Peter Churness: My Messiah

My Messiah
A Folk Composition Inspired by Handel's Messiah

Artist: Peter Churness

Recently I fell in love with Handel's Messiah. The music is phenomenal, but what really captured me were the words. The entire text is taken from the Bible. For several weeks, I found myself listening to the Messiah over and over again. It was a deeply edifying experience. Before long I started singing some of the words on my own. One day I was singing to myself, "the trumpet will sound..." and reflecting on this verse when the thought came to me to take this particular passage and the basic melody line and write my own version that I could play on guitar and sing along with. Well, what followed over the course of the next three and a half weeks was the coming together of seventeen songs.

Together these songs contain the complete Scriptural text used by Handel and I've even held to the classic King James Version as a further tie in to his work. Occasionally I've added my own words to connect the biblical texts together or by way of offering a brief reflection, but these are relatively few. The text begins with the prophesies of Isaiah and then flow into the passages of the incarnation, nativity, life, death, resurrection, and final glorification of Jesus the Messiah. To sing and meditate on these texts is to meditate on the great rescue mission of God. We were drowning. God dove in to save us. The text of these songs tells that story.

(Two discs; 95 minutes)