Take My Life, That I May Be

SKU: CF.FAS108

ISBN 9781491151396. UPC: 680160908899. 9 x 12 inches. Key: D major.

Annie's Gone Home, composed in the style of a spiritual, was written as a tribute to composer Bud Woodruff's mother. The tune is built on phrases of easily understandable material, but the poignant nature of the piece is marked with profundity. From the subtle bass solo to the emotional high points, the piece is inspired by this strong woman in the life of the composer.

Annies Gone Home is a tribute to my Mother, Annette Fenner Hains (19232017). Her siblings and cousins always called her Annie. She loved music, and her influence was the primary inspiration for me to go into music. Her tastes were wildly diverse, loving everything from symphonic music to Country/Western, to various styles of folk music, to pop, to marches, but she had a very tender spot for hymns and spirituals.

While it is easy to interpret grief in this music, and its presence is undeniable, it is really intended more as a song of the ultimate triumph of goodness. In her wisdom, she was able to capture deep thoughts within simple phrases, which I have also tried to capture. Her life was one of frequent struggles, yet she was inspiring to many. She emerged from every difficulty, never unscathed, but always victorious, with clear eyes and head held high, until her last battle, which brought about her greatest victory. This sentiment is what I tried to capture. If too slow a tempo is taken, that feeling is lost and a sense of grief takes over. That may be what a conductor wants to convey, but is not what I intended.

Annieas Gone HomeA is a tribute to my Mother, Annette Fenner Hains (1923a2017). Her siblings and cousins always called her aAnnie.a She loved music, and her influence was the primary inspiration for me to go into music. Her tastes were wildly diverse, loving everything from symphonic music to Country/Western, to various styles of folk music, to pop, to marches, but she had a very tender spot for hymns and spirituals.

While it is easy to interpret grief in this music, and its presence is undeniable, it is really intended more as a song of the ultimate triumph of goodness. In her wisdom, she was able to capture deep thoughts within simple phrases, which I have also tried to capture. Her life was one of frequent struggles, yet she was inspiring to many. She emerged from every difficulty, never unscathed, but always victorious, with clear eyes and head held high, until her last battle, which brought about her greatest victory. This sentiment is what I tried to capture. If too slow a tempo is taken, that feeling is lost and a sense of grief takes over. That may be what a conductor wants to convey, but is not what I intended.

Annieas Gone HomeA is a tribute to my Mother, Annette Fenner Hains (1923a2017). Her siblings and cousins always called her aAnnie.a She loved music, and her influence was the primary inspiration for me to go into music. Her tastes were wildly diverse, loving everything from symphonic music to Country/Western, to various styles of folk music, to pop, to marches, but she had a very tender spot for hymns and spirituals.

While it is easy to interpret grief in this music, and its presence is undeniable, it is really intended more as a song of the ultimate triumph of goodness. In her wisdom, she was able to capture deep thoughts within simple phrases, which I have also tried to capture. Her life was one of frequent struggles, yet she was inspiring to many. She emerged from every difficulty, never unscathed, but always victorious, with clear eyes and head held high, until her last battle, which brought about her greatest victory. This sentiment is what I tried to capture. If too slow a tempo is taken, that feeling is lost and a sense of grief takes over. That may be what a conductor wants to convey, but is not what I intended.

Annie's Gone Home is a tribute to my Mother, Annette Fenner Hains (1923-2017). Her siblings and cousins always called her Annie. She loved music, and her influence was the primary inspiration for me to go into music. Her tastes were wildly diverse, loving everything from symphonic music to Country/Western, to various styles of folk music, to pop, to marches, but she had a very tender spot for hymns and spirituals.

While it is easy to interpret grief in this music, and its presence is undeniable, it is really intended more as a song of the ultimate triumph of goodness. In her wisdom, she was able to capture deep thoughts within simple phrases, which I have also tried to capture. Her life was one of frequent struggles, yet she was inspiring to many. She emerged from every difficulty, never unscathed, but always victorious, with clear eyes and head held high, until her last battle, which brought about her greatest victory. This sentiment is what I tried to capture. If too slow a tempo is taken, that feeling is lost and a sense of grief takes over. That may be what a conductor wants to convey, but is not what I intended.

SKU: HL.147434

UPC: 888680073831. 5.0x5.0x0.2 inches.

Your pianist takes an equal role in this exquisite ballad that is tinged with melancholy. A superb selection for a more mature or community ensemble. Here's to life, here's to love and here's to you..

SKU: PR.114419980

UPC: 680160681723. 9 x 12 inches.

The ancient Egyptian empire began around 3100 B.C. and continued for over 3000 years until Alexander the Great conquered the country in 332 B.C. Over the centuries, the Egyptian empire grew and flourished into a highly developed society. They invented hieroglyphics, built towering pyramids (including the Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the World), and the created many household items we still use today, including toothbrushes, toothpaste, eyeliner, black ink, and the forerunner of modern-day paper. Included among their achievements were a series of highly developed funerary practices and beliefs in the Afterlife. As the average lifespan of an Egyptian hovered around 30 years, living past the death of oneAs physical body was a legitimate concern. Egyptians believed that upon death, their souls would undertake a harrowing journey through the Netherworld. If they survived the horrific creatures and arduous trials that awaited them, then their souls would be reunified with their bodies (hence the need to preserve the body through mummification) and live forever in a perfect version of the life they had lived in Egypt. To achieve this, Egyptians devised around 200 magical spells and incantations to aid souls on the path to the Afterlife. These spells are collectively called The Book of the Dead. Particular spells would be chosen by the family of the deceased and inscribed on the tombAs walls and scrolls of papyrus, as well as on a stone scarab placed over the deceasedAs heart. Subsequent collections of spells and mortuary texts, such as The Book of Gates, assisted a soul in navigating the twelve stages of the Netherworld. Not only did these spells protect and guide the soul on this dangerous path, but they also served as a safeguard against any unbecoming behavior an Egyptian did while alive. For instance, if a person had robbed another while alive, there was a spell that would prevent the soulAs heart from revealing the truth when in the Hall of Judgment. Rites for the Afterlife follows the path of a soul to the Afterlife. In Inscriptions from the Book of the Dead (movement 1), the soul leaves the body and begins the journey, protected by spells and incantations written on the tombAs walls. In Passage though the Netherworld (movement 2), the soul is now on a funerary barque, being towed through the Netherworld by four of the regionAs inhabitants. We hear the soul slowly chanting incantations as the barque encounters demons, serpents, crocodiles, lakes of fire, and other terrors. The soul arrives at The Hall of Judgment in movement 3. Standing before forty-two divine judges, the soul addresses each by name and gives a A!negative confessionA(r) connected to each judge (i.e. A!I did not rob,A(r) A!I did not do violence,A(r) and so on). Afterwards, the soulAs heart is put on a scale to be weighed against a feather of MaAat, the goddess of truth. If the heart weighs more than the feather, it will be eaten by Ammut, a hideous creature that lies in wait below the scale, and the soul will die a second and permanent death (this was the worst fear of the Egyptians). But if the heart is in balance with the feather, the soul proceeds onward. The final stage of the journey is the arrival at The Field of Reeds (movement 4), which is a perfect mirror image of the soulAs life in ancient Egypt. The soul reunites with deceased family members, makes sacrifices to the Egyptian gods and goddess, harvests crops from plentiful fields of wheat under a brilliant blue sky, and lives forever next to the abundant and nourishing waters of the Nile. Rites for the Afterlife was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment on behalf of the Akropolis Reed Quintet, Calefax Reed Quintet, and the Brigham Young University Reed Quintet. -S.G.

SKU: GI.G-9978

UPC: 785147997832.

With a passion for liturgical prayer, the vision of Catholic Social Teaching, and witness of Pope Francis, Lori True has created a collection of sung prayer for communities who want to embrace the unrelenting love of God and the deep challenge of Christ. Here you will find songs for gathering, communion, times of grief, doubt, action, and celebration, all fashioned with texts that foster deep reflection and her signature, accessible melodies, all ready to serve a wide variety of communal gatherings. Take some time to explore “Show By Your Life,” and discover a very unique and prophetic collection of liturgical music that the church desperately needs. CONTENTS: Show by Your Life • O Love, Ever Faithful • Take Our Hands • My Favor Rests on You • Wage Peace • My Daily Portion • In the Morning, in the Evening • Grieve Not • The Hand of Our God • Pardon Is the Instrument • I Will Give You Life • When One among Us • I Send You with the Grace of My Spirit.

SKU: PR.11441690S

UPC: 680160626021. 9 x 12 inches.

Ran's third string quartet was written for the Pacifica Quartet, who are featuring it in numerous performances from May 2014 through February 2016, across the country and abroad. Their blog page dedicated to the work also features the composer's notes, for more indepth insight. ...impassioned solos emerge from ominous quiet, and high arpeggios in the violins quiver alongside the earthy cello. Ms. Ran skillfully deploys these extremes of color, volume and pitch, yet the overall somewhat chilly impression is one of poise. -- Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times.
My third string quartet was composed at the invitation of the Pacifica Quartet, whose music-making I have come to know closely and admire hugely as resident artists at the University of Chicago.  Already in our early conversations Pacifica proposed that this quartet might, in some manner, refer to the visual arts as a point of germination.  Probing further, I found out that the quartet members had special interest in art created during the earlier part of the 20th century, perhaps between the two world wars.  It was my good fortune to have met, a short while later, while in residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2011, art conservationist Albert Albano who steered me to the work of Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944), a German-Jewish painter who, like so many others, perished in the Holocaust at a young age, and who left some powerful, deeply moving art that spoke to the life that was unraveling around him. The title of my string quartet takes its inspiration from a major exhibit devoted to art by German artists of the period of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) titled “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s”, first shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006-07.  Nussbaum would have been a bit too young to be included in this exhibit.  His most noteworthy art was created in the last very few years of his short life.  The exhibit’s evocative title, however, suggested to me the idea of “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory” as a way of framing a possible musical composition that would be an homage to his life and art, and to that of so many others like him during that era.  Knowing that their days were numbered, yet intent on leaving a mark, a legacy, a memory, their art is triumph of the human spirit over annihilation. Parallel to my wish to compose a string quartet that, typically for this genre, would exist as “pure music”, independent of a narrative, was my desire to effect an awareness in my listener of matters which are, to me, of great human concern.  To my mind there is no contradiction between the two goals.  As in several other works composed since 1969, this is my way of saying ‘do not forget’, something that, I believe, can be done through music with special power and poignancy.    The individual titles of the quartet’s four movements give an indication of some of the emotional strands this work explores. 1) “That which happened” (das was geschah) – is how the poet Paul Celan referred to the Shoah – the Holocaust.  These simple words served for me, in the first movement, as a metaphor for the way in which an “ordinary” life, with its daily flow and its sense of sweet normalcy, was shockingly, inhumanely, inexplicably shattered. 2) “Menace” is a shorter movement, mimicking a Scherzo.  It is also machine-like, incessant, with an occasional, recurring, waltz-like little tune – perhaps the chilling grimace we recognize from the executioner’s guillotine mask.  Like the death machine it alludes to, it gathers momentum as it goes, and is unstoppable. 3) ”If I must perish - do not let my paintings die”; these words are by Felix Nussbaum who, knowing what was ahead, nonetheless continued painting till his death in Auschwitz in 1944.  If the heart of the first movement is the shuddering interruption of life as we know it, the third movement tries to capture something of what I can only imagine to be the conflicting states of mind that would have made it possible, and essential, to continue to live and practice one’s art – bearing witness to the events.  Creating must have been, for Nussbaum and for so many others, a way of maintaining sanity, both a struggle and a catharsis – an act of defiance and salvation all at the same time. 4) “Shards, Memory” is a direct reference to my quartet’s title.  Only shards are left.  And memory.  The memory is of things large and small, of unspeakable tragedy, but also of the song and the dance, the smile, the hopes.  All things human.  As we remember, in the face of death’s silence, we restore dignity to those who are gone.—Shulamit Ran .

SKU: HL.263232

ISBN 9781540021038. UPC: 888680729318. 9.0x12.0x0.586 inches.

Romance, heartbreak, optimism, melancholy, or just a lovely autumn day - it's all been captured by American songwriters. A generation of the country's finest songwriters captured universal feelings and experiences in such an infectious combination of words and music that their songs still inspire today. This collection features 100 classics by treasured composers arranged for ukulele: All the Things You Are (Jerome Kern) * Blue Skies (Irving Berlin) * Come Fly with Me (Sammy Cahn) * Georgia on My Mind (Hoagy Carmichael) * Mood Indigo (Duke Ellington) * On the Street Where You Live (Lerner & Loewe) * People Will Say We're in Love (Rodgers & Hammerstein) * Somebody Loves Me (George Gershwin) * You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To (Cole Porter) * and more.