Commissioned by: Richard Miller, Michael Miller & Mary Miller Bullis, in honor of Mary Jo Bullis
Premiere: 14 February 1993 at First Methodist Church of Lawrence, KS, under the direction of Joel Panciera, Minister of Music
Circular Psalm was commissioned in honor of a woman who had spent her life in service to others. Upon learning that she was a member of a hand bell choir, I chose that medium to create a piece the she could participate in along with her other musician friends. The text was inspired by a Sanskrit poem stating that a good person's love "lives on in men like a bell's reverberation." This phrase reminded me of the old analogy of a pebble dropped into a pond as a model of how sound waves travel through air. I revised the text to unite these ideas - "Like a stone in water cast releases ever expanding waves, So it is a selfless act within the soul reverberates" - and then decided to continue the allusion by writing the hand bell part as a series of arpeggios that create the visual effect of waves expanding outward in both directions from the center bell. Finally, the string quartet adds both extended reverberation and the "plop" of the stone dropping into the water to complete the setting.
Written: 1992
Instrumentation:
solo
mezzo, handbells, stg 4tet
Performance Highlights:
Plymouth
Music Series of MN
Audio Sample: Clip
one
Publisher: Subito Music Corporation
