Choral Arranging after 3 or more months

Waaahhh!!! After many months of doing a lot of programming, coding, scripting and many more, I already had the chance to do what my heart desired -- Arrange songs for choirs.

The last time I arranged a song was for my graduation last October 2007. I did I Love the Lord, composed by Fr. Arnel Aquino, SJ which I did as a tribute to all of my fellow Lasallian Ministry Office Ministers who will graduate that term (actually, most of them are my batchmates).

When it was sung during the mass, I got some responses from people. One was from our chairperson for Information Management who asked for a copy of my arrangement and also asked for some of my arrangements if I have. The second was from my parents who saw my talent and my art, although they told me that I should not focus so much in music because it will not give me anything (well, here in the Philippine setting). So I told them that this will just be my hobby.

Since then and when I joined the project that I'm working in my company, I never made any arrangements that were big. I focused myself in developing websites and stored procedures. And as I was doing this, my heart was hungry to do what I loved to do.

That was until 2 weeks ago when we were now in the User Acceptance Testing when the developers were there as support for the users. There were bugs and enhancements that were issued but they are easy to deal with.

As I lay idle, I played my sounds until it played the song The First Time I Loved Forever, the theme song of the TV Series Beauty and the Beast. It was then that it tickled my mind and my heart and started arranging the song.

During my composition (or arranging), I envisioned a girl singing this to her boyfriend, telling him how much she loves him and that her heart was already with him since the time he said hello. Thus, I arranged it for a female choir. To cut the story short, I placed there all of the emotions, feelings and thoughts in all four voices. Thus, whenever one sings a line, it is as if each voice tells a story or a message. That is my style of arranging: It is as if all voices are saying something to the audience.

This arrangement is just the first version and I plan to revise it until it will be "perfected" by asking some of my friends who are music majors.

So here it is. I finished this arrangement and I did this to my one true love. I hope she will love it.