My latest antipodean project is the songs of Shirley Erina Murray in Alleluia Aotearoa. You can buy the collection here as a downloadable pdf or in what may be one of the last 50 physical copies. Because everyone wanted to set her texts I am doing more backings than usual.
The text of this gentle yet firm song is at Hope Publishing, where they provide two settings. The first is by Nancy Raabe (PEACE). It is simple and singable but written in Db – so bring it down to C and everyone is happy.
My backing leaves it in Db and I made up chords based on the sheet music.
The second setting is by Prof. I-to Loh called SAM-KIAP. It’s range is B to a high D so may need a key change depending in where your singers’ strengths are.
Chords were provided (yay) but BIAB has a limited range of world music options and they tend to caricature. Mea culpa.
AA, however, chose to set it to SUANTRAI, a traditional Irish melody, which is fair enough as neither of the other two tunes above were written when AA was published. This is the pick of the tunes, except it has an similar range (Bb to Eb) to SAM-KIAP. Even though it is public domain, I had trouble finding the sheet music, but it is in Together in Song 641. It seems to be a different “Suantrai” to the Irish lullabies on YouTube.