Last spring, at the Catholic boys school where I teach, we graduated four strong singers who provided a dependable core for our choir the past few years. With a larger but less experienced group to start this school year, the pressure of preparing them to lead the singing at our monthly all-school Masses has had me looking for creative choices for what they might sing.
Our most recent Mass was on the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi (Friday, Oct. 4). I suppose I could have taken one for the team and tried to play this (Liszt's virtuosic evocation of St. Francis talking to the birds - and no, I'm not serious that I would ever try that in this context), but I had the idea that it would be nice to sing the famous words of the "Prayer of St. Francis." I'll admit I was partly attracted to the opening line, "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace," because I liked the musical resonance of the word instrument, even if the prayer is not literally referring to musical instruments. I thought it would be interesting to think of the choristers as musical instruments who deliver this prayer about being instruments for good.
The day when I was thinking about this happened to be the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen, perhaps the most famous composer of chant melodies, so pretty soon that connection had inspired a simple, chant-like melodic figure for the opening words of Francis's prayer: "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace." Because I wanted a bass part with a narrow range and which would not be difficult to learn, I leaned into the idea of treating this phrase as if it belonged to a musical instrument by turning it into an ostinato - which is a fancy way of saying it repeats a lot as a kind of accompaniment to the simple tenor melody above. Even when the basses finally get to sing new words (after intoning that opening line eight times in the background for the first half of the prayer), the melodic figure is mostly unchanged. The piano plays a series of chords in open fifths which provide varied harmonic context for the unchanging ostinato.
Of course, one of the most enduring lessons I've learned in working as a composer is that writing simple is hard, so the resulting piece is a little more complicated for young singers than I might have hoped, mostly because of the uneven rhythmic flow.* But I'm stubborn, so we went ahead with the arrangement as I first wrote it, and they did a nice job singing it with reverence and delivering the text. I, at least, found it moving, and I've appreciated the opportunity to get to know this prayer better. Although it is supposed to sound "old" (Francis lived a long time ago), I believe that chant can serve as a very natural way to deliver words in a way that can still be relevant for listeners.
The recording here is a fully synthesized one I created for practice purposes - which means that for now you can only hear this vocal music in instrumental form. I added some strings and harp to give it a bit more character and distract from the sound of wordless synthesized voices. Given that everything is in middle to low register, the result is a little muddy, but I this does a decent job of showing the basic idea. And these are beautiful words. I'll likely keep tooling around with this, including having my church choir sing a variation of it (with real cellos, since I have a couple of cellists under my roof), but here is where it is for now:
* UPDATE: After reviewing the song with the choir this morning, I'm remembering that probably the most challenging thing about singing this for my students is understanding how to be expressive in this style. Learning the melody notes and even the timing with 5/4 bars is not so bad - but the fact that the mostly linear, unrhythmic melodic style isn't conventionally "catchy" is an issue; and understanding how to shape phrases like this with subtlety, informed by natural text inflections, is not - it turns out - something that can be learned overnight.
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