This months composer’s choice is an exploration of choral music. I was keen to layer a polyphony of ‘voices’ loosely based and hardly recognisable on the chord structure of the Righteous Brother’s Unchained Melody. Not that I was feeling particularly righteous. But I was thinking, that Unchained Melody reminded me of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord and then the penny dropped: Nya Ha ! Both songs are prayers and there was my choral “devotional music “ connection. Major Key – Major Lift Everyone knows that Unchained Melody is a song of longing, deep, deep, longing. The way its delivered is clearly a love song for union with one’s beloved but it also doesn’t take much of a shift, to sing it as a prayer, seeking union with one’s sense of the Divine. A sense that one’s true home is Unity: Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea To the open arms of the sea Yes, lonely rivers sigh, “Wait for me, wait for me I’ll be coming home, wait for me” And then it just takes a comma after “God” to shift the focus of the song to missing one’s lover, to a direct statement to the Divine “speedSlow Rain and a Spot of Unity Consciousness by Stephen Fearnely