David Seitz says: As a choral conductor and singer I always valued the feel of professionally printed music. It seemed to go along with my ambition to produce the best choral experiences possible for singers and listeners—start with smart-looking hard copies ordered from a publisher or selected from the church or school's music library.

I am pleased to offer on cameratapress.com a new arrangement of a folk hymn from William (Singing Billy) Walker's 1854 edition of Southern Harmony. Please click on The People Called Christians in the Mixed Voices, A Cappella section to see and hear this piece that originated in the shape-note singing tradition. That method of learning new music was especially popular in singing schools and a cappella church traditions of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, but it continues to this day.

Remember the days of going to music stores, flipping through their browsing boxes, and maybe finding a keyboard somewhere to hear a piece of interest? Then publishers began mailing "approval" copies, then CDs, and now all is both visible and audible, well, you know where. I work hard to make my audio files as realistic as possible, but for both the music and text there's no real substitute for a live recording.

The hymn tune CWM RHONDDA is to me one of the most stirring of all Christian hymns. Welsh organist John Hughes composed it in 1907 for "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah," a text translated from its original Welsh. With the creation of this majestic music and pairing it with the vivid imagery of those words, Hughes made a monumental addition to our hymnody. 

In 1964 I was second tenor in the Mennonite Hour Quartet, and that summer we toured the island of Jamaica extensively for two weeks. Mennonite Broadcasts produced "The Way to Life" for airing overseas. The quartet, along with the radio pastor, gave live voices and faces to the program's listeners around the island.

It was in 2013 that David Seitz contacted me, and we began working together on creating camertapress.com. It was a completely custom built website using the Drupal CMS, an online content management system designed for building websites online.

A group of 16 select singers from southern Michigan and northern Indiana met recently to record several pieces for cameratapress.com. The Master's Touch and In the Garden of the Lord were also filmed and are the first of David Seitz's pieces to appear on YouTube.