In 2019, during an Advent service at our church, Karen performed a setting of these two verses that I had composed in the Summer of 2000. I was accompanying, but at a certain point it occurred to me that the reason one particular bit was difficult to pull off - the very bit that I was even then preparing to play - was due to the clear fact that I had composed it poorly, settling for a good enough when I should have worked it out properly. Further, I began to furiously make internal compositional decisions on how to improve that moment and the rest of the piece. Needless to say my feeble brain can't compose one thing and play another at the same time. Karen persisted like the trooper she is, singing on until I regained my bearings and rejoined.
When I got home I made some notes, and over the course of several weeks realized that the only way to correct that spot was to start from scratch and re-compose the whole thing. Those pages sat on the music rack until this Summer when I finally had some time to complete it. For about a month I have been learning to play and sing it myself. The range is pretty high for me in spots, and the chromatic leaps are a challenge, but I get the idea of it across. Next task is to teach Karen to sing it. It fits her range much better than it does my untutored-except-by-what-I-have-picked-up-over-the-years-from-choral-cunductors voice.
