Every year, members of the community combine with the students of my alma mater, MSSU (Missouri Southern State University) to form the Southern Symphonic Chorus, and alongside the Southern Symphony Orchestra, we perform beautiful orchestral works from Beethoven's 9th to Orff's Carmina Burana, and everything in between or of a similar nature. Performing these great masterworks does a great service to my hometown of Joplin, MO, in that it brings class to what some folks claim would otherwise be a classless town. (I'm not so sure about that, but that's what the people have said so in the past about it.)

I had previously done the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's "Messiah" because I had sung that before, but I had never sung the whole thing. This year, after a 2-year hiatus resulting from COVID-19, we're finally singing again, and we're doing the Messiah. I therefore decided to do a few more choral excerpts from the oratorio in celebration. All text comes directly out of the Bible. I'm not going to do all of them, though; just a few specific ones that I performed with the aforementioned chorus.

The excerpt I've done here is entitled "And With His Stripes, We Are Healed." This is normally sung a cappella, with the orchestra playing just one at the beginning (at least that was the way I sang it). But here, I've translated it into a work for saxophone ensemble (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone).

---

This arrangement (C) me and me alone
Original music is public domain