Inventing Music

Finally, in the fall of 1975, when I was thirty-three years old--after more than three decades of listening to music, playing music, and thinking about music--I wrote a short song, 'This Is My Blood,' which was the very definition of a song:  4-part choir (or 4 single voices), with optional, or for rehearsal only, organ duplication of the notes; the music being entirely and organically derived from the text (verses from the Gospel of Mark), one syllable per note, with only two melismas (on the words "shed" and "vine") for pictorial/graphic effect; sung (all 4 parts) in the person of Jesus Christ.  Which is an idea I apparently stole from Thomas Tallis, whose 'If you love me, keep my commandments' has much the same affect and the same effect.  A friend, fellow composer and professional musician to whom I showed the piece said, "It is very correct."  And, I think he meant, exiguous.  Yet, in summoning 'This Is My Blood' from its repository on the Astral Plane (or Lunar Sphere), and re-perusing it, I am still amazed (as if it had been written by someone else) at its boldness and compendiousness as a Gradus Primus ad Parnassum; how successfully it defines, and deals with, counterpoint, harmony and voice-leading--and, incidentally, binary form.  Of particular note also is its status as specifically a religious song, of a religion whereof I am not a communicant, and which I personally believe to be (as religions go) a damned, false, vulgar, hysterical barbarism--and yet, I dare say, I have well and fairly expressed even its innermost mysteries (or what its adherents believe to be such) without the least occasion of scandal for the faithful, or the slightest perceptible intrusion of my own utter disbelief.  As, I believe, any competent artist ought always to be able to do.