Seasonal Notes

I'm the Prelude project manager who sifts through spreadsheets and sheet music in order to bring you the new material that keeps flowing into Prelude, both from Augsburg Fortress and our musical partner publishers. Many talented musicians have already contributed to this blog, and will do so in the future, and they are much better organists and choral directors than I could ever hope to be, but my special niche here will be give you content updates that go more in-depth than small front-page announcements. This gives me a chance to share specific recommendations from the recent batch that I hope you love as much as I do, things to bookmark for your planning this coming educational/liturgical year.

One exciting development recently here at Prelude is all of the new content we have from GIA. Lots of this content is recent (2013), but over half of it is older material hand-picked by knowledgable staff here. The most recent batch of content added included some really good meaty arrangements for Christmas or Easter holiday festivities, things with brass quintets or strings or timpani, by folks like John Ferguson and Marty Haugen. Just before our GIA batch got loaded here, we finished adding our recent Augsburg Fortress fall/winter 2014 releases, too, so there's a mix of GIA material new and classic and new AF material in the list below, so you can survey arrangements from several years and seasons as you plan for the year ahead:

• Immediately useful for your special music this summer: K. Lee Scott's 2014 vocal solos New Songs of Gladness in medium-high and medium-low from Augsburg Fortress

• Also useful right now for summer and fall weddings for the organ players: Augsburg Organ Library: Marriage

• Late November/Christ the King choral arrangement: Christus Paradox, gorgeous text, set to Picardy, from GIA

• For Thanksgiving or Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, SATB + Children's Choir: Marty Haugen's Thanks Be To God is a melody paired with children's choir singing the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome, from GIA

• Christmas liturgy: for an easy but festive idea, we’ve just added a Christmastime Alleluia that uses O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis) for the assembly part, with echoes of Silent Night in the instrumental accompaniments by James J. Chepponis, from GIA

Find ALL of the above recommendations live on Prelude now, with full previews available for you of all these new (and in the case of GIA, various years) items, so you can read all the way to the end, and know before you buy--How high do the sopranos need to go? How many divisi parts? Will this be an easy couple weeks of rehearsal or a challenge to plan over a few months for my choir?

If you don't have Prelude yet, summertime is a great time to give a free trial or a Webinar a try. Play around, have fun, explore new and older music gems, find something to inspire you during your summer planning time.