Easter morning at church, we always like to have "real brass" augmenting the sound. There's nothing like hearing choir, organ, and real brass. Big sound. In the old days, we a had quartet; two trombones and two trumpets. For a while it was just two trumpets. We had three one year. Recent years, we've been down to one trumpet. Local musicians figured out that they could charge $100 or $150 to play at local services, since everyone was doing it, but we're just a small church and don't have a huge budget. This year, we had some money, but our choir director couldn't find anyone. Like, nobody anywhere. We usually hit up the local high schools, but everyone's on Spring Break.
At choir rehearsal a few weeks back, I said "You know, saxophones are made of brass, so technically..." I'm not sure how serious I was, but if the idea is to augment the sound, why not? I've played my alto in church a few times with the praise band, and Brian (one of the basses (I'm a tenor)) has an alto and a soprano. The anthem has optional parts for two trumpets and two trombones. Checking it out, you could have all four, or just the two trumpets, and it would work. Just the two trombones would be weird but okay, but if you can get trombones, you can probably get trumpets. I suggested Brian play his soprano, which is Bb, so he wouldn't have to transpose, and I'd play my alto and just wing it.
The next rehearsal, our director showed up with the two trumpet parts transcribed from the "miniature" versions on the back page of the choir part. Apparently you had to order them separately (and pay for them, of course), so she just did them on her PC using Sibelius. I would've done the same if she'd given me the go-ahead, but whatever, she did it, and was obviously on board with the idea. Our choir is small, but we can afford to lose one tenor and one bass if it meant having brass. So we did "Joy in the Morning" with a soprano sax and an alto sax playing the trumpet parts. It was different, but pretty cool.
Rewind to Friday night. As I lay in bed, I was thinking ahead to this morning, thinking about how cool it was gonna be to have brass, and actually get to be part of it. I thought about the opening strains of "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" (which is always the opening hymn on Easter morning) and... Hey, why aren't we doing
all the hymns with brass?
So Saturday (yesterday), I shot an email to Shirley (the director) and Brian, and told them I had some time, and wanted to whip up some charts, and what did they think? I'd be willing to just fly with it, but Brian isn't quite the war-scarred veteran I am, and would want to rehearse it, and maybe wouldn't even feel comfortable doing it with just one rehearsal. But I sent the email, and then immediately started working on the charts. An hour later, I had two verses. I wasn't sure how many verses we were going to sing, but we could do two, alternate between them, skip a verse, whatever. We had some ammo. Different harmonies and augmentations, lifted from the actual choral parts and transposed in various combinations.
I logged back into my email and, not really surprisingly, nothing new yet. So I sent the soprano part to Brian and the two-sax part to Shirley (actually I sent both to both, since it was the same email conversation), and asked Shirley if she knew what the closing hymn was going to be. Gotta open
and close with the brass, right?
I checked throughout the day, but Shirley was gone all day. I should've just called her. But Brian answered, asked me if I could meet him early to run through it a few times. Sure. Then he wrote back later, said he's tried it and it was a piece of cake, so if we did it once during regular rehearsal before the service, he'd be fine. Yes! I never did hear back from Shirley though. But hey, we'd have brass for the opening hymn as well.
This morning, Shirley happened to check her email and answered me. She's fine with everything, even thanked me for doing it since she'd run out of time (she should've just asked me -- I would've done it but didn't think of it). The closing hymn is "Christ is Risen", but at this point I didn't have time, since I too was basically doing a last-minute email check before leaving the house. Crap. She showed up at rehearsal with a pad of five-line paper, said asked me if I wanted to whip something up really quick, or she could do it. Whoa.
During the sermon, I cooked up a chart for Brian to play based on the descant written for the final verse, and I just winged a second horn part based on the tenor part. Hey, the harmonies worked, there was some counterpoint here and there, it worked. Living on the edge. Writing horn parts 30 minutes before they're gonna be played.
So we did the opening hymn, anthem, and closing hymn with "real brass" in the form of two saxophones, and I got to write the charts for two of them. And I did it for free, and I'm damned proud of it.