Be Thou My Vision

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
naught be all else to me, save that thou art.
Thou my best thought, by day or by night,
waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true word;
I ever with thee and thou with me, Lord;
thou and thou only, first in my heart,
great God of heaven, my treasure thou art.

Great God of heaven, my victory won,
may I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
still be my vision, O Ruler of all.

Ancient Irish lyrics translated by Mary E. Byrne, 1905; versed by Elanor H. Hull.
Traditional Irish melody, harmonized by Carlton R. Young, 1963.

I was saddened by the recent sudden, unexpected death of my near-lifelong friend, Paul Dozier. Several of his friends, who remained close to Paul during the last years, spoke at his Memorial Service. The hymn, “Be Thou My Vision” and its lyrics were featured during the service because of Paul’s reported fondness for the hymn. I have also loved this hymn for years and played it many times for congregational singing while serving as organist of various churches. Since Paul’s funeral, I have been working on this arrangement of the piece. Additionally, I recently was made aware of a very nice history of the piece with commentary on its authorship and underlying textual meaning. The article also publishes an additional verse of the hymn, that is not commonly known or sung.

My arrangement utilizes all three verses of the hymn as presented in an old United Methodist hymnal in my library. The hymn is marked to be sung unison, without vocal harmonization. Harmony during the verses remains faithful to the Carlton Young harmonization from the hymnal. However, I used chromatic harmonies during the intro and interludes between the second and third stanzas. Instrumentation includes recorder melody, a soprano saxophone playing an alternate version of the melody, an oboe playing a duet part (primarily with the recorder), two different string ensembles (one used for the intro and interludes and the other during verses), a dark brass-like synthesizer instrument playing lower-than-the-melody harmony parts and avoiding melody notes, and bass. I used music-paper, pencil and lots of eraser to compose several of the parts. This is contrasted to when I play a part I am concocting over and over before finally settling on what I am going to play, and then recording it without ever committing it to paper. More and more I am finding the tried and true pencil and paper method to be a reliable way of working.

All instruments and sounds except piano are made by my Yamaha Montage8  synthesizer. The piano sound is being made by my Kurzweil PC3K8 and is a piano program I used extensively years ago.

The video was created using ProjectMilkSyphon to generate the video that is synchronized to the music. I recorded the generated video using Syphon Recorder.

I then used the command ffmpeg to trim a little empty video from the beginning of the video, combine the video with the audio, and transcode the video to h264 and audio to aac. I then used Fotomagico to create titles, credits and the ending screen, and finally generate the video for this to be uploaded to YouTube. This workflow is still not automatic for me; but, it is getting easier. I hope that you enjoy my arrangement of Be Thou My Vision.