BEHIND THE DOTS (S1E1) - Let My Prayer Rise Up by Joanna Forbes L'Estrange

Today's episode is about Let My Prayer Rise Up. Let's delve BEHIND THE DOTS... As with every piece of choral music that I  write, I take my initial inspiration from the text. This particular text is from Psalm 141: Let  my prayer rise up into thy presence like incense. I love that image. I can just picture sitting  cross-legged, incense stick lit wafting up as I sit with my eyes closed in a sort of meditation.  So, for me, when I began to set this piece I thought of the music of Taizé. If you're

not  familiar with Taizé it's a region in the east of France and they have a wonderful Christian  community there where they sing music which comprises very short phrases which are repeated  and repeated and repeated. I'm guessing it's not everybody's cup of tea but I love it. It has  a sort of meditative quality about it and when you're singing these repeated phrases you get  deeper and deeper into the sense of the words and also you connect with the other people who  are singing on a very dee

p and spiritual level. So these words suggested that kind of music to  me and when I was coming up with the initial melody I wanted something which also reflected  the yearning the longing in the word words "let my prayer rise up into thy presence like  incense". So my first thought was I need to create the right tonality and I was  looking for the right key. For me keys are very representative of mood and also of  colour and when I was reading this particular text it was a sort of deep rich pur

ple  velvet that came to mind. For me that key is F# minor. But how to invoke that sense  of longing? Well, for me, the added ninth of a chord creates that sense of push and pull.  And then I wanted to write a melody which sits comfortably in vocal range -, not too  low not too high - something around the middle of the range. That's really important,  I think, when you're writing a piece which has a meditative quality because you want it to  sound restful and peaceful. The word "prayer" is the c

rux of that sentence and so that's  the word that I gave the added ninth. [Music] Then the second phrase of this piece is "let  the lifting up of my hands be as an evening sacrifice". This was the piece that gave me my  idea for the front cover of my choral album Heaven to Earth of which this is the first track. So at  this point I needed a way of showing the lifting up of the hands so I decided to modulate from  F minor into A minor which is lovely when you go up a minor third. It always has a

wonderful  effect. I sing a lot of film soundtracks and that's a classic film score manoeuvre there. So  instead I had this new brighter key of A minor, still not a very bright shiny orange of A  major but a lift from the deep purple into something a bit lighter to show this new  lyric of "let the lifting up of my hands." [Music] And then I combined the two melodies,  both this time in the original F minor key, so I modulated back from A minor back into F minor  and joined the two melodies toget

her. [Music] And then to finish the piece  instead of having "be as evening sacrifice" which is what I had  earlier, I used augmentation so that the harmonic rhythm as well as the actual  note lengths of the melody were [Music] doubled. But then I didn't want to end it  in the minor, so I used what we call in the trade a Tierce de Picardie, another French  reference, Picardie in the north of France (don't know why it was named after Picardie)  but it's a lovely tool that you can use as a compose

r when you've been in the minor to  end in the major. And the reason I did that was because I wanted to give the effect  that the prayer had risen up to Heaven. So I really hope that you'll want to have a  go at this piece. It's one of many two-part anthems in this wonderful new collection by  the Royal School of Church Music and, happily, if you let it fall open at the staples you'll  find my piece! It's very clever, this book, because you can either sing the two parts  as soprano and alto on o

ne line and tenor and bass on the other OR you can have sopranos  and tenors on one line and altos and basses on on the other OR you can mix and match OR  you can do it with all upper voices and just have sopranos on one line and altos  on the other. It's really flexible and a very clever way to enable every choir to  be able to sing the anthems in this book. So I hope this short video has inspired  you to sing this piece with your choir.