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About this CD

This CD features well known traditional hymns and songs, some of them (‘We rest on thee’; ‘I cannot tell’) associated with timeless melodies (Sibelius’s Finlandia, Londonderry Air). In many cases I have used the tunes as a basis for a free rhapsodic interpretation: you hear the tune, a variant of it, or the outline of the harmonic structure, and new musical ideas spring from the original stimulus.

Complementing a couple of popular ‘classical’ pieces (JS Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, and Chopin’s haunting Prelude in E minor) are more ‘modern’ (well, compared with Bach!) if established spiritual songs (‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord’; ‘Anointing, fall on me’; ‘Be still for the presence of the Lord’, and Melanie Green’s ‘There is a Redeemer’).

Finally, I have included some compositions of my own. These include the communal hymn ‘We come to serve a living God’; ‘No one in the world like you’ and a piece composed while at Sneaton Castle dedicated to the African cause. The feeling behind it is of impoverished African mothers, so used to nursing their dying infants without hope, finding (with the pledged dedication of resources from those who ‘have’) new hope and rocking their children to sleep in the knowledge of a new world, a new order in which life and health have become a realistic expectation. I have also included the title song from a musical I wrote with Peter Flounders in 1986. Unfortunately you won’t hear the words but I just love the opening lyrics “What can I say, to try and explain what happened today, it’s back to front. When losing is winning, and in death is life, it’s an upside down world in Christ”.

Whatever the original melodic stimulus, or the ‘borrowings’, all the arrangements are mine and all spring from a spontaneous solitary three days of playing while at the Sneaton Castle retreat in Whitby in November 2008. I hope you enjoy the result.

It was said that when David played his harp it relieved the mental tensions of Saul. Music can heal. 10,000 people are physically dying in Africa every day. To stem this tragic loss of life has to be the first priority. But many others across the world are dying in the inside through loss of hope, disillusionment and depression. In the central chapter of the Bible (Psalm 118) we read “I will not die but I will live …”. So stick this CD on, turn the lights down low, pour yourself a drink and may this music bring healing and refreshment to you in the knowledge that the very purchase of it is saving lives and helping to create new hope. And if this CD brings comfort to you or helps you in any way out of the ordinary, please email me to let me know (paulslaughter@btinternet.com).

Paul.