A version of the 18th century German aria Bist du bei mir that Fred Thomas and I made together is out on vol 4 of Nonclassical's Outside the Lines compilation series. Here is a short text I wrote about the release:

This little song was copied by Anna Magdalena Bach into her musical notebook, sometime around 1725. The song used to be attributed to J.S. Bach, but actually it is probably by the composer Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel.

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It is one of many songs and arias in the notebook that take death as their subject in a manner that expresses the Lutheran concern with the spiritual practice of ars moriendi, the art of dying.

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When Lefteris, Andreas, Fred and I gathered to record my album Abundance, I hadn’t decided to put this song on it. But, being an album of ritual, transition, celebration and devotion, it made perfect sense when Fred suggested it.
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The song is about leaving this world with confident assurance of salvation in Christ. It begins, "If you are with me, I will go joyfully / To my death and to my rest."

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Since the time of recording, I have learned a deeper lesson about the importance of ars moriendi, of practicing a relation to death, of preparing to greet death with a radiant and devotional gratitude for living.
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I feel that music is at its deepest level of sedimentation a devotional practice, a spiritual practice, and I've always been struck by the devotional power of this song. The absolute foreverness of those words.

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As with all acts of making, this version grew from many seeds. One of them is a birthday present I made for Fred many years ago, a layered recording made in my bedroom with the melody of the song woven into lines from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

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It was an afterthought, and we recorded it last, and it will appear last on the album, as it does here in this compilation. It is a final song, but not a song of ends. It is a song that passes into the other side of repetition.

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Bist du bei mir was recorded and mixed by Andreas Trachonitis at Studio eleven63, with additional recording by Alex Harker. 


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