ONU August/September Update
Bart with a solid mahogany Guild jumbo (looks a little too C&W, but sounds good on recordings)
Hello my gracious, patient friends,
Megan has completed all of her coursework and comps for her MMA in Choral Conducting from NIU. Tomorrow her parents are throwing a BBQ party in her honor. It was a long process made even longer because she faced quite a bit of adversity over the last year at her full-time job whlie she was trying to finish out her degree–and still be a good wife and mother. Our family is breathing a collective sigh of relief.
I have been kept busy at work, watching the children, and serving on our church’s praise team nearly every Sunday. I am more a writer than a performer and prefer the creative solitary existence of a home studio to public performance, but lately I have grown as a musician through continual participation in live playing.
Priorities are now shifting, and my work on O Nox Ultima will now be on the figurative “front burner”. I hope to scale everything else back so that I can finish this huge project. I wrestle with the enormity of it all, and often wonder if my artistic ambition outstrips my ability. Maybe it does. I will just have to work much harder to make up the difference.
Thank you all for your enduring patience and prayers. I hope to have something more substantial to post here than my usual litany of excuses for my lack of progress.
In gratitude,
Bart
August 30, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Hey there, Bart! I’m glad to hear that all is going well with you and your family.
I’m eager to hear your (DIS) current project. It seems like a major undertaking, which is very exciting! I pray God blesses your efforts as you continue. In the meantime, however, do you have any snippets of the project for those of us following your progress?
August 30, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Hey Maggie,
No snippets available. Most of the recorded work thus far has been extremely rough demos that I would never want the world to hear. The S&P demos were awful compared to the final product!
I am still in the writing and arranging phase as of this posting. We welcome any and all prayers for this project, our other ministry opportunities, and for our families.
Bart
October 23, 2009 at 2:18 am
Hey Bart! Have you listened to the new David Crowder Band album (Church Music)? Check it out–a couple of the tracks sound like they’ve got some prog influence, and the album is meant (I believe) to be listened to as a whole. I think you’ll like it
October 24, 2009 at 6:28 am
Hey Jeremy!
I’ll have to check that out. Any Christian band doing album-length projects will pique my interest.
Seeing that you’re a classics major, you might find this interesting: lately I have had to do some background research into Classic Latin pronunciations vs. “Ecclesiastical Latin”. Did you have to study this in college? There are some substantial differences between the two.
In this musical I use both the melody and text of the ancient song Dies Irae, which is of Medieval origin and would have always been sung using Ecclesiastical Latin. But seeing that the story takes place in 1st Century Judaea, I wanted to make sure the Latin pronunciations were more the period-accurate Classical Latin.
Yes, I know that hardly anyone would be able to tell the difference, and this is just a rock ‘n’ roll project, but it would seem to me to be a nice touch to get this right.
November 5, 2009 at 1:56 am
The only main differences are in the ‘v’ and ‘c’ sounds. In medieval Latin the ‘v’ is a ‘v’, in classical it’s more of a ‘w’. Think of how ‘vine’ and ‘wine’ are related words, and you’ll see the idea (i.e., modern Italians pronounce it ‘vino’, while we actually maintain the older, ‘wine’). The other sound is a ‘ch’ in medieval but a hard ‘k’ in Latin. “Gloria in excelsis” is pronounced medievally as “exCHELsis” but classically as “exKELsis.”
But you’re right. Most people won’t know