The year was 1990. I was working as a freelance composer from time to time for Geof Benson Music at Swell Pictures in Chicago, in a high tech digital studio for commercial music production, complete with a Synclavier and New England Digital's "Tapeless Studio." At home in St. Louis I had Geof's old low tech analog studio and a few Korg synthesizers. My challenge was to approximate the sound we produced in Chicago, with state-of-the-art cutting edge technology, at home with considerably less than cutting edge technology. Don Quixote has nothing on me.
      And then there was my desire to do something more spiritual than herbicide and beer commercials. I was in long term recovery from a high school and college fling with atheism. A surreal moment in Geof's studio might help to illuminate the essence of my dilemma:
      There were five of us men, if I remember correctly, and one young woman, tweaking the soundtrack of a beer commercial. That means we watched it over and over for half an hour or more. Whenever the low cut top of one of the attractive actresses in the commercial revealed some excess cleavage, the young woman among us voyeurs approved with loud, sometimes lewd, at least rude, comments. The men in the studio would not have dared to act like that, not with a woman present. We were on a holy mission, the most holy. Our incomes, our careers, and our reputations were on the line. I don't really believe the young woman was an oversexed lesbian. I think she thought she was fitting into a man's world.
      It got me thinking. What were we doing as we carefully placed every beat and sound heard in that beer spot? For all my protestations of innocence, what was I thinking when I helped place the little gasps and giggles in the soundtrack from that sample collection Geof had, the one euphemistically titled Exotic Woman Sounds?
      Well, the result of these two lines of thought (and who knows how many more?) was The Word of God, a collection of scripture readings with musical accompaniment. Each passage from the Bible explores the Word of God from a slightly different perspective. My efforts to create a more spiritual music guided by the Scripture became what I call "an exercise in ethereal architecture." If you imagine a transparent three-dimensional structure moving through space and changing over time, you have a fair grasp of what I attempted to achieve.