Title
Words of St. Peter
Year
1965
Instrumentation
for SATB chorus, organ & electronic sounds
Notes
Commissioned by Malcolm Johns for Gross Pointe Memorial Church, Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The end attempts to use electronic sounds to depict light.
Reviews
"...one senses a composer with that rare ability to combine surface attractiveness and expressivity with an underlying musical cohesiveness and sophistication. This can be seen in his Words of St. Peter. A single, all-pervading chord (a perfect 4th topped by an augmented 4th) unifies the piece...

The most sublime moment comes near the end. As the sopranos descend by whole steps singing the words, "...called you out of darkness into his marvelous light," the electronic sounds enter. (The composer asks this to be "drifting, distant, almost inaudible"). Conceived as a musical representation of light, we hear a series of fast, repeating, bell-like impulses on varying pitches, beginning loudly and then fading into the distance. ...Beneath this, the organist repeats a series of chords that move independently of the electronic sound. All the while, the women have sustained the word "light" and then gradually fade out. There is no defrinite cut-off.

Using the simplest of means, the composer has created an absolute gem of a work.
Notes, Journal of the American Music Library Association