The Grissom High-School “Alma Mater” That Never Was

It was during the fall of 1969, my freshman year as a piano major at Birmingham Southern College, that I can claim to have written my first composition. I was really enjoying my Music Theory I course because of the extreme head-start in music-theory provided by my Mother and other of my pre-college music-teachers.

Though I graduated from Huntsville High School (1969), my two younger sisters were attending Grissom High School – the senior as a junior and the junior as a freshman, during the school’s 1969-1970 opening year. I conceived the idea to write a chorale to submit as the Alma Mater for the new school. I had some familiarity with the then-band-director, Dave Ward and assistant-principal, Ray Reynolds; and, thought they might help to position my composition for consideration as Alma Mater.

My music-theory professor at Birmingham-Southern, Dr. William H. Baxter, Jr. (author of the music-theory textbook whose cover is pictured, above) was more than willing to review my voice-leading and provided advise during several initial revisions. After that, I’m not sure what happened to my grand plan to propose this piece as GHS Alma Mater. But, obviously the plan fizzled completely and I went for years without thinking of the piece.

Sometime around June, 1999, I made an arrangement of the piece in D major instead of the original Db key. I have since discovered that during 1999, for an unknown reason, many of my compositions were in the the key of D major. I have recorded the 1999 D major rendition and have attempted to leave it largely unaltered from its original arrangement.

I again lost track of the piece until recently finding the original manuscript (pictured) that was the one from final revision with Dr. Baxter. This is the simple arrangement that I recorded and included with the short, featured animation. The accompanying animation uses several of my original Blender 3D models that I have pressed into double-duty from their normal role as header-graphics for this blog.