Make Haste Oh God!

PROGRAM NOTES: While living on the island of Guam in the Marianas Islands in the late 1960s, as a professor at the university, my wife and I were active in the music community. The time was during the Vietnam war and Guam, a U.S. territory, was our western-most support of the war effort for U.S. military forces. To understand this sacred choral work, let me take you back to a Sunday in 1968. It is a Sunday morning service at the Naval Air Station non-denominational chapel where I served as music director. Our Nation is fully engaged in the Vietnam war and everyone in the chapel is being touched in some way by the war. The chaplain reads Psalm 70, "Make haste, O God," and its spiritual message seems to capture the despair surrounding us with the island and military community fully engaged in the war effort. The psalm's message, however, gives us hope and consolation that through God's grace we can be "delivered" from the "confusion," the "pain," from that which "seeks after our soul," and for each of us to "rejoice and be glad" for the camaraderie, music making, and joy that surrounds us, especially living among the welcoming Chamorro people who suffered under Japanese occupation for three years. The composition captures this spiritual moment in music: the "pain" and "despair" through the dissonance; the "seeking" through the contrapuntal and chant-like passages; the "rejoicing in God salvation" in the open sonorities and exciting rhythms; and comfort in reaching the resonance of major chords. The voices lie within normal ranges for TTB men; the primary challenge is singing the dissonant harmonies in an a cappella setting. Singers should be coached to embrace and lean into the dissonances. Thanks to the encouragement of Dr. Tim Fredstrom, director of the Illinois State University Men's Glee Choir, I revised various sections and re-scored the original SAB score for TTB men's voices. The work has received premiere performances from the University of Guam's Madrigal Choir, the ISU Men's Glee Choir, and most recently, selected for the University of Arkansas Fort Smith's Men's Choir to be performed on the program of the College Music Society's South Central Conference (March, 2024). DBW