Enter the Arbiter: Songs for Holy Week

 From the liner notes:

These songs for Holy Week are arranged roughly in terms of the sequence of days, from Palm Sunday to Easter sunrise, the exception being the instrumental prelude and postlude (Tracks 1 and 12), which I include as artifacts from their service as such in chapel worship ... While just two of these tracks (Tracks 3 and 11), are of my own musical composition (the latter piece opening with a brief quotation from the traditional tune “Eventide”), others include original modifications to old standards. On Track 5, the paraphrase of Psalm 61 (a “Year D” psalm overlooked by both the RCL and the daily lectionary) is mine, while the final musical phrase in the tune, ”The Bonnie Cuckoo,” replaces a more traditional repetition of the previous phrase; the final verse in the lyric of Track 2 is mine, inspired by my translation work on Johann Georg Hamann; the lyric for Track 10 is my attempt to fill a relative scarcity of hymn texts for Holy Saturday and “the harrowing of hell.”      

    Where the use of traditional material is concerned, I have attempted (in part as an example to worship students) to offer relatively fresh pairings of texts and tunes, as in the case of Rhosymedre, Noel Nouvelet, and Es Flog Ein Kleins Waldvögelein, but it is hoped that even the more familiar pairings will gain some new life by way of these guitar settings and (hopefully) fresh instrumentation. In each case I have relied on the guitar to provide most of the chords and have kept harmonies to a minimum, emphasizing melody lines throughout, both vocally and with other instruments, since the use of these tracks for online worship (the whole project being birthed while observing pandemic restrictions in late 2020 and early 2021) aims to encourage participants to sing. 

    I only hope this record will serve, however imperfectly, to remind the church and the world of all that we have to be grateful for in the ministry of the one Arbiter between God and humanity, the Judge who was willingly judged in our place, the Firstborn of a whole new creation, the last Adam who makes all things new and before whom all lying and accusing tongues should and shall cease. I also hope that somehow these songs in praise of Jesus, for all that he did during that Holy Week of the world’s redemption, may reach those who do not yet know him, that they may come to do so and “enter the Arbiter” by way of baptism — by dying and rising to new, eternal life in, with, and for him. — TMS