Behold the Handmaid

Lorena Schnebly started the whole thing.

In December of 2006 Lorena was asked to sing a solo for the Christmas program in our ward sacrament meeting. She looked for some music that seemed like just the right thing, and she asked me for ideas, but she just couldn't find what she wanted.

Finally one day she asked me to come over for dinner and a visit; and while I was there she said she'd had a song in her head that she thought she could use for the Christmas program. She'd written the words out, and annotated the melody, and wanted to know if I could write a piano accompaniment and a small choir part. I'd always thought I'd like to write music, but had never really done anything like this before. Still, I said I'd give it a try.

The choir part and a small ornament to the accompaniment popped into my head right away. After that it took a couple of days to figure out and write out the whole thing. I was a little nervous to play it for her, but she loved it! Now she had her solo, but we had to present it to the choir so they could learn their little bit. They loved it too! We had our Christmas song, In Her Heart, a lullaby for Mary, with most of the text being based from scripture.

After Christmas was all over with, Lorena came to me and said she couldn't get it out of her mind to make a second song, using the idea of Mary witnessing the crucifixion and reflecting back on the lullaby she sang to the baby Jesus. She had no ideas for melody or words as yet, but she asked me to think about it. One day, as I was making my bed, the first lines of melody and lyrics came to my head. So I wrote it down, and pretty soon had the entire melody and probably 2/3 of the lyrics—plus some outlined ideas for lyrics—for the whole piece. I played it for Lorena and she really liked it, so I went back to the piano to come up with an accompaniment, while she worked on some of the missing lyrics. The accompaniment for this one was more difficult at first. But soon our Pieta was completed.

As I worked on Pieta, I thought that now we had the birth and crucifixion of Christ—from Mary's perspective—but we really needed a piece to talk about the triumph of the resurrection. And soon the idea evolved into making a series of pieces, sketches of the Savior's life as his mother saw it.

The next piece to be worked on was In the Morning, the resurrection piece (the title was taken from Psalms 30:5 "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."). At first I only had a few basic, incomplete ideas for it, so I asked Lorena to work on it too. She came up with the first part of it, and from there I was able to bring it to life. It was a HUGE piece—beginning with sorrowing, turning to a kind of almost timid happiness, and finally to a triumphant realization of what had happened—full of fanfares and hallelujahs. Very big. It was also the most difficult to work out, the one I felt I'd put the most of my own effort—and the smallest bit of "inspiration"—into.

I felt like we could have stopped with the three pieces and had a really nice set. But Lorena wanted to continue with the idea of the four sketches. She came up with words and a melody for Jesus' growing up and ministry, A Man All His Own. Unfortunately, the melody echoed another song too closely, so I took it in hand and changed it. I found out later that Lorena was a little upset with me for not including her more in that song. But it was written at a time when she just wasn't available to work with me very much, and now we were on a deadline—we had asked to be able to perform the entire piece as a ward fireside at the end of May 2007, and we were still writing A Man All His Own at the beginning of April.

The last piece, Behold the Handmaid, was easy. It popped into my head, I wrote the music and most of the lyrics (asking for Lorena's help with words when I got stuck), and then we rearranged it together for a reprise at the end of the whole program.

Once all the music was written, Lorena and I got together to write out a narrative to go between each piece and tie it all together. And we had decided to put all the pieces together in an art book, with drawings for the title page of each individual piece, so we asked church members, family and friends to do the artwork for us.

When the music/art books were done we soon realized that we just wouldn't be able to get enough choir support from just our ward. So went to our stake presidency and asked if we could do it as a stake Christmas fireside in December 2007. (There are several wards in a stake, so even though a ward choir might only have four to fifteen members, we could probably get a decent stake choir.) The stake presidency reluctantly agreed to it; reluctant because they thought we wouldn't get much choir participation or get a good turnout to see the performance.

I won't give you all the details of getting approval to do the program, advertising for it, putting together a stake art show to go with it, and working with the choir. I will tell you that we had an astounding turn-out. At our first practice we had 72 choir members show up, in addition to the four soloists and the women's trio we'd auditioned for the five songs. We ended with about 60 singers, the soloists and trio, and four men to do the narrations. There were about 500 to 700 people in attendance to watch the performance. That is really incredible for a stake fireside—even one done at Christmas time. And I think it was well received. It was such an amazing experience to see and hear our music come to life.

But since that evening of the fireside,I have often wondered if the music was really that good. I mean, I know it was good, but was it that good? I remember about a year later, driving home alone one night and listening to classical radio. They were playing Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, and it had gotten to the wonderful, lyrical piano, 18th variation (you can hear it in the movie Somewhere in Time—it's probably the most famous variation in that piece) and the melodies and the harmonies in it are just so incredible and so beautiful. I hadn't been thinking of my music at all, but as I heard that wonderful piece by Rachmaninoff I suddenly thought of our Behold the Handmaid suite, and wondered, was it really any good?

I don't aspire to be a Rachmaninoff, or to have the greatness of really any other composer, old or new; and I didn't aspire to it while we were writing the music, either. But our music seemed good while Lorena and I were in the throes of writing it and getting it performed. We'd both always wanted to write music, but never been . . . inspired? . . . with anything; and now, suddenly, music was just flowing from us. So it was very exciting. I think it was good music, but every now and then I wonder, "How good was it? Were we just caught up in the excitement of the whole thing, or was it really, actually good?"

I suppose I'll never really know. But I'd love to be able to hear it performed again and see what I think.