During the last few weeks of trying to get my musical done, preparing for surgery, and then recovering from surgery, I missed a few sweet surprises. One was a “Get Well” card that a friend sent me to help me laugh while I didn’t feel like doing anything. I felt bad I hadn’t opened it sooner.
The other was an email that came over 2 weeks ago. Usually I read all my emails as soon as they come in. I have an ipod touch, and I love reading emails, I’m just not really good at responding if it takes writing a long response, or if it has an attachment that isn’t easy to get to. Such was the case with this email. It’s subject heading said, “Your Music”, and it said simply,
hi lindy
in the attachtment your song…in dutch.
thanks al lot.!
greetz
It was signed by the sender, and I was unable to open the attachment, so it sat there in my inbox, until yesterday.
Yesterday, I was sitting at my computer trying to clear the 1000 emails in my inbox, when I came across this particular email. I opened up the attachment, which was a .wma file that started to play a simple piano in a melody that I recognized as my own, but I couldn’t place it. After the first line, a violin came in, and the choir began to sing. It was a fully orchestrated version of one of my songs, with a beautiful professional sounding choir singing along. It was beautiful! I was astounded with what someone had done with one of my songs. The funny thing was, because it was in Dutch…. I had no idea which song it was!
While I listened, I went to my website and tried to figure out which song it could be. I didn’t recognize the arrangement, and figured that someone had arranged one of my songs with the orchestration and choir arrangement. I couldn’t figure it out. About 2 1/2 minutes into the song, I was close, but I had to leave the room for a minute to try and come up with the “English” words that went along with the melody that I was hearing.
It was my song, Living Water, arranged in such a way as I could only imagine or dream it would be. It was so beautiful. I wrote the song, Living Water about 12 years ago. I had participated in Kenneth Cope’s musical program “Women at the Well”. For participating, the director had given us a picture of Christ talking with the Women at the Well. One day I was looking at the picture and thinking about that experience, and felt I should write a song about it. I wrote the song, but it was never performed. I didn’t put it on my website, because I was hoping that one day I could make a really neat recording of it, and put it on a vocal CD. It sat and sat and sat, until I had that opportunity to sing at BYU for Women’s Conference. I needed a song to go with the one I had written about Naomi and Ruth. It was another great song about Women from the Bible, it was perfect.
The recording was beautiful, and sung by the lovely Rebecca Lopez. I loved how it all turned out. I thought it was beautiful.
The CD was only sold in the BYU bookstore for a short period of time, but is now only being sold from my website, here. I’m not a very good promoter of my CD’s, so really not many people know about it. Trying to help my sales, I decided to write a choral version of the song. I figured if more people were aware of the music, it might help sales. That was the only reason I wrote the arrangement, and I never heard it performed…. until yesterday.
As tears fell down my face, I heard my song, the way it was meant to be orchestrated. The choral arrangement was mine! I couldn’t believe it as I watched the sheet music as they sang. I thought some one else must have arranged it, but it was mine! The orchestration… I don’t know. Maybe the one who sent it to me…. but whoever it was- Thank you! It was a privilege and a dream come true to listen to.
There are some neat things that happen when you let people download your music all over the world…. People play it, and sing it…. and orchestrate it! And sometimes, it comes back to me, in a more meaningful way than I could have ever imagined.
Someday I want to have all my music orchestrated like that….. the way I hear it in my head when I’m composing. I don’t know how it will happen… but I hope it does someday!