Why have you forsaken me

A song based on Psalm 22 for Baritone and Organ.

This piece is based on the first half of Psalm 22, as seen through the lens of the events of Good Friday. Indeed, I came up with the basics of it on the way back home from a service of the Liturgy of the Last Hour.

The accompaniment is deliberately sparse to reflect the desolation conveyed by the psalm. I very nearly made it a single line with no chords or polyphony at all, but I think this works better. I wanted to give the impression of it snaking around the singer and jabbing, poking, biting, before deserting them altogether.

Summary information

• Voicing: Solo voice (baritone)

• Notes on ambitus: C below middle C to E above.

• Instrumentation: Organ

• Approximate performance length: 3:00

• Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Releases

Version 1.0

First public release.

• Sheet music (PDF, A4) for baritone and organ.

• MIDI preview: this is as it comes from Lilypond, so does not reflect the written tempo changes or dynamics.

MP3 rendering of the MIDI preview.

Source code

This piece was written using Lilypond. The source code for it is available from my GitLab repository. To compile it yourself, you will also need my house style files.