The Judas kiss, rendered musically

Last week was a DOOZY of a week... haven't had energy to be on the computer except as necessary for several days, but while I was rolling around the city, I DID come up with the solution to how to render the "I don't want to be a Judas in my heart" verse in my arrangement of the Negro Spiritual, "Lord, I Want To Be a Christian In My Heart."

Simplicity is often best... the lesson comes up, again, and again, and again. That and an almost Shakespearian rendering of the fall of Lehman Brothers made in England a bunch of years ago... let me explain...

I follow the stories of financial crises... don't even ask how that started, but the point is that in this dramatization of the last weekend at Lehman Brothers that set off the financial crisis in 2008, there was this scene where John Lewis, head of Bank of America, showed John Thain, then head of Merrill Lynch, his favorite painting: "Judas Kiss," a dark, sparse, rendering of one of the Bible's most fateful moments. That stuck in my mind, and I thought about how to render that musically in the space of beauty I have created for the other verses -- it is NOT the massive disruption I was thinking of here, but tenderness twisted and gone wrong; a pellet of poison tossed into a lovely pool, sinking deathward...

Eight bars after that, and we will be out of the darkness, the shadows left behind... only a little left to go in arranging this Spiritual, and a baritone to approach about singing it... in one of the busiest weeks of the year for a Christian musician. It WOULD happen that I figure out how to deal with the subject of Judas just before what is known as Holy Week...

Oh, don't forget (like I almost did) ...

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