Music: Composer
Sing Oh Barren One Isaiah 54:1-10
Commissioned by the Meet the Composer/Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program, world premiere as a choral work based on the original sermon, performed by Sweet Honey In The Rock, Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY, 1988. Recorded by Sweet Honey In the Rock, Sacred Ground (Earthbeat! Records, 1995).
Spring 1987, the Reverend Elaine Hyman asked me to present her installation sermon in song. The scriptural reference was Isiah chapter 54, verses 1-10, I pulled out my Bible and began to read and then called Elaine and asked her “why she had me in Isiah because God was so pissed with Israel? I don’t like Isiah!” Elaine told me that this passage spoke to where she was as she began to go into a new work in her ministry. She talked about the concept of the “wounded healer” to serve.
—Composer’s note
To all of us who, by standards of those who set standards, flunk– maybe we don’t look right, or love right, or we don’t have a home, or a job, or maybe pregnant at 14, or HIV positive or with the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, it is You – Me – Us who are the voices to be heard, it is WE who must sing!
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