Psalm 122: I Rejoiced by Christopher Walker

Text and music copyright 1988, Christopher Walker. Published by OCP

[PABWECG]

Wow, I've never heard this song. I love it!

[christopherrushlau]

"Faustus" by Thomas Mann deals with a composer who makes deals with the Devil to get his musical contrivances. This merely, I realize now, forty years later, was Mann's odd philosophy. But I was listening to Lennon's "She Said" and marveling at the evil ingenuity of it, catchy in the extreme but with an extremely dubious message (see Wikipedia on its composition). So Walker's song had me a bit worried. I worked out the chords years ago but couldn't justify it musically. Did it modulate in the middle? That's one year of music theory in high school speaking. So after much painstaking labor, including in the middle of last night, I realized that Walker, as the score in JourneySongs finally showed me upon close study, never changes key. All those odd chords belong to F in all its various guises. When it returns to an F chord a couple of times in the middle, if I listen really carefully, I can notice its return to home base. The last bit, with the E flat chord then the F, clearly sounds to me now as a return. All my chords turned out to be right. It was my theory that was a bit lacking. So there is no satanic ingenuity in this composition, merely making full use of what the humble F key provides. If, say, a song in F couldn't occasionally slide down to an E flat chord, where would we get the average Kinks song? You've really got this one by heart: your hands, that is. Why isn't there an Alt code for the flat symbol? Composers don't do that here, evidently.