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This Is a Day of New Beginnings
Composer David Ashley White
Text Brian Wren
Voicing SATB, organ, opt. cong.
Topics Anniversaries, New Year's, Ordination, Dedication
Length 3' 10" Price $2.00 (U.S.) Released 7/99
Catalog no. 425-871 Difficulty Moderately difficult
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 Review
"David Ashley White's 'This Is a Day of New Beginnings' (on Brian Wren's text)) is something of a conundrum to me. On the one hand, it is David at his glorious best: urgent, compelling, and deeply satisfying. On the other hand, the rich Easter text, commissioned for a Sesquicentennial celebration, will stick in the mind for some of the wrong reasons if used in Easter ("...time to remember and move on"). It would be ideal in a patronal feast which falls during Eastertide: churches named for the Annunciation, St. Mark, St. Philip, St. James, Gregory Nazianzus, Dunstan, etc. I am also intrigued by the shape of the piece; as it appears in the score, Wren's text is set first as an anthem for SATB, organ, and brass on [White's] tune, all leading up to singing the same four stanzas of text and tune as congregational hymn. After multiple returns to this piece, I am convinced that is should end without the hymn (add a tonic chord as measure 65)." --AAM Journal, Feb. 2001
Description
A joyous, festive piece, especially appropriate for church anniversaries or millennium celebrations. At the close of the work, the congregation can join the choir in singing the stirring Brian Wren hymn text on which the anthem is based.
Anthem text
This is a day of new beginnings,
time to remember and move on,
time to believe what love is bringing,
laying to rest the pain that's gone.
For by the life and death of Jesus,
love's mighty Spirit, now as then,
can make for us a world of difference,
as faith and hope are born again.
Then let us, with the Spirit's daring,
step from the past and leave behind
our disappointment, guilt, and grieving,
seeking new paths, and sure to find.
Christ is alive, and goes before us
to show and share what love can do.
This is a day of new beginnings;
our God is making all things new.
-Brian Wren, 1978
©1983, 1987 Hope Publishing Co., Carol Stream, Ill. 60188 (for permission to reprint this text contact Hope at 800.323.1049-www.hopepublishing.com). All rights reserved. |
