Music for the Gospel

On a Usenet thread about film music acquisitions in 2006 (yes, for reasons that are odd enough, rec.music.movies is active again), I just wrote a post about my recent acquisition of Jeff Danna's score to The Gospel of John, and I want to repeat that post here, edited to include some linkage:

At the church my family attends, the services (like most) always include a reading from the Bible. Now, when it's from the Old Testament or from one of the letters of Paul, the pastor just reads it out loud. But if it's from one of the Gospels, he plays a video clip corresponding to the reading from one of several "video bibles" they use. I've noticed over the last two years that two of these video Bibles are in use, with two different actors playing Jesus.

One of these Jesuses has an American accent, and plays Jesus in a very down-to-Earth manner, always smiling a lot as he dispenses his wisdom to the flock. The other Jesus, though, has a British accent, and speaks in a much more mystical manner -- in fact, the general tone of all the scenes with "British Jesus" tend to be more mystical in tone than those with "American Jesus". I've also noticed that the "British Jesus" scenes always featured very beautiful and meditative music. I tried doing some Google searching to identify this production, in hopes that maybe there was a music CD out there, but no dice. (Yeah, I could have asked the Pastor directly -- but if God wanted us talking to Pastors, he wouldn't have invented Google.)

Flash forward to about six weeks ago, when I'm channel-flipping at home on a Wednesday night. I flip by that night's episode of "LOST", a show which I don't watch, but my eyes were caught. There was an actor standing on the beach who looked a lot like "British Jesus" from church. (My daughter was already in bed, fortunately, thus sparing her my disconcerting yelp of "Holy Shit, there's Jesus!") Anyway, I watched that episode long enough to hear this guy speak, and he sure sounded like "British Jesus". So it was off to IMDb, where I dug into the "LOST" page and found an actor named Henry Ian Cusick, whose little headshot looked Jesus-like. Following the link to Cusick's IMDb page, I saw that he did play Jesus in "The Gospel of John". And a little further investigation turned up a CD on Varese of the film's haunting score by Jeff Danna.

Interestingly, the score makes extensive use of instruments existing at the time of Jesus, along with Aramaic texts. It's interesting to compare the work of Danna to that of a Miklos Rosza, since both took great pains to extensively research their scores for films set in Biblical times, with greatly differing results.

It's a genuinely moving score, a gem I'm very happy to have uncovered.

For what it's worth, the American Jesus is an actor named Bruce Marchiano, who played Jesus in a Visual Bible edition of the Book of Matthew. So upon further review, it turns out that we don't watch video clips from Mark or Luke, I guess.