Far Heaven: Songs and Tunes for Chorus and Small Groups, by Don Jamison.
Published by Don Jamison, Burlington, VT, 2009.
Book with accompanying CD: $25.00
Price: $25.00
(Includes book, CD)
Intended as a ‘community songbook, with music written for several connected circles of singers in Vermont’ (including Village Harmony). The book, which is accompanied by a disc with recordings of all of the compositions, includes twenty-five of Don Jamison’s beloved and imaginative compositions. Jamison has divided his highly-singable and fascinating choral pieces into three sections: shape-note-inspired tunes, three-part songs, and four- and five-part songs. The title of both the book and the first song comes from Isaac Watts’ text: ‘Far in the heavens my God retires:/ My God, the mark of my desires,/ And hides his lovely face…’ Many of the songs, the composer writes in his introduction, ‘have to do with a search for God—or the spiritual world more broadly—and a right relationship with nature and the cosmos… Sometimes when I listen to music, and, more often, when I make music, the world seems to reveal a little more of what it really is—and relationships feel clear and direct, and “heaven” not so far away at all…’
Table of Contents / Sample
Mp3s
click
highlighted titles to listen
Part One: Shape-note-inspired tunes
Far Heaven
Cabin Hill
Owen Sound
North Street
Kingdom
Sweet Brother Weed
Mission Farm
Jackson Heights
Part Two: Three-part songs
Sometimes
Night Song
Spring and Fall
Stars
Ubiquity
How Long?
Autumn Carol
Three Restless Songs
1. The Shadowy Horses
2. Where is Our Mother of Peace
3. The Song of Wandering Angus
Part Three: Four- and Five-Part Songs
Inversnaid
Pied Beauty
Measure of the Stars
1. Not to be cut off
2. Nocturn
Mother-Root
Falling
1. Fall Day
2. Fall