parishes.

Turn Around was commissioned for a parish formation program in Catholic social teaching designed by Jack Jezreel and the folks at JustFaith. The title, “Turn Around,” is a literal translation of the word metanoia, which is often rendered as “conversion” or “repentance.” What the word suggests is a literal turning and going in a different direction, starting from within the heart and mind of a person, then directing one’s actions in the world. It is a call to action that echoes the gospel call to “Repent (i.e., turn around) and believe the good news.” I think it might help congregations refresh and sense anew what conversion really is, hear the call again evangelically, and make a change toward the gospel.

God Is Love - Came from an idea that love is one, though it manifests itself in different ways. In the Greek of 1 John 4:16 and 1 Cor. 13 the word for “love” used by the authors of those letters is agápe, the highest of the four (or five, or six) kinds of love expressed by different words in Greek. So it made sense to me that, as St. Paul writes in Corinthians, if “love is patient, love is kind,” then we ought to be able to say that not only is the human person (especially the Christian) who loves is patient and kind, but also Christ, and also the God of whom Christ is the “living face.” In this song, with 1 Jn 14:16 for the refrain and 1 Cor. 13 for the verses, those concepts get blended in the choral third verse, in which the choir’s “God is love” refrain dovetails with the litany from Corinthians in such a way that the word “love” serves both as the end of one phrase and the beginning of another. 

Two songs in this collection, Eyes on the Prize (Hold On) and Mary, Don’t You Weep have been recorded by dozens, if not hundreds, of artists through the years, expanded and interpreted in the spiritual and folk traditions by artists as diverse as Pete Seeger, Odetta, Bruce Springsteen, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples, and Aaron Neville. As for me, I wondered as I listened to various versions which “Mary” was being referred to in the song, and I think it means Mary Magdalene. But maybe it was Mary the sister of Lazarus, I don’t know. So rather than try to pull it one way or the other, I wrote three different lyrics for different events: one for Mary, Lazarus’s sister, for the 5th Sunday in Lent, one for Magdalene, for Easter Vigil and the Easter season, and another one for all the Marys and the last Sundays of the year. As for Eyes on the Prize (Hold On), in this world, these times, we just need that song all the time.

Please give To You Who Bow a listen! I know that there are songs here that your congregation and will enjoy singing, and can become a part of your repertoire. And I'm prejudiced, of course, but I believe that To You Who Bow is our best "listening" experience since Vision. Gary has done a great job with this recording, and the nearly fifty singers and other musicians who took part in its creation have done a wonderful job.

A special word of thanks, too, to Alec Harris and Michael Silhavy at GIA who stood with us during this project, and to the amazing Andrew Schultz who designed the cover and all the enclosures and design work. We're very proud of our work with GIA over the twenty-eight years we've been working with them, and grateful for the support and trust we've received over the years from everyone there. Thank you.

Albums 18: Today (GIA, 2007)

Somehow, in all the excitement of getting our new collection, Like No God We Had Imagined, launched, I didn't realize that I never got around to publishing an "Albums" post about our previous CD, entitled Today. We had finished the 2005 recording of Christ the Icon, but still had a number of songs that we wanted to share. GIA had already published "Heart of a Shepherd" after I had made an inquiry about arranging the Gelineau Psalm 23 for the verses. As I explained in my SongStories blogpost on that song, this conversation began just at the time that Pope John Paul II was dying, and GIA liked "Heart" and wanted to make it available in the interregnum, as they say, for communities to pray with. We made a proposal to them based around that and some other GIA administered psalm texts and other material, and the collection took on the name of two of the songs, Today.

The order of songs tries to follow the order of the Church year a little bit, though it would have been most groovy to have begun and ended with “New Jerusalem.” We cut out an instrumental verse from the recording, and if we could have stuck it on the end, it would have been very Sergeant Pepperish, but we ixnayed the oovygray. So the CD begins with “New Jerusalem,” picking up the first Sunday of Advent's eschatological glimpse of the end at the beginning, then go to “The Wilderness Awaits You,” a song for the nativity cycle based on various biblical texts, but mostly an updating of the prayer that is Psalm 72, used both in Advent and at Epiphany. Both of those songs have entire posts written about them in the SongStories series, and you can use their links to read those if you wish, as well as the other linked SongStories posts in the text that follows.

In the Christmas series on this recording, there comes next “In the Stillness,” a choral  reworking of the Dameans' song. Gary Daigle and his Damean colleagues had produced an album of Christmas songs in the late 1980s entitled Light in the Darkness, and over the years in our concerts together we had used "Stillness" many times, often as part of a medley of songs that told the gospel story from beginning to end in song. When he was working with me at St. Anne, Gary produced this SAB arrangement of the song, and my choir grew to love it, so we thought we'd share it with the world. Gary's musical ear takes the melody of the verses from a beginning in A minor to end each time in C major, which is lovely enough, but he wrote a contrasting third verse which starts in C minor but diverges through B major, returning suddenly to Am for verse 4. 

What follows is the first of the "Today" psalms, my setting of Psalm 96 for Midnight Mass, “Today,” called that to translate "Hodie" as in, "Today is born our savior, Christ the Lord." Later on the recording, Psalm 118 for Easter bears the same name. There, "Today" translates Haec dies in Psalm 118—"This is the day." Of course, I hope that people will see the text connection and hear it in the musical motif, suggesting in an artistic way the connection between the incarnational and paschal celebrations, their union in the paschal mystery, and some insight into Christmas as "Easter in wintertime," at least in the northern hemisphere! The Dameans’ choral song “Light in the Darkness" follows, rearranged for a more modest church choir and orchestra, from the original version which was the title song of the previously mentioned  Dameans’ Christmas CD. Once again, my choir at St. Anne's considers this song a Christmas essential, and my hope is that many other choirs will try it and come to feel the same way. Michael Balhoff's poetic text uses a structure that employs repetition of similar elements that urge us to give glory for the light and for the darkness, while Gary's music and instrumental arrangement is lush and original, taking us from F to F minor and back again with a genuine freshness that is unmistakably Christmas.

My “Litany for the Scrutinies,” and “Psalm 22 for Passion Sunday” follow, both of which I really like and I hope other music directors do too. Again, both have SongStories posts linked above, and you can hear music clips and read more on those pages. These are followed by my Easter psalm 118, also called “Today.” As I alluded to earlier, Psalm 118 uses the same motif for the word "Today" as the Christmas psalm does, but aside from the key and time signature, that's where the similarity ends. These are two different psalms set differently, but which use a motif to suggest a theological connection. The "Today" of God's action in Christ, in the incarnation and in the resurrection, is "today," this very day, same God, same Christ, new day, thanks be to God.

Next up is a choir/congregation version of the Latin sequence “Victimae Paschali Laudes.” If you're not familiar with the sequence, it is a hymn that precedes the gospel acclamation on Easter and Pentecost (and, optionally, on Corpus Christi), based on medieval songs that trope on scenes or words in the gospel. Victimae is an Easter song exhorting Christians to praise the risen Christ. In my setting, I have retained the Latin plainsong tune and text, and interspersed it with the Alleluia from "O Filii et Filiae," all rendered in an Fm mode.

Let me confess right now that I know that I'm the last person anyone would expect to set a Latin chant, but the economy of words and juxtaposition of opposites in the text (e.g., innocens/peccatores; mors/vita; mortuus/vivus; sepulcrum/viventis) is without equal in any English translation I know of. But I'm also aware that this is lost on 98% of people in the pew. It is in the least idiosyncratic that I would do this, but I'm so spiritually smitten with this lovely chant that I thought I would try to arrange in such a ways as to preserve its beauty and also reverence the principle of active participation. In doing so, more may be made of a sequence than was the original intention, but these are preserved only on great solemnities, so some leeway might be assumed. I used some organum in the choral verses to suggest the medieval milieu of the song, which also allows for the movement between chant rhythms and time as we move between the sequence and refrain, which ultimately becomes the gospel acclamation.

The next cut on the CD is the Easter communion song, “Heart of a Shepherd," which like others has its own full SongStories page. The recording is rounded out with the Ascension psalm 47, "God Mounts His Throne." This setting has its origins in my college days, but it is simple and evocative, originally scored for organ, trumpet, cantor and assembly, I added SAB to the refrain for the recording, along with some text edits. There's not much one can do to dress up an enthronement psalm, though, and imagining a king being enthroned while the warrior God is evoked and people are urged to "clap their hands" and "sing a song of joy" makes me really uncomfortable in a culture where the commander-in-chief is all too often the high priest of the "God bless America" civil religion. Walter Brueggeman suggested in Israel's Praise that we should be wary of psalmic alleluias that want us to "praise the Lord" without specifying which Lord we are worshiping and why. The implication is that not all psalms are created equal, and when the "alleluia" says "praise the status quo" instead of "praise the God who lifts up the lowly, and raises the poor from the dust," we may be be part of the problem, and not the solution. But Ascension comes every year, and we have to rely on each other, and the homilist, and the rest of the liturgy, music, and life of the parish to help us interpret the scriptures, right?

The last song on the album is a collaboration with my daughter Claire on a wedding song called “Song of Songs, based upon verses from that biblical text whose verses sound like an erotic epithalamion but which may be some coded language about the end of the Babylonian captivity or some other literary form. In any case, its use at weddings makes it eligible for a musical setting, and I took Claire's paraphrase of the text and set it to what I hoped was a Randy Newman-ish melody and accompaniment. You can audition it, and the other songs on Today, on the GIA website, or using the arrow button in the iTunes window below.

This completes the list of albums we've done together so far, except for Terry's albums, for which I hope she will eventually write up her memories. She did the song selection for them, and she is a perceptive thinker and entertaining writer. It is for these reasons I have left the option to write about those recordings to her and her busy schedule. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy reading about the making of these recordings. If you want to see the list of album posts or SongStories posts on my blog, just use the "Labels" tool on the right column at the top of any blog page, and click on the "Albums" or "SongStories" link. You'll then see a complete list of whichever "Label" you selected.

Until late this year or early 2016 then, that's the story of Cooney-Daigle-Donohoo collaborations in recording. Thanks for reading!

For more information about the Today CD and music collection at GIA, click here.

Albums 19: Like No God We Had Imagined (2015, GIA)

We are so thrilled to announce the release of our new CD and music collection, Like No God We Had Imagined. It has been almost two years since we started the process of negotiation and recording that finally emerged as this recording, and we couldn't be happier. The long and winding road that brought us to this place has been fraught with twists and turns in our personal and professional lives, and it has, in fact, turned into two collections, one of which won't be seen until next year. For now, this one is an exciting beginning, and in addition to the new songs on this CD, there are seven more already recorded, so we have work to do before next spring!

First of all, what happened was that we finally got thirteen new songs recorded for a collection that we had decided to call "To You Who Bow," with the song that made its debut at the 2014 NPM convention being the title song for the collection. As it turned out, though, when listening to the songs together, I began to feel that it wasn't going to be a very cogent listening experience, with half the songs recognizably Christmas songs, and the other half more general. It's not like it was a vinyl record or cassette that would require you to turn it over or make some other gesture of differentiation! So as I considered this issue, an idea came to me that the publishers at GIA, particularly Michael Silhavy who was liaising this with the rest of the staff at the company, came to approve.

What we decided to do was to take the six Christmas songs and put them on a separate CD with other seasonal music we had recorded over the years that we thought might deserve a second (or first) hearing with music directors around the country. These songs were recorded on several different albums in four different decades, beginning with Safety Harbor, released in 1989, over a generation since they were first released. There are also songs on this recording from Stony Landscapes (1994), Today (2007), and of course Terry's Christmas CD from 1998 which was a very popular listening collection, On Christmas Day in the Morning. We recorded the new songs in late 2014 and 2015, which means  that the songs on this album were recorded over a period of more than twenty-five years. With Mark Karney (of Norwest Communications) and Gary Daigle's careful ear, the songs on the disc were remastered to blend together as though they were all recorded yesterday.

So you see, we didn't set out to make a Christmas collection at all, like we did when Terry recorded OCDITM in 1998. I just tend to try to do a new arrangement every year, and recently have taken to writing lyrics for traditional songs that are maybe second-tier familiar, where you know instinctively that you've heard or sung them at Christmas, but you might not know the words. I thought this might be a way of bridging the gap between a modernized (or, I suppose, personalized) incarnational theology in the text and a traditional tune associated with the holiday.

A second kind of energy that is in the new songs is that they are arranged for smaller (SAB) choirs. This is the kind of choir I have at St. Anne, and I hear from other church musicians that SAB arrangements are very welcome in their work too. I intended to have four of the songs published together in a fascicle, perhaps something like, "Four European Carols for Smaller Choirs," but that turned out to be too cumbersome, and they are packaged individually, but in the collection. Those four would be "Friends in Christ, Rejoice," which is a French carol by way of England, "Still, Still, Still," which is German, "Song at the Manger," which is the Czech "Rocking Carol," and "Lullaby, Little One," which is a Polish carol. (I wrote this in consultation with a new associate pastor at St. Anne in Barrington where I work. Fr. Chris suggested it as a representative Polish Christmas song, and sang the first verse in Polish two years ago when we first introduced it before Midnight Mass.) The other two new songs are my own version of a "Christmas Glory" based on "Angels We Have Heard on High" and a new text and arrangement based on the Rossetti text and the Holst tune of "In the Bleak Midwinter." "Christmas Glory" may stand out a little bit from the crowd of similar efforts at least in its brevity! The "Angels" refrain is sung only three times. There are two verses of a simple SAB chant tone, and then after the second verse, the final refrain is sung, with the last words of the Gloria ("...For you alone are the holy one..." through the Amen) sung as a soprano descant over that refrain. Not that brevity is everything, but you might have more energy for the liturgy of the word if you're not exhausted from the introductory rites! Just sayin'...



A word about the marvelous group of singers and musicians in Arizona and Illinois who have made all these songs come alive. Some are still singing and working, inside and outside of music ministry, some have gone to God. Reading the names of the singers and players who worked on these songs over the course of the last quarter century is a humbling experience, and I am grateful to them all because they have graced my life, certainly, but kept music alive with their art and ministry for decades. Some of my Phoenix friends have died, some have retired, some are very active in ministry, others have put that part of their past aside. My daughter Claire, barely a teenager when she sang verses on "Carol of the Stranger," is now a successful author in her early thirties. Gary, Terry, and I are "changed, not ended" too, still busy, but all of us having navigated the fast-moving waters of life, and still (crazy) friends after all these years. New friends, like Breda King, who sings with Terry on my "new favorite" song, "In the Bleak Midwinter," and Paul Rausch and his sons and students and former students who made up much of the choir on these new songs, and Lara Lynch, Gerry Aylward, and Tom Yang and his crew of amazing musicians from Chicago Musical Connection, fill our lives with music we can barely believe we helped to create. A lot of Christmases have come and gone since we started singing and recording this music, but each one has been a season of grace and mercy in our blessed lives.

The title of the album is taken from a repeating motif in the first song, "Friends in Christ, Rejoice," which is set to the carol tune, "Masters in this Hall."

Noel, noel, noel! Sing the news with awe,
Like no God we had imagined is the baby in the straw.

The rest of the text is here, part of our "2013 Christmas card" on my blog. Our 2014 Christmas card was the little YouTube video linked above, in which I paired images with the music of "Still, Still, Still," track 7 on the CD.

You can audition all of these songs in mp3 form (available for purchase as well) at GIA Publications website.

Track List

1. Friends in Christ, Rejoice (2015)
2. My Soul Gives Glory (text by Miriam Therese Winter, MMS)
3. The Advent Herald (text by Brian Wren)
4. Sing We Maranatha (SongStories post)
5. In the Bleak Midwinter (2015)
6. Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day
We regularly come back to this song in our Christmas repertoire. A beautiful melody and a clever medieval text that seems to take off from Zephaniah 3:17, a prophetic text read in Advent liturgies. There is a brief instrumental ritornello between the stanzas for string quartet and flute, and the choral and instrumental parts quote from Silent Night in one of the stanzas.
7. Still, Still, Still (2015)
8. In the Stillness of the Night.
This is one of two wonderful Balhoff-Daigle-Ducote songs (Dameans) on this collection. Terry recorded this as a solo on OCDITM, and we put this SAB version on Today, but included it here to get it another hearing. I really love the wedding of text and tune on this Christmas song, its unusual modality and expressiveness. Gary's part-writing and instrumental arranging are also wonderful.
9. Christmas Gloria (2015)
10. Psalm 96: Christmas Midnight
11. Song at the Manger (2015)
12. Carol of the Stranger (from Stony Landscapes, with 12-year-old Claire singing the solos!)
13. Lullaby, Little One (Lullajze, Jezuniu) (2015)
14. Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow
15. I Saw Three Ships.
I tell Terry, whenever we're listening to her Christmas recording, that I think this is the best arrangement I've ever done. On that recording the arrangement is soprano soloist with TTB choir, but it could easily be done SATB as well, with just flute and cello accompaniment. When she asked me to do a couple of arrangements for the album, I threw myself into this one and "Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day," which also appears on this CD.
16. Light in the Darkness
This bright Dameans song, like "In the Stillness" above, has been one one of my choir's favorite Christmas songs for twenty years, and I hope that many others will discover it with its inclusion in this collection. The Balhoff-Ducote text moves through many moods as it explores "light in the darkness," and Gary's joyful musical setting and choral and instrumental arrangement captures their work wonderfully.

Like No God We Had Imagined page at GIA publications for more information, or to audition or purchase songs or printed music.

Albums 17 - Christ the Icon (WLP, 2005)

Deum hominesque cano. (Apologies to Vergil)

Christ the Icon is a collection of songs that I wrote or arranged over a period of about three years, between 2002 and 2005.  What I’d like to offer in what follows is a bit of insight on my thought processes as they came into being. I don’t want to suggest that the songs need explanation. Was it Mae West who warned, “If you have to explain it, it’s not much of a kiss”? I can’t track down definitively who made that crack, but artists including Picasso and Louis Armstrong have warned against “explaining” art. Just as knowing more about a new friend’s life can deepen our appreciation of her more, so the experience of singing or hearing one of these songs might be somewhat enriched if you know a bit more about its origin, and what kind of thoughts and events catalyzed its existence. At least, that is my hope in writing this blog post, as it has been for the previous fifteen. (NB: note that album 16, which is actually Terry's Family Resemblance, has been postponed for now until I (hope to) convince her to do a guest blog post about it. She chose the songs for the recording, she's a very fine writer, and you could use a break from my voice, I'm sure!)

I’d like to talk about my experience of the song “Christ the Icon” first, because some of what I write about the other songs will make more sense when you see the theology which I am embracing that underlies this song. It seems to me that as human beings we are obsessed with power. This is generally because someone else has it, and we want it, or we have it, and we don’t want anyone else to have it. When we come to think of God and interpret the biblical story in light of our obsession, we think of God as “omnipotent,” and by that omnipotence we imagine the kind of power that we would like to wield: both irresistible force and immovable object, able to do anything we want to anyone we want, full and absolute control over the universe in all its parts.

The trouble with this, of course, is the problem of evil. If God is so great, critics of Christianity can rightly claim, why do so many bad things happen to so many good people? With so much evil, disease, and violence in the world, why doesn’t the omnipotent God do something about it?

The other problem is the Christian story itself. Even though the confluence of Christianity and empire lasted from Charlemagne to the Enlightenment, and arguably survives vestigially in the papacy, there is no evidence within the biblical tradition in the story of Jesus of Nazareth that such a confluence was warranted. Rather, as David Power has pointed out, when Christians say “Jesus is Lord,” we don’t mean that Jesus is like the lords of earth. Our kerygma is that lordship is defined by who Jesus is. That is a world of difference. The kingdom of Jesus “is not like those of this world.”

Furthermore, by the claims that the evangelists and apostles make about Jesus the Lord, we are invited to rethink who God is, what God is like, and just what “power” means. In the letter to the Colossians, St. Paul writes or quotes the astonishing hymn that begins, “He is the image (eikon) of the invisible God.” That is to say, to look upon Jesus, dead and risen, is to see who God is. The One who loved so much that he “did not deem equality with God something to grasp onto,” this one who emptied himself, giving himself up to death on a cross, this is the image of the invisible God. It draws us back to the Jesus of the gospels who assures the disciple that “whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

I think there’s enough material in those insights to last a lifetime. Contemplating that ought to reshape our definitions of power and transform our relationships. For someone like me, formed by the Church of the catechism and trained for a while in the seminary crucible of Catholic apologetics, it is a revelation. If God can give up god-ness to be with people, to stumble along and pass out the fragility of one’s own life so that others may have life and have it more abundantly, then why on earth do I have to hold on to “being right” in some theological or political battlefield? If even god-ness isn’t worth grasping, apologetics is just silly. It is precisely why “love covers over a multitude of sins,” because what matters is the extent to which we are like God, to which we abandon the right to be ourselves and to preserve our own lives for the sake of being for other people. Where Paul uses the language of kenosis and icon, John’s simple formula says the same thing in three words: God is love.

So, what I wrote in “Christ the Icon” is simply the verse from Colossians 1 to which I referred above, as part of a refrain that anchors the entire text in the paschal mystery:

Christ is the image of the unseen God,
Our life, our peace, and our lasting.
Praise and thanksgiving to the Crucified,
Who endures while the mighty are passing.

The verses of “Christ the Icon” are sung by a cantor, and invite the singers to reflect on the gospel in the light of that insight from St. Paul. At the end of each half-verse, we repeat the words, “the image of the unseen God,” and the choir provides a texture of musical prayer by singing “Eleison” (have mercy!) through the verses as they recall image after image from the story of the Messiah. My hope is that, as we sing the song together through the communion procession, or during the veneration of the cross, or whenever the song might be used, the story of Jesus, the eleison’s, and the refrain that draws us back to the insight of St. Paul will help reform our values to the values of the gospel.

“Be Perfect” is a song I wrote from the intersection of the parish travails of a good friend and colleague of mine and my reading of the French-American anthropologist Réné Girard. Part of Girard’s thesis about the origin of societies and religion in violence, a thesis generally termed “mimetic desire,” is that we don’t want things in themselves, but we want them because others have them. We learn to desire from others, and want what others have because they have them. Girard’s theory, while complex and necessarily oversimplified here, is that this desire escalates into violence unless a “scapegoating mechanism” is triggered, and the violence within society can be focused on a single person or group and thus released. Girard, a Catholic, sees the Paschal Mystery as the way out of the cycle of escalating violence and scapegoating by revealing our violence for what it is, an assault upon an innocent victim. Scapegoating only works by associating God with the accusers, by making a demon of the one cast away. But in the Christian story, Jesus is revealed in the resurrection to be both innocent and the Son of God. The false religion of sacrifice is revealed for the murderous thing it is. By refocusing our desire after the desire of Jesus, to be like the Father who loves unconditionally and “makes the rain fall and sun shine upon the just and the unjust,” we can be part of the emergence of the reign of God.

The passage upon which the refrain is based, taken from the Sermon on the Mount, is almost invariably watered down by homilists afraid to imagine that it might be possible to act as Jesus does, and imitate the perfect love of God.

There is a certain sense in which the admonition to “be perfect” has been understood in a semi-Pelagian way, that is, that we need to keep practicing our spiritual exercises until we get them right, and arrive at some state of sinlessness reserved for the true spiritual Olympian athlete. This sort of thinking denies both the perfection of divine love, which loves us right in the midst of our sinfulness, and the divine initiative, by which we mean that grace precedes and enables the response of repentance. But there’s something even more important here: to be perfect means to be like God, to make being-like-God the object of our desire of our loving imitation. And this is not being like just any God, but being like the God of Jesus, who “makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.”  To keep Jesus’s admonition before us to “be perfect” is to resolve not to forget the admonition to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us. It keeps the church honest, and helps us to recall that it’s not enough to “be nice” and to love each other in our families and communities of intention. The gospel call is to love everyone with the divine love, the love that puts the good of the other first, even if, especially if, the other is our enemy. This seemed to be particularly cogent as our nation began to prepare to go to war again in late 2002 and we were hearing the community discourse in Matthew that harkened back to the Sermon on the Mount. More immediately, as I briefly indicated above, a good friend of mine had experienced tremendous alienation, betrayal, and vilification in a parish job experience, and through that ordeal, never lashed out or retaliated against those who were doing the persecuting. I was moved and amazed by the restraint and love that this person was able to show in the situation.


You can hear a little of Girard again at the beginning of “Let Us Go to the Altar of God,” when the words of Psalm 42 are invoked, “Who will fight my fight when the mob surrounds?” The song goes on to describe the altar of God as both a sanctuary and a gathering place for those who want to answer the call to “gather with friend and with foe” around the table of Jesus. Christians are not immune to any of the doubts, troubles, or afflictions that anyone else suffers, but the hope offered by solidarity, by gathering around the altar-table at the summons of the gospel, is the good news that we have experienced and can offer to others. The lyric of the song points directly to political upheaval:

When the winds of war through the land increase,
When they call your children my enemies,
Where will I draw strength to proclaim your peace?
I will go to the altar of God…

I tried to connect with both my personal apprehension about a cancer diagnosis I had received, and my exasperating spiritual bankruptcy in the lyric as well, knowing that I am not alone either in sickness nor in sin, appealing to images from Psalm 23.

Who will find a way? Who can rescue me,
Caught between the Pharaoh and hungry sea?
Though I’m sick and broken, alone, unfree,
I will go to the altar of God… And if I should stray from all I hold dear,
And I’m left alone in my shame and fear,
Where will sun shine warm, streams of hope run clear?
I will go to the altar of God.

Again I nod to Girard’s celebration of the cross as hope for the end of violence in the fourth stanza, in which the Crucified “breathes his spirit out” upon the killing fields of the world, summoning all the persecuted and desaparecidos to the holy mountain on which there is no death or injury.

“You Have Built Your House” was commissioned by a parish in Naperville, Illinois, for the dedication of their house of worship. Strangely, my own parish of St. Anne had built a new church only three years or so earlier, and though it had been a priority for me, I did not, could not, come up with a new piece of music for our own dedication. But I had thought long and hard about what such a piece ought to include, and when the folks at Holy Spirit asked me to write something for them, and my inquiries revealed a community there similar to ours, with similar musical forces, I was energized to make a new attempt.

The lectionary texts for the dedication of a church are so rich! There is a nice cluster of images that works something like this: Jesus Christ is the meeting place of heaven and earth, the temple of the new covenant. The temple of the new covenant is a Christ. Christ has, through the Spirit given to us in baptism, called us to be living stones in the temple. Just as Israel discovered after the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem that the permanent abode of the Most High was not in a building but in a people, so the People of God of the New Covenant are the lovely dwelling place of God. God has built our house for us, not the other way around. This is the key image for me: it sets the relationships right among us, and puts our efforts at “building a church” in perspective. “You Have Built Your House” describes that reality, and offers a kind of corrective to our hubris and a celebration of the truth of God’s diverse people on mission together, “streaming in” to remember who they are and be fed for their continuing journey.

"Every Generation Calls You Blessed" was commissioned by the community of St. Mary's in Port Washington, WI, for the 150th anniversary of their parish, dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption. Originally, what I wanted to do was a triptych of pieces, beginning with this one. The other two were an arrangement for the same group of choir and instruments of a mid-20th century plainsong hymn called "Mary and Christ," a litany that takes the form of fulfillment, as in,
Mary the Dawn,
Christ the Perfect Day.
Mary the Gate,
Christ the heavenly way....
I knew this song from my childhood, but as it turned out, after I had the song completely arranged, I came to discover that it was not anonymous at all but had been written and published around 1950. One website says the following:

"Mary the Dawn" was first published in 1949 under the pen name 'Paul Cross', believed to be a pseudonym for Fr. Justin Mulcahy, C.P. (1894-1981). A Passionist Priest from the St. Paul of the Cross Province, he studied at the Pius X School of Liturgical Music in New York and eventually earned a degree in Church Music from the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, Vatican. The haunting melody of Mary the Dawn is an adaptation of Gregorian Mode IV. In some hymnals, the text is attributed to 'Anonymous', while others show the author as Paul Cross.

At any rate, rather than trying to track down a pseudonym, I just gave up on trying to get it included with "Every Generation." I may try again, now that I see that the original version was recorded by Richard Proulx's Cathedral Singers for GIA. The third piece in the triptych was a canon on the text "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb." Again, as it turned out, the whole thing just got to be too much like work, and I bagged part three as well. Mercy. Such a quitter!

I wrote a set of verses for St. Mary's entirely based around the feast of the Assumption. Reading through some of the apocrypha about the Assumption, by the way, is a very groovy experience, particularly the story as recounted in the Dormition of the Mother of God by pseudo-John, complete with the Virgin being taken up on a couch, and an angry Hebrew trying to hold her back and having a seraphim cut his arms off, leaving them dangling from the couch. You can't make this stuff up. But it also doesn't belong in a hymn, right? The editors at WLP (rightly) decided that it would be a more useful song if the verses were about a cross-section of Marian mysteries, so I provided another set of verses of general use.

The call-and-response form of "Every Generation," with refrain, makes it an easy song to use for communion or at any other procession. The melody is dynamic if somewhat serpentine, but I think within reach of most assemblies without much rehearsal. Please give it a try! And while you're at it, perhaps investigate the setting of Psalm 45, the responsorial for the Assumption feast day.

Christ the Icon also includes a setting of Fr. Peter Scagnelli's translation of the "Pentecost Sequence," which is set to a chant-like melody reminiscent of Bill Withers' classic "When She's Gone," hence the melody's name, QUANDO ITA. Very fun to sing, and I think it fits the spirit of the day, as it were. There is setting of French noel Il Est Né which I did for my choir a few years back. Such a charming little melody, and all I did really was set it for SAB choir with a cello and flute accompaniment and ritornello. We recorded the verses as equal-voice duets. Je l'aime beaucoup! And don't miss "Let the Children Come to Me," which I wrote as a song for the sending of children to Children's Liturgy of the Word in the parish, but it has plenty of verses to make it useful for First Communion and certainly on Sundays when that passage in the synoptics is part of the liturgy. (The links in the above paragraph go to the pages at World Library for each song, where you can hear a clip of the recording.)

I need to especially acknowledge the amazing cover art on this recording. My brother-in-law, Gary Palmatier, created this mural on the exterior wall of the Ammon Hennacy House of Hospitality in Los Angeles while he was doing alternative service during Vietnam as a conscientious objector. Although the structure had to be demolished and rebuilt after an earthquake, photos of the mural survive. In the picture on the album cover, you can make out the individual bricks in the lighter-colored sections. Gary painted into the shadows of the crucified Jesus the faces of the homeless and hungry people who visited the food kitchen every day. It is an amazing icon of the meaning of Christ, and the continuing presence of the Crucified among the poor and those who serve them.

Christ is at the heart of these songs, Christ who is mediator Dei, both the image of the unseen God and as the image of a humanity called to “be perfect” and built into a living house of praise and thanksgiving. As a songwriter in the Church, I can only hope that by putting them at your service through the ministry of this publisher, they will help you and your community find ways of expressing the resonance between life in the modern world and the abundant life that the Spirit offers through the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank you for trusting all of us songwriters and other artists in the church who have staked our lives on the hope that this might be possible.

As I wrote this article, I've been listening again to Christ the Icon, and I have to say that Gary and crew did an excellent job recording these songs for World Library, the listening experience itself is a joy. So consider a visit to iTunes, or to WLP to purchase the CD, and thanks for reading.

Track list: 
(songs that have their own "SongStories" post, with Soundcloud clips, are linked to those posts here.)

Be Perfect
Christ the Icon
Let the Children Come to Me
Il Est Né
New Families
Pentecost Sequence
Every Generation Calls You Blessed
Psalm 45 for Assumption
Let Us Go the Altar of God
Mass of St. Aidan
Lamb of God (Living Stones)
You Have Built Your House

(Note: Mass of St. Aidan was revised in view of the 2010 Roman Missal, and has been re-released as an octavo and CD.)

(Parts of this article appeared in AIM magazine, and is used with permission from World Library Publications.)

Christ the Icon page at World Library Publications.

Christ the Icon on iTunes, and the revised "Mass of St. Aidan"

Albums 16: Keep Awake (2000, WLP)

Way, way back in the late 20th century, World Library Publications of Chicago, the music publishing arm of the missalette juggernaut J. S. Paluch Company, decided to compile a songbook for young people. Anchored by songs by campus music ministers  par excellence Joe Mattingly and Steve Warner, along with works by John Michael Talbot, Paul Tate, Ed Bolduc and hits by Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Dana, and Rich Mullins, Voices As One in its first incarnation was published in 1998 with 105 pieces of music as a softcover supplement to other worship aids.

Sometime in the late spring of 1997, there was a knock on the door of my Barrington home, and there at the door were Laura Dankler and Ron Rendek, with a modest proposal. This new youth hymnal project was coming up, and they were hoping I would consider writing a few songs for it. Of course I was honored. Here, for the first time every, was a publisher actually asking me for songs, instead of me having to sell my songs to a publisher. On the other hand, I was mildly apprehensive about the task, which had a deadline and was out of my "comfort zone" in the sense that I rarely wrote specifically to that target audience. In fact, I don't think that, even when I was writing as a young man, I was writing to that target audience. The congregation in my head is people of all ages, but I think largely adults and, maybe necessarily, like the people I know. The music I write is like popular music, but more like standards and oldies than like anything remotely hip, even 15 years ago!

But when someone comes to your door asking you to write songs, it's not the right time to say no. There would be time for that later in the editorial process if what I wrote wasn't a fit for their project. So I told them that I would do it, and that I would enlist the help of my daughter Claire, a budding writer and poet who was 16 at the time. That summer, when she came to visit for a few months, we would find time to write together.

I gave Claire some possible texts (from Scripture), and told her to concentrate on psalms and stories that interested her, where she was in her own life, and to "translate them into English." I wasn't so concerned about the texts sounding like other people's, or even my, voices, but what she as a Gen X-Y (b. 1981) child might hear in those texts, and how she might want to express them in her prayer. There are some really fine examples in her writing, even at that young age. I was hoping for an edge of idealism in the texts that might appeal to other young people, and Claire's most consistent metaphor for idealism was "dreams." Her lyric for "Jerusalem of Dreams," for instance, a paraphrase or inspiration from Psalm 122, while not one of the original songs submitted to WLP, was one we used on Keep Awake. You can make out the contours of the ancient song of ascent as you read or sing her words, probably gently edited by her father:

We have found our Jerusalem of Dreams,
A place for coming clean,
Wash away the sweat and soil.
We have found our Jerusalem of Dreams.
Shall we rest?
What dreams will come next?... 

We, a tribe,
Each is blood to all,
Drawn to march by the memory of a call.
Some confused,
Weary, battered, bruised,
Marching to Jerusalem of Dreams. 

We have found our Jerusalem of Dreams,
Bright, shining, and serene
And we pledge we shall be loyal.
We have found our Jerusalem of Dreams.
Shall we rest?
What dreams will come next?

Claire and I would go together to the Parish Center for a couple of hours a few times a week where I would take her lyrics and play with various feels and melodies until I could capture what I thought I was hearing in her lyric, and we would settle on ideas together that I would develop. We sent to World Library four co-written songs, "Stranger and the Nets," "Holy You," "I Choose You," and "You" (at least no one could accuse our song titles of being Pelagian!) and two of mine, "Morning Song" and "Fly Together." I wrote "Morning Song" several years before while working as a youth minister one summer at "Youth Sing Praise" during its second year, when they produced the musical Champion of Israel with book by Fr. Ron Brassard and music by Chris Brubeck. I had been writing songs for my children's graduation masses at St. Jerome School in Phoenix, and wrote "Fly Together" that year for Aidan's graduation. I remember writing much of the lyric for "Fly Together" in the studio in New Orleans as Gary was recording some overdubs for our GIA album This Very Morning, including the street musicians who played trumpet, trombone, and clarinet on our "A Litany of Saints" that features the refrain of "When the Saints Go Marchin' In." Those six songs, sent as our contribution to the hymnal Voices As One, formed the beginning of the collection that became Keep Awake.

Gary had moved back to his hometown of Gonzales, LA, and built a studio into the house, where the CD was recorded. He made frequent trips to Chicago because of his association with the publishers there, and this was the first time we used our current modus operandi in recording my music. As I've mentioned before, I hate studio work, you know, so much repetition past the point where I can hear a difference. Terry and Gary, on the other hand, thrive in the environment. So Gary came in and we played through the songs, and he made notes and recorded me playing the songs on my little piano. He then took that information back to Louisiana, and, using local musicians and singers, made the recording. Terry went down and did some overdubs, I think, because I remember being down there for some infamous events involving our sons, Desi and Grant, making an unbelievable mess of their 5-year-old selves in a mud hole.

I still find this recording a pleasure to listen to. The songs did not "hit" with the audience, and did not appear in later editions of Voices As One, and as usual I'm at a loss to explain it. It could just be that they are too idiosyncratic, and not traditional enough in either words or music to appeal to churchgoers. They seem to have a life on Rhapsody and Pandora, which is encouraging. I'm particularly proud of "Apocalypse," which was our take on Daniel's vision, sort of expanded into a more general and universal "dream" of new world saved by a community in solidarity, and of the title track, "Keep Awake," another end-time song that ends with a litany I wrote, based on Mt 25, as a kind of homage to Bruce Springsteen's "Land of Hope and Dreams." Great guitar work and an outstanding vocal performance by Gary on that song really give it wings. In our concerts, we give "Apocalypse" and "Stranger and the Nets" frequent play, and occasionally "Fly Together" and "I Choose You."

Terry's performance of our take on the Magnificat, "In God I Will Rejoice," is a country-tinged smile that I can't help but love, and Claire's ebullient lyric "Is This Goodness God?" appealed not only to me as a writer, but then to the wonderful Meredith Dean Augustin, who covered it on her CD Deep River.  If you haven't heard the songs on Keep Awake, I hope you'll give them a listen. You can audition them on iTunes using the links at the bottom of this page, and get the flavor of what Claire and I set out to do. At any rate, it was a great first experience making music for a wonderful company that has only gotten better over the intervening years. Our next CD with World Library would come five years later, when we recorded Christ the Icon.

Keep Awake, by Claire Cooney and Rory Cooney
© 2001, World Library Publications

1. Morning Song (by Rory Cooney)
2. I Choose You
3. You
4. Fly Together (by Rory Cooney)
5. Psalm 146: All in You
6. In God I Will Rejoice
7. Holy You
8. Is This Goodness God?
9. Jerusalem of Dreams
10. The Stranger and the Nets
11. Apocalypse
12. Keep Awake

Albums 15: Change Our Hearts (2000, OCP)

Change Our Hearts Track listing

Change Our Hearts
Servant Song
Come to Us
Up from the Earth
Faithful Family
Thy Kingdom Come
Bread of Life
Yours Today
Glory to God (from Missa America)
As We Remember
We Will Serve the Lord
Do Not Fear to Hope

By 2000, a number of my songs from the NALR years had been introduced into the missalettes of OCP, which had purchased the assets of NALR in the early 1990s. As I wrote in my posting about Safety Harbor, we had parted ways with NALR after Lost and Found, and begun publishing and recording through GIA. At the same time, with a lot of new music suddenly part of their repertoire, OCP needed to streamline their assets, and my recordings from 1984-87 were scheduled to go out of print.

This kind of thing happens, but we came up with a strategy to keep those songs available to new listeners as well as to create what we thought of as definitive recordings for musicians who like to hear what the songwriters had in mind as they committed the song to paper. OCP let us record the anthologized songs from those earlier recordings onto a new CD, making entirely new recordings and adjusting the arrangements after a decade and a half of usage. The psalms from those recordings that had been anthologized, along with newly anthologized settings, were released as volume 2 of Cries of the Spirit. 

Change Our Hearts was recorded and mixed at Gary Daigle's new home studio in Gonzales, LA, "The Eagle's Nest" (d'aigle, get it?), with some of the tracks overdubbed in Barrington at Norwest Studios. Tren Alford, who had graced many of the Dameans' recordings with her playing, did the flute parts, and Gary's friends in his hometown supplied the rhythm tracks and choir parts, anchored by his childhood friend, drummer Randy Carpenter. In Barrington, too, we used our new friends Kari Lee (trumpet) and the Chicago Musical Connection for strings, with Breda King for a couple of songs, all really good musicians we had worked with in the years since our move.

Rather than write about each song again, I'll batch them by the albums on which they first appeared, and refer you back to those album postings with links. If you haven't noticed, by the way, I've tagged my album posts and "SongStories" posts so that you can use the sorting button on the upper right to see just those posts if you'd like to peruse them.

On the recording You Alone, there originally appeared these songs: "Change Our Hearts," "Thy Kingdom Come," and "Yours Today."

On the recording Do Not Fear To Hope, there originally appeared the title song, as well as "We Will Serve the Lord," "Come to Us," the Glory to God from Missa America, and "Faithful Family."

On the recording Mystery, there originally appeared "Servant Song," "As We Remember," "Up from the Earth," and "Bread of Life."

For me, the highlights of this recording are Gary's NOLA shuffle styling on the song "Thy Kingdom Come," featuring the sweet groove of Fred Forney's brass line. Terry's vocals shine as always, but are never better than on the new versions of the title song and "Do Not Fear to Hope." I'm still the biggest fan of my song called "Servant Song," and wish it had made it more into the repertoire. It continues to shine in concert usage. I'm sure it will be revealed to me in the next life what went wrong with it! The COH version includes orchestral parts I'd written in the intervening years since Mystery that I believe add to the piece's impact.

I'm working on the rewrite of Missa America, and hope to submit it this year, maybe with a different name. I liked the name at the the time, but now it seems a little presumptuous. The songs for gathering, communion, and closing that we're part of that suite were peace and justice oriented, marginally political, including a new melody for the text "God of the Ages (God of Our Fathers)", the national hymn. I was going for a mixed bag of American-style music asked on blues riffs and simple polyrhythms (here, variations on 7/8 time) that might be evocative for US congregations. Aside from the communion song "Seek after Peace" and the Glory, though, the music was never recorded, so never was well-distributed. In rewriting the mass, I am currently thinking of leaving the Glory out, or starting from scratch if I must. I feel that music directors don't really need the Glory to match the musical flavor of the Eucharistic prayer, and the amount of effort it takes to teach and learn a song of the Glory's length means they are reluctant to try new ones anyway. So I'll try to get away with it.

That's about it on Change Our Hearts, which is a really nice listening experience. Give it a listen, if it's not already on your library!

Albums 14 - On Christmas Day in the Morning (1998, GIA)

Terry wanted to make a Christmas album. GIA was happy with the idea as long as they got some
printable music arrangements out of the deal, and thus was born On Christmas Day in the Morning. We were still pretty new to the Chicago area as we recorded this CD, but the recording gave us the opportunity to meet some new musicians and gave Gary and Terry the opportunity to experiment a little more in Irish styles.

Terry remembers the beginnings of the idea: it all started with "The napkin: after talking with Rory and Gary about the idea of doing a solo collection and deciding on a Christmas themed one, I waited many months for an opening in our schedules to put the project plan into action. One night when we were all in Estes Park, Rory volunteered to stay in our little cabin with Desi while Gary and I went into town, sat in a café and came up with a song list. Gary wrote the titles on a napkin, which I kept as a souvenir and as motivation to keep going."

She continues, "This was a traveling show, really. We started in Mark’s studio (in Barrington); I remember Desi was about three years old. He and I flew to Louisiana to mix the recording in a studio in New Orleans. Gary and his family had moved there, and mixing in NOLA made more sense. Desi had to stay with the Daigles at their home in Gonzales while I went to the studio. He was Art Daigle’s best friend all day. We recorded the ending of "O Holy Night" over again on the morning I was leaving to fly back to Chicago. Desi cooperated by falling asleep on a couch in the studio and we did the ending in one take."

Terry knew from the outset that there were two pieces she wanted to do on the recording: the Wexford Carol and "Some Children See Him." I started to work on an arrangement for the Wexford Carol, a chord structure for the piece for which instruments and vocal harmonies could be written. But it became clear pretty quickly that I was overthinking this beautiful, ancient Irish song, and Terry's and Gary's better instincts opted for a sparser, more resonant accompaniment suggestive of the monastic origins of the tune. I've been a big fan of the Alfred Burt carols since being a high school chorister in the late 1960s, and out of those many beautiful and seasonally evocative carols, each one of which started life as a Burt family Christmas card, Terry chose the one with the clearest social conscience, "Some Children See Him." With a few notes and strokes of the pen, the lyricist and composer sketched out a global vision of Christmas, crowned with the simple payoff line, "'Tis love that's born tonight."

Here are a few more thoughts about the cuts on this recording. If you don't already have a favorite Christmas album, give On Christmas Day in the Morning a listen. There's a good chance you'll have one by the first or second track. Count your blessings: somewhere in Barrington there is a hard disk and probably a digital tape backup of the great Brendan McKinney playing a full set of highland pipes on one of these songs. The hair-raising honking of the instrument shattered nerves and the relative quiet in that underground studio, but its expatriate complaints never made it onto the recording. That is proof of grace enough for me.

Track List, with further comments.

On Christmas Day in the Morning, Theresa Donohoo (GIA, 1998)

The First Noël (arr. Daigle)

Gary's arrangement of this English carol moves its musical heart from Cornwall to Cork, as it dances along with a lilt and the services of the great Chicago Irish musicians, John Williams, piper Patrick Broaders, and fiddler Katherine Keane. In my opinion, this arrangement is so delightful it just jumps out of the speakers, and becomes a carol in what may be the original sense, a carula, a circle dance.

Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow (trad., arr. Rory Cooney (GIA), and Gary Daigle)

Terry writes, "I remember the slow and intuitive process of deciding on arrangements with Gary. Rory famously hates the studio in general, and there were a few tense moments when he bristled at our re-interpreting some of his arrangements. In fact, while we were working on “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow,” including changing the key and adding a fiddle part, he walked out. Fortunately for all of us, he eventually accepted the new arrangement and it is one of my favorites on the recording." Rory responds: In my defense, I have no defense. As usual, they were right, I was wrong, and being a jerk to boot. However, until I revisited this, I had managed to block this out of my increasingly selective memory. Note to self: just make stuff up from now on, do not seek interviews with artists.

Some Children See Him (Burt/Hutson)
Carol of the Stranger (Rory Cooney, GIA)

I wrote about this song in my album post about Stony Landscapes, when we had first recorded it. You can read about it by clicking here.

I Saw Three Ships (trad., arr. Rory Cooney, GIA)

I did this arrangement with Terry leading an ATB choir, accompanied only by flute, cello, and bodhran. It starts off with this weird little hornpipe in two that just inserted itself into my arrangement saying, "Hey, we can get to 6/8, no problem." A couple of modulations and stop in Disneyland later, the piece is over, and I get the distinct feeling I've been listening to sailors. The choir and instrumentalists on the recording did a fantastic job of realizing this arrangement probably for the only time in history, with Terry's vocal part sparkling over the top of the whole thing. The most satisfying arrangement I've ever done. 

O Holy Night (Adophe Adam, arr. Gary Daigle)
In the Stillness of the Night (Balhoff, Daigle, Ducote, GIA)

The Dameans included this beautiful song in their Advent-Christmas collection Light in the Darkness. Terry's performance of it expands its emotional range, brilliantly incarnating the contrast between the silent darkness of the birth of the messiah with the explosive light of its meaning. As always, Gary's talent as a songwriter and interpreter of text with melody and harmony is in evidence as he moves the lines and images from a simple exposition through a complex but harmonically lush and warm contrasting section, and back to the simplicity of the original verses. This song is a wonder both to hear and to perform, and I only wish it were more familiar in the repertoire.

Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day (trad., arr. Rory Cooney, GIA)
The Wexford Carol (trad., arr. Gary Daigle and Rory Cooney)
I Wonder As I Wander (John Jacob Niles, arr. Daigle)

Wonder-Wander began life as song that was thought to be an Appalachian folk song "discovered" by Niles in his research, but as it turned out it was outed as an original composition by him that was flavored by regional dialect he derived from his research. He seems to have heard and recorded a young woman singing a piece of a song in North Carolina, and then composed the song around his recollection and notes on the event. It sounded so genuine that performers made recordings of it as though it were a folk song. Niles had to press lawsuits in order to collect royalties for his work. 

Advent Herald (text by Brian Wren, music by Rory Cooney, GIA)

Brian Wren's masterful text "Welcome the wild one" is so beautifully conceived a picture of the Baptizer's dangerous ministry at the Jordan that I find myself sometimes choked up by its empathetic vision both of the radical call to the kingdom and the way the message is received by Jesus (?) in his baptism. I say (?) because Jesus is never named. One gets the idea that the "young one" in the lyric might be Jesus, especially because the final stanza calls the baptized one "God's love-child" and with an initial "welcome" bids "let salvation begin." But Jesus wasn't, by my calendar, a "young one" as he came to the wilderness "seeking the spirit that beckoned through John," he was John's age. One could suspend disbelief, or believe in the myth, I suppose, but it's just as easy to imagine that the child in the water is any believer, and the invitation that salvation begin be a word of hope about any of our lives. I don't really care, it's a wonderful text! My special joy about this is that a former editor at GIA told me that, after my setting was published, Brian Wren received a copy of the song, and wrote back to GIA to express his delight that the setting capture his text so well. For reasons for which I'd rather not know the full explanation, the editor's comment was, "Pigs have flown."

Silent Night (trad., arr. Gary Daigle)

Albums 13 - "This Very Morning" - (1998, GIA)

In 1998, at Mark Karney's Norwest Sound Studios in Barrington, we started working on our first recording in the Chicago area. Norwest is right in the heart of the village of Barrington, which is very cool: it is in the basement of a wonderful Starbucks, and it's just a block from the Metra commuter rail, making it easy access for gigsters coming from the city. It's also occasionally a pain in the arse: it's in the basement of a Starbucks (think of late-night recording—is there another kind?—with chairs and tables squeaking across the floor above, even with lots of soundproofing) and its less than a block from the Metra commuter rail (three dozen trains a day on the Northwest line). What tips the balance in its favor is that Mark owns the place, Gary knows the recording equipment so well, and there are a number of worthy eateries within walking distance. At the time of this recording in 1998, and through all the records we have made since, Terry and I lived, and I worked, just two blocks away. There is something to be said for small-town life in the Midwest. (I purchased a Ford Focus new in 2003, and today, in 2013, it has barely 60,000 miles on it.)

What had begun to collect and what we thought would be the heart of a good new collection was music for Holy Week and Triduum. My work with the North American Forum, as well as our work at our jobs in Phoenix, had us working to create music for more "family friendly" Triduum celebrations, as I wrote about in a previous blog post. We also had the millennium-themed "Trumpet in the Morning," a spring-flavored graduation song that fit the general mood of the album, and an Easter-Pentecost anthem I had written for a friend's anniversary of ordination that would provide the title song for the collection. GIA was interested in a new collection, so we got to work.

I've written more extensively on a number of these songs, so there are links to those songs with their "song stories" if you missed them. On a couple of them I have added some reminiscences about the recording process.

Tracklist and comments

1. Trumpet in the Morning
2. Quiet Strength
I wrote "Quiet Strength" for my daughter Claire's eighth grade graduation mass as St. Jerome School in 1994. I had previously done the same for Joel ("Building a City") and would do so again for Aidan ("Fly Together"). The song title was actually the class theme for their respective year. This little ballad just expresses hope in the peaceful growth of things moving toward maturity, and asks for God's favor on the process of waiting in silence and breaking free. These three songs taken together especially are very special to me, trying to express both the hopeful optimism of a proud parent and the faith that believes that God guides the path to the future by inviting us to go there together, in whatever messy peace we can compromise.

3. Palm Sunday Processional
One big difference between the midwest and the southwest is the weather in winter and early spring. Most of the time, we wouldn't dream of having a Palm Sunday procession outdoors in northern Illinois, but it was not unusual in Phoenix at all. When we thought about doing this, it always seemed difficult to manage a form and style of music that was amicable to walking with minimal accompaniment, and not dependent on a worship aid that would both be distracting from the procession and probably a deterrent to participation, since people wouldn't probably look at it anyway. My thought one year was to write this chant-like litany with a refrain that had a sort of walking rhythm to it and lots of repetition.

The bonus was being able to add instruments to the processional music as the congregation enters the church so that there is a natural crescendo of both depth and excitement to the music as we gather. This simple little litany has proven very successful over the years, and has been in the last two editions (2nd and 3rd) of GIA's Gather Hymnal, and appears in Worship 4th edition as well.

4. Lenten Gospel Acclamation
A simple setting of the last dispensations "Glory to you, Word of God" acclamation, with a Lenten verse and one for Triduum. It can be done a cappella, with ensemble instruments or organ, and has instrumental parts for Holy Thursday use.

5. Precious Blood
A couple of years previous to this, Terry recorded a collection with Pamela Warrick-Smith and Donna Peña entitled One Heart. You may have noticed that I left a hole at "12" for that album, in case I can get Terry to write a little bit about her memories of recording it. See, I can't, because we recorded it in Minneapolis, where Donna lives. Pamela, a wonderful chanteuse from New York, had spearheaded the effort to make this recording, and she and Donna did most of the writing and arranging for it. I was singularly blessed to contribute "Precious Blood" to the effort because of Terry's participation. On the One Heart collection, Pam had sung the song. Terry sings it here. More information at the link to the "SongStories" page.

6. Fraction Rite and "Tableprayer"
Gary's generous nature as a musician and collaborator may well be learned behavior from his years as a member of the Dameans. Their song "Tableprayer" is a beautiful litanic song that praises God for the gift of the eucharist in a series of invocations to which the assembly responds with the words, "How wondrous are your gifts to us." It appeared on their fine collection Morning to Night in 1985. For our collection, Gary wrote a Fraction Rite (Lamb of God) to segue into the communion song, for which I wrote additional invocations or tropes. The Dameans allowed me to add some more verses to their lovely text in order to make it more useful for longer communion processions. "Tableprayer" (the Dameans original version) appeared in the first edition of Gather Comprehensive in 1994, and in RitualSong.

7. Concertato on "I Am the Bread of Life"
No one needs any introduction to Sr. Suzanne Toolan's wonderful communion song, whose origin dates back to the late 1960s. As I mentioned in a recent post, she nearly threw it away, but it was rescued by a young postulant who heard her singing it. It has been part of my liturgical spirituality since then, and I was honored that she allowed me to share my arrangement on this collection. It is always in the top five of my most popular downloads on iTunes, not because of my arrangement, but because people love the song.

8. Psalm 31: I Place My Life
We had recording this psalm on Psalms for the Church Year, Volume 4, when we were in Phoenix, with the great baritone Mike Wieser cantoring. (Spellcheck wants to make that participle "cantering," but in fact he was standing still as he sang.) For this recording, we wanted to have Terry sing it, bringing it another rich layer of meaning and emotion. Annually the responsorial psalm for Good Friday, many people look forward to the 3pm service at St. Anne's when she leads the singing of this psalm in the liturgy of the word and leads us on the psalmist's journey from desolation to hope.

9. Genesis Reading for the Great Vigil
Nothing much to say about this, except that I hear so much, from so many places, that people enjoy participating in the proclamation of the Genesis (and Exodus) readings through my setting, and that I love the CEV translation of "be fruitful and multiply," to wit, "Have a lot of children!"

There was a moment of near disaster (and, consequently, murder) in the studio when huge sections of this piece, largely necessarily improvised, were erased during mixing after the choir had recorded them. Gary was able to re-record some sections of the narration and incidental music, and fly in other refrains from other tracks. Necessity is the mother of improvisation, but it can be a real mother. If you follow me.

10. Psalm 118 (Easter Alleluia) for the Great Vigil, with Easter Gospel according to John
11. A Litany of Saints
Terry and I (mis)conceived of this litany that blends the invocations to the saints with the refrain of "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" while staying at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans with Gary one year at the Hofinger conference. A little shaken by the staid and solemn liturgy at the cathedral we had just briefly witnessed as we walked in the Vieux Carré on a Sunday morning, we wondered why this city that played such an important role in American music didn't have a more American sounding liturgy in its cathedral, and began thinking about how it might be reimagined. One of the ideas we threw around was a litany of the saints based on "Marchin'", and this is what happened.

The local instruments you hear on the refrain were recorded later by Gary in New Orleans. What a coup. So grateful for the opportunities we've had over the years to do this sort of thing.

12. You Have Put on Christ
Gary and I collaborated on this little baptismal acclamation, though my contribution was simply adapting the scriptural acclamations in the RCIA to Gary's music. Easy to sing and perform, simple and joyful, I think it fits the definition of "acclamation" to a tee, and is further adaptable as a sprinkling rite by changing "You" to "we" in the refrain.

13. This Very Morning
I worked with Fr. Stan Szcapa in the North American Forum's institutes on reconciliation, first called "Re-Membering Church" and then "Becoming Reconciling Communities." Stan asked me if I would write a song for the 25th anniversary of his ordination, which was going to take place on or near Pentecost in 1996. The link in the title above will take you to a Pentecost post where I shared the text of the song as a prayer. I still think it's about as good a lyric as I'm capable of, with multiple scriptural images wrapped around the single theme of Pentecost as a moment happening now.

This Very Morning - product page at GIA website



Hits and misses. I've been very happy with the reception of the music on this collection. Two songs (three, if you include Table Prayer) have been anthologized in hymnals, several others are popular in choral music and in reprints. I cannot explain why the song "This Very Morning" didn't work for anybody else. It must just be sign of my interior disorientation: the closer I get to the best I can do, the further away from general acceptance. Just God's way of smiting me, and sparing me from the worst ravages of my own ego. It makes me very grateful for my choir, who humor me, and continually offer me the support and affirmation that gives me the courage to go on. That is how it's supposed to work, it seems to me, at least on this very morning.