This Is the Christ (Moody)

Description

This piece was composed by Michael F. Moody to a text by the late James E. Faust, former member of the First Presidency. The result is a stirring, musical testimony of Jesus Christ. You can hear Michael Moody talk about the composition process at 1:04:25 of this interview.

There are more permutations of voicing for this piece than I have seen for any other piece composed for an LDS audience. There are SAB, SATB, SSA, TTBB versions and vocal versions for high, medium or low voice. There is also a Spanish translation of the SAB version. I carefully analyzed three of these versions and found some strange discrepancies in the key signatures. For example, the SATB version begins in the key of Eb and then moves to a C major key signature. But in the low voice version, it starts out in Eb and then moves to F.  The chords are basically the same, the publisher just couldn’t decide which key they were really in. The low voice version has a couple of missing naturals—so be on the lookout for those. The free version at lds.org is equivalent to the low vocal solo available from Jackman Music, however Jackman’s arrangement has a fancier accompaniment and the missing naturals (the lds.org version correct).