For me the main reason I am studying music has and always will be God, to worship him and glorify him with the talents and passion that he has given me, so I believe this piece is long overdue. The Good Fight is a contemporary Christian worship song based on the bible verse;

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2 Timothy 4:7

"I have fought the good fight,

I have finished the race,

I have kept in faith."

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This verse speaks of how as Christians we are fighting with love to bring glory to his name and speak hope into our world, be that our friends, our family or our own heart and how we need to persevere and keep our faith in order to overcome things in life. Of course as a bible verse there is no official interpretation, but after dwelling on it for a while that is the interpretation that I came upon. beyond the lyrics themselves, the piece doesn't hold too much metaphorical relation to the verse.

 

As I wish to write worship music as my career I acknowledge that my music needs to be easily understood and interpreted by musicians regardless of whether they can read music or not and also be easily simplified so it can be performed with a rotational band for a large congregation to learn easily. before I started anything I had a meeting with my Worship Pastor to discover what songs do and don't get chosen to be used in our church and why. Without disclosing the exact formula of my church, some notable things I took into consideration was writing lyrics that aren't so metaphorical that they confuse non-Christians visiting the church and having sections of music such as the tag(bridge) that can be easily built up and repeated. Another core part of the song which I considered was chord progressions. When I originally wrote the song, I wrote it with  regular church notation in mind, using simple chord progressions so that they're easy to remember and having chords that transition well into any part of the song, as it is not uncommon to hope between sections of the piece in live worship settings at Church. For my performance version of the piece I then took those chord progressions and found alternative chords and inversions that I enjoyed and worked them into the piece without completely detaching it from the original version. 

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As I have never written a worship piece for an actual band and with the knowledge that people that can't read music will be reading this, I had to rely strongly on the input of my band and use rehearsals as the time to express how exactly I wanted things to sound. With most churches, the music being learnt already has a track and the original recording of the song given to them so they can hear exactly how the piece sounds and feels and most of the performers and just given the chord progressions and lyrics and practice with the track until they get it. Now obviously with a new song this isn't possible, but because for my first performance I have trained musicians this is my opportunity to create that first track and because of this there isn't too much I can do to actually notate my piece other than telling the performers to. For instance, when I spoke to my guitarist, pianist, double bass player and percussionist they all seemed to agree that having vague chord charts and rhythmic ideas was the best way to go about the piece and that they would expand their parts to fit both their performance abilities and the direction of the piece. with my violinist and vocalists we agreed to have a stricter score as they hold the main melodies and harmonies and I wanted to avoid clashes if possible, but in true Christian worship there is always opportunity for ad lib. If I am honest most of how I wrote this piece was less of a conventional notation and more making it clear to the performer when and how they should 'ad. lib' their parts. I think it's important as a worship song to be personal and expressive, to really feel the emotion in the piece and move with that rather than letting the piece be rigid and exactly how it's written.