“We Sing Alleluia” piano accompaniment

This Easter Sunday was quite wonderful for me as a music director, conductor, worship leader, and accompanist. An imperfect Sunday like all other Sundays, this Easter was wonderful because I got to watch others be more involved in the musical aspects of the service.

From leading the congregation in worship to conducting the adult choir and to being involved with the other musical items, I purposefully made room for others to get things done and I was more of an observer.

Though this is not the first time I did something like this on purpose, it felt fresh to see others have the opportunity to make musical things happen in the service.

I did participate in one musical element during the evening service though. It was a piano accompaniment for Maranatha’s “We Sing Alleluia” sung by one of our vocal ensembles called Harmony Praise. A vocal/piano arrangement of my own, the song begins in Ab Major and modulates to A Major.

Not a difficult piano part to play by any means, but Ab is not a key I play in often, and the harmonic changes are a bit different from what I usually play. I enjoyed it very much, especially when the performance was over and I had not made any disastrous mistakes :-)

Below is a raw recording of me playing the piano accompaniment, on my classroom Yamaha Clavinova CVP-301. I’ve liked this instrument so much over the years, we purchased one for my classroom and also the same model at our church. My favorite features of the Clavinova is the piano-like feeling of the keys, the piano-like sound, and also the multi-track digital recording capabilities of the instrument.

Here’s a recording of the accompaniment I created for this song. I hope you like it.