• Instrumentation: Medium Voice & Piano 

• Duration: 3:00'

• Text: Micah 6:8 KJV

 

Program Note

 

Commissioned by Helen Weinland through the New Choral Music! initiative, a Kickstarter project that funded my 2011 CD Motets.  Helen was a volunteer alto at Trinity Church, Boston. Both my wife and I taught her privately, singing being a life-long passion to which she turned after her retirement from the foreign service.  The song was premiered by Katherine Growdon, a colleague and fellow staff singer at Trinity, who became Helen's voice teacher after my wife's freelance career began to keep her on the road more often.

 

Helen selected this text from Micah: ...and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?  The setting strikes a balance between humility and the simplicity of a deliberate understanding of purpose.