The first time George Frideric Handel’s five-hour “Messiah” premiered in London in 1743, it did not go well. The composer had wept while composing the oratorio and described visions of angels during the process. At the manuscript’s end, he had written the letters SDG, standing for Soli Deo Gloria, “To God alone the glory.”
Yet the high-class audience in that major city was scandalized by a religious work being sung in a theater, rather than a church.
Charles Jennings had sent the lyrics to Handel in advance, chosen entirely from the Old Testament — in hopes of responding to a religious sect denying the reality of Biblical prophecy. To another friend, Jennings expressed in a letter his hopes that Handel would pour his “whole genius” into the composition, so that it may “excel all his former Compositions, as the Subject excels every other subject.”
“The Subject is Messiah,” Jennings wrote.
In Deseret News interviews with Latter-day Saint musicians exploring their experiences composing music, it was striking how many contemporary songwriters and composers had felt similar inspiration over the last decade to create music that focuses even more directly on and shares exclusively the ministry of the Savior with the world.
The wideness of God’s mercy
Prolific composer, producer, conductor and songwriter Rob Gardner is best known for “Lamb of God,” made into a movie in 2021 after the pandemic. The oratorio was created with a goal to leave people “feeling a little more hopeful than when they came.”
Especially in our increasingly tumultuous times, Gardner feels that “hope is the most important thing in the world” — explaining his interest at being a “a vehicle or a vessel to just put beauty and hope into people’s lives through storytelling.”
And not just to believers — with one person telling him recently after attending “Lamb of God,” “Look, I don’t believe any of this, but this is really moving.”
“If it’s going to be about this,” he remembers feeling early on when he turned attention to music about the Savior, “then it has to be the best thing I’ve ever written — it has to not only be written at the highest level, but also performed at the highest level.”
That’s just what he did, securing the help of the London Symphony Orchestra in recording the oratorio. Yet for years, these high expectations prevented Gardner from writing anything, until he realized he may never feel “good enough” as a composer to do Jesus Christ justice musically. “I’m never going to be like, ‘And I’m now ready.’”
When asked more recently to help refresh the composition for the Mesa Arizona Pageant, Gardner experienced the “worst writer’s block I’ve ever had in my entire life.” But while in coastal California, Gardner had a burst of creative composition, sparked by a new text he came across, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.”
Standing on a beach in the evening listening to the new music, a deeper sense of God’s love distilled for him. “It’s as wide as the sea, which is infinitely wide,” he recalled feeling. “If there’s one thing I want people to leave this pageant or ‘Lamb of God’ with, it’s we’re surrounded by love. We’re surrounded by mercy and there’s no limits to it.”
One thing Gardner felt strongly about in his early work on the “Lamb of God,” he said, “is that I had no interest in hearing Christ sing” — adding that “Jesus, Joseph Smith and Lincoln” are three people whose roles he’s not persuaded ever need to be sung on stage.
Yet, he recalled, “I wanted to give voice to Christ in some way.” Aware that the cello “mimics very nearly the human voice and sometimes can be more emotive” than a voice in its unique beauty, Gardner decided the cello would “represent not just the voice of Christ, but Christ’s emotional journey.”
Nicole Pinnell, the cellist who played “Gethsemane” in the recorded version, made a final request to rerecord the song a final time — which would stretch the orchestra and ensemble after an already grueling two days and 20 hours of filming. That’s when Pinnell spotted some blood on the floor, noticing for the first time that the nail on her right thumb had started to split away from her skin after so many hours of playing.
As that song was recorded for a final epic performance, the celebrated cellist can be seen playing through intense pain, unlike anything she had experienced before. “I just reached as deep as I could to play with such gratitude and such love,” she said.
Redeemer — entirely focused on Him
Jenny Oaks Baker has spent a career reaching people in the great music halls around the world. But no performance had reached more hearts than her performance with Dallyn Bales and the Lyceum Philharmonic of “Savior, Redeemer of My Soul,” combining Gardner’s music and Orson F. Whitney’s lyrics.
“The clouds cleared and we were able to perform” she says, recalling earnest prayers for the rain to stop on the day of the filming.
As she moved forward on another project, however, Baker was stopped in her tracks by a distinct feeling that she was moving in the wrong direction — which prompted natural wondering about her next right step.
“What if we did an entire album on the Savior?” composer Kurt Bestor suggested. With all the many opportunities to create inspiring albums, Baker realized she had “never done one entirely focused on the Savior.”
“It just felt right,” she said — commencing intensive work on a new production where “each song is a different episode in the Savior’s life.” What started off as a one-hour premiere at BYU-Idaho, eventually turned into a two-hour show performed in cities across the country this spring: “Redeemer.”
“Nothing in my life felt inspired like this production,” Baker said, recounting how how she felt in many added details to different songs, including a violin representing the Savior in “Gethsemane: from Every Pore” — accompanied by the cello representing the supportive father. And in “Crucifixion: Upon the Cross of Calvary,” the music at the end reflects the Savior’s spirit going up to heaven.
“It isn’t like I sat down in a production team, sharpened my pencil and figured it out,” Baker says — pointing instead to “lightning bolt inspirations of what I should do and which movements I should add.”
“It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever been a part of,” she said. “Everyone should partner with the Lord, because He helps so much! It’s the most empowering way to live — focusing your hearts and lives on the Savior.”
He still hears me
Hilary Weeks remembers growing up singing Janice Capp Perry songs around a piano. At a songwriting class for BYU’s Musical Dance Theatre program, the college student wrote something new on a rented piano hauled up to her third-floor BYU apartment. “You need to come back to the apartment and hear this,” she told her roommate. “I just had a feeling it was good.”
“He Hears Me” touched many people and got her started. Yet when she tried to publish other music, she was “told no by everyone” — leading her to say “maybe that’s not my path. Maybe I’m supposed to do something else.” But nearly 20 years later, Weeks has published many other inspired songs, reflecting, “It doesn’t really matter who says no when God says yes.”
“I wouldn’t be a very good writer of country, or pop, or rock songs” she said — “or any other genre.”
“This is where my heart felt at home. I’m just drawn to writing songs about faith and life and how God is interwoven in all that.”
Most of Weeks’ songs involve a lot of work. But every once in a while, she says, a song “falls from heaven, right in my lap.” In those cases, she says, “I’m just present and Heavenly Father sends the song. … I almost don’t feel like claiming it as my own.”
“That song got me through my darkest hour,” Weeks often hears, which thrills her to know that “whether or not I’m aware” of someone hurting, God can somehow use a song like “He’ll Speak Peace” to “quietly help them.”
“Sometimes when we hit rock bottom, it’s music that can reach into our heart and express what we want to say, but we don’t have words to say,” she said. “And when we feel understood, we simultaneously feel God’s love for us.”
“Not one of our paths is the same,” she says. “But the answer and the place we can receive peace and comfort is the same — and that’s through the Savior.
“We’re all different — but he finds us all. And reaches us all.”
“When I write about him, I feel confirmation that he’s real — that he’s involved in our lives, every detail of our lives,” Weeks says. “That there isn’t anything that we can’t take to him. And he loves us infinitely — he’s just so good.”
Son of Man
Few songs represented the Savior so potently through the 1990s than Kenneth Cope’s “His Hands” — which was part of an entire 1989 album focused on Christ, “Greater Than Us All,” written when the composer was 28.
President Thomas S. Monson had taught over the years that our own hands represented the hands of the Savior. Cope still remembers exactly where he was — Blackfoot, Idaho, on Thanksgiving weekend — when those prophetic words percolated further while he played on his guitar.
Even though the song had a widespread impact, Cope said that wasn’t surprising to him, since it “just shows people’s feelings of love and appreciation for Jesus, and their desire to follow, mimic and eventually become like Him.”
Cope spent much of the next decade trying to understand more about the nuance of Christ’s life — prompting him to also begin composition of a deeper musical treatment of the Savior’s life, highlighting key vignettes from his ministry.
Twenty-three years in the making, the recorded music and script of “Son of Man” are now publicly available. Cope is currently seeking support to turn it into a musical for the stage.
Creating this music, he said, has been “the gift of a lifetime.”
“The story of the Savior is taking the world by storm,” Cope stated. “The knowledge that the Father prepared Jesus Christ for us,” he said, “is such a beautiful story and concept that people of every nation are being affected.”
“Our hearts naturally gravitate to the beauty of that offering from God,” Cope said. Although currently recovering from knee surgery, the 63-year-old songwriter spoke with a youthfulness and joy that could have been mistaken for a 19-year-old missionary, fresh out in the field.
“I’m absolutely in love with him in any way that you can think of. … I want to be with him, I want to be like him — he’s everything to me. I’ll do whatever I can to tell people about his glory.”
“And the fact that it’s not just a story, but it’s true,” he continued, “and that there is a person embodied as that Savior — and he is accessible to us today, and not just thousands of years ago.”
Cope mentioned losing his father and brother nearly 20 years ago, and that he hasn’t “heard from them since.” By comparison, he added, “Jesus died 2,000 years ago, and I have heard from Him often … his personality, his spirit.”
Worth the rest of my life
It’s hard to miss the pattern in the fact that Cope, Baker and Gardner (and Hoffman) have each felt urged as songwriters to focus their energies on creating more direct presentations about the life, ministry and Atonement of Jesus Christ.
“How often do we thoughtlessly sing along to songs,” Baker said. “When I’m playing those words, they’re so powerful and I wish everyone could sing them with that same feeling behind them” — suggesting that so many hymns have that potential “if we bring it.”
“I’m over getting praise as a musician,” the celebrated violinist said. While it’s kind when people give her compliments on the violin, Baker says it’s not what “fills my heart with joy. … I should be good at the violin by now.”
“I’m also really not trying to entertain people — there’s enough of that in the world, you can find entertainment anytime, anywhere, in any moment.”
“It’s fine to be entertained sometimes,” she qualified. But “I’m not going to give over my life to entertain people. I want to leave people changed, not from me but from feeling the Spirit.”
“I just want to build the kingdom and bring people closer to Christ ... to leave people changed,” Baker concluded.
“And that is worth the rest of my life.”