New Music: Ammon's Boast

Don't remember if I've mentioned this already, but I've started writing music again over the last year and a bit. It's been coming on slowly for a long time, I think, but the catalyst was my brother, Jake telling me in no uncertain terms that if I wasn't going to rewrite a song I had written and then lost about twenty years ago, he wanted to. I decided to do it. Then I decided that if I was going to go to all that trouble, I might as well share it. What follows is a fuller version of the story. If you're interested, you can listen to it and download the sheet music here.

There are a lot of things I don’t remember. One of those things is whether I originally wrote this song just before or just after my mission, but it was definitely around that time. Another one is whether or not we ever sang it in public. I really should remember both of those, but for some reason I don’t. All I know is that I wanted to sing it in church with my brothers, and I can’t remember now if we ever did.

Here’s the story: my older brother left on his mission about 18 months before I did, and my younger brother left about 6 months before I got home. That means there were approximately five years between the time the first

of us left and the time we were all reunited again. I wrote this song looking forward to that reunion. Our service stretched from the late 1990s until the early 2000s, when contact between missionaries and their families was limited to physical letters plus two phone calls a year, so it felt like we would be on different planets until we all got home again (instead it was merely different continents).

To my young mind, the parallels to the Book of Mormon account of the sons of Mosiah were pretty easy to see. We were brothers, leaving their homes to serve the Lord at more or less the same time, and it would be a while before we all came together again, at which point we’d no doubt have lots of stories to tell and much rejoicing to do. Never mind the fact that Mosiah’s sons served eight years longer individually than we did put together. Mosiah also had four sons, not three, but I also have a third brother, so that one’s not as different. His mission didn’t overlap ours in the same way, though. That’s it’s own story, and maybe the subject of another song someday.

I remember looking forward with great anticipation to the moment all of us would be together after our missions, and wanting to write a song about it using the language of Ammon.

So I did that. And then I lost it. It was a combination of my computer dying, back when online backups were rare and storage media changed frequently (remember minidiscs?) and me not ever being very good at keeping track of papers.

Some 20 years later, my older brother, Jake, said to me something like “Remember that song you wrote about the sons of Mosiah? You need to write it again, or else let me do it, because people need to hear it.” I hadn’t written much music for a couple decades, but it had been on my mind, and that was all the prompting I needed. This is the updated and, in my opinion, much improved version of the song, which I never regarded as finished anyway. It’s a lot harder to get together wih my brothers these days, but maybe we’ll still get to sing it sometime.

About the music:

In the scriptures, Ammon starts talking to his brothers about all the things they’ve gone through for the Lord, how blessed they’ve been, and the abundant fruits of their labors as evidenced by the love of the Lamanite converts. His brother Aaron scolds him gently, saying his joy is carrying him away into boastfulness. Ammon responds that he’s boasting only of the Lord, rather than of himself, and that he has no intention of stopping such a boast, because nobody could praise the Lord too much. So that’s where the title comes from.

All of this happens as the sons of Mosiah are on their return journey, so I’ve tried in the accompaniment to give a sense of constant motion. I imagine the undercurrent of eighth notes as the brothers’ footsteps. As they walk they take turns rejoicing in the Lord, and the piano reflects both their physical journey home and the spiritual walk they’ve been on over the past few years. You can hear the places where their pace is disrupted by the memory of their trials, or where they stop and turn to each other to celebrate a particularly sweet blessing.

The voices are each meant to be one of Mosiah’s sons, necessarily including Ammon, but you can take your pick for the other two. Maybe go for Himni. He doesn’t get a lot of attention. Apologies to Muloki and Ammah, but they don’t really fit the paradigm of this piece. I hope you enjoy it.