This Judson Life: Ever wonder what your dreams sound like? Doug Weatherhead knows all about it.
“More than two years ago I listened to the beauty of Laurel singing the last movement to the Requiem I was writing and it was the most amazing musical moment of my life. It became real. I knew I had to finish it when I heard her sing it.”
And not only did Doug finish his Requiem, it was performed at Judson Church to launch our 100 Anniversary Celebration, on November 1, 2009, and it became real to an entire community. Conducted by Judson Choir Director, John De Haan, with guest musicians and singers along with the Judson choir and hundreds of people attending, we all got to hear the sound of Doug’s dream in real life.
“It’s kind of surreal to hear 45 people playing your music. All the years working on it and then real live people playing real strings with voices singing. It’s a weird dreamlike thing — sounds to my dream. It’s cool to see how this church embraced it, the choir and everyone involved.”
Doug is a musician, he has been for years. But Doug was in a rock band and a Requiem is a grand musical piece performed in honor of a departed soul and it is definitely NOT rock music. So where did this Requiem come from?
Creating this music, bringing it to life has been a deep journey for Doug. It all began almost 16 years ago when Doug joined the Judson choir. Doug’s first big choir piece was a Requiem and Doug was reminded of his childhood passion for classical music and it awakened this “Oh, wow, classical thing! I embraced it!” A couple years later, the Choir performed another Requiem and Doug learned the patterns of a Requiem. Then a couple years after that, he found a piece of music on the Judson piano and he played around with adding his own music for the Latin words. “I can do this.” He remembers thinnking. And every few years, he would attempt another melody for a movement, without really knowing why. Just for some day.
After listening to Laurel sing the piece he’d scored for her, “I basically locked myself in a room for 4 months and wrote the choral score. Rough. Hard. And then the idea of Judson’s 100 Year Anniversary Celebration came up, so last year, after Easter, we started rehearsing a little bit.” Then he gave the choir members a recording of it to listen to over the summer and he spent the summer writing the string ensemble accompaniement.
“It’s very exciting. The thing I was so worried about — it’s one thing to write a choral score, it was an amazingly complicated thing … but I did it/ But then to write a string accompaniment! Could I do it? I haven’t been taught any of this stuff! I just experimented. Would it work? Well one of the cellists came up to me after the first rehearsal with the strings and said to me, ‘I want to thank you for writing beautiful cello parts. The violins get all the glory and you wrote a beautiful cello part. Thank you.’ That made it all worth it.”
“In some ways, I don’t really know what I’ve done because I’ve been so buried in it. But it’s starting to sink in, it’s real.”
And in all its beauty and splendor it is now real to the world. Congratulations, Douglas Weatherhead, on giving a spectacular gift to the community.
