3. Joelle's Song

3.         Joelle’s Song

This was music composed for the wedding of a daughter of a friend.  The theme kind of appeared all at once, and then worked itself out so easily that I was convinced for the longest time that it must be someone else’s song.  The wedding occurred in a small historic building in Aptos, California.

Basically, the song is in two sections:  a Processional called “To the Brink”, and the Recessional called “Setting Sail”.  When I first discussed the music with Joelle and her mom, I told her that my sense of a marriage is of a very powerful and meaningful first experience for the bride and groom in their lifes, an awesome moment filled with anticipation, hope, anxiety, deep feelings and thoughts of all kinds.....  I wanted the music to be minimal and unobtrusive, a kind of very light high-register setting for the very real and meaningful human events unfolding in a sacramental space.   It seemed to me to be wrong to intrude musically on those few moments the bride and groom have as they physically and mentally approached the event.   Joelle’s mom was hoping for something grander and magnificent (and yet she was the one who asked me to play for the wedding, and therefore knew it would just be solo guitar).  But Joelle herself liked the approach I was taking.

In the actual event, the bride was at least 30 minutes late, and so the music before the Processional became a full-blown raga (that was mostly ignored by the room full of celebrants, all of whom were talking at once).  And then, as so often happens with the “plans of men”, the Recessional was by-passed and shuttled off to the side by the minister who spontaneously changed how the exit of married couple and celebrants would proceed.  As a result, Joelle never heard the song in its entirety until last year! 

For me, it's piece filled with joy, expansion, hopes, dreams, expansion.