Table Grace

Philip Brunelle and Garrison Keillor asked for a simple, doxology-like melody for the setting of “Table Grace,” with the desire that it could be easily learned by a congregation or audience. As most composers realize, to write a melody that is at once simple, memorable, tuneful, and yet remains true to one’s own compositional style is no easy matter. Another structural challenge was presented by the poem itself, which is a sonnet, and which at fourteen lines contains “stanzas” of unequal lengths. Since my challenge was to write an easily-learnable melody, I needed to have it repeat in some way and yet not become truncated at the beginning or end.