# Nine Hymns on Spiritual Life



## Jerry Gerber (Apr 25, 2020)

These hymns began with the poem "Hymn to the Divine" coming to me one evening while in meditation. I decided to set it to music and was happy enough with the results to continue composing 8 more hymns.

The pandemic made getting this work performed problematic, concerts were being postponed and canceled and. as we all know, it became more difficult to make plans.

So I decided to try using a high-quaity sample library that includes a word-builder, an ingenious software application that lets the composer choose the words the choir is to sing. It wasn't easy to learn, but once I got the hang of it I found the clarity of the text not much worse than trying to understand the words that a large choir is singing in a reverberant church or hall. My experience has always been that if I don't have the words written in front of me, or I don't know the words by heart, choir singing can be difficult to dicipher.

Here are the hymns. I'd call them spiritually-oriented rather than religious in the sense of coming from any particular religious tradition. The instrumentation is constructed using the Vienna Symphonic Library.

HYMNS


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