Once upon a time, back in February, when it was still cold and wintry and blustery… unlike today in Colorado Springs where it’s 38F with four inches of snow… um… never mind…

As I was saying, back in February there was this awesome concert:

https://www.lds.org/media-library/video/musical-broadcasts?lang=eng#

That’s a link to the entire broadcast. It was one of the two annual Church Music Festivals, with some amazing musicians presenting some new works received through the annual Music Submission. (You can get all the sheet music free at ChurchofJesusChrist.org/music/library — just search by title.)

This first excerpt from the concert is the Salt Lake Institute Combined Choirs (Marshall McDonald, director) singing the hymn “Holy Places,” for which I wrote the words and my dear friend Katherine Wright did the musical setting:

Aren’t they just good?

In case you wonder… this hymn uses the phrase “There the saints of God will stand…” In Latter-day Saint jargon, the word “saint” is used as it was in New Testament times, meaning a simple disciple of Christ, not a canonized holy-person.

And then there was this… a children’s song called “The Shepherd and the Lamb.” The words are by another dear friend, Toni Thomas, and music by yours truly:

Did these kids totally steal the show? Yes. Yes they did.

The choir was amazingly good, but kids always win, and these were fabulous.

What was really fun was watching the choir in the background try to keep from grinning. It’s hard to keep a straight face when you know the camera is likely to be on you, and even harder when you hear kids sing like these did.

Grant Westcott, the talented young man who sang one of the solos even came to find me for pictures.

(I’m not fond of being in pictures, but I had to post this one so you could see his grin. Yeah, I expect to see his name in lights one of these days. 🙂 )