Anthem 52

Welcome to Anthem 52 in my successful attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you have enjoyed listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. Well, here we are at Anthem 52. It's been a great year of composition, despite the many traditional and unexpected ups and downs of family life. At times it's been a bit of a slog but I'm surprised how little difficulty I've had coming up with ideas and working them through. Whether that has resulted in any decent anthems, I'm not sure and I'll let you know exactly how I'd like you to help me decide on that in 2025. That's to come soon but, for now, I should concentrate on the final anthem in the whole project. Its words come from Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892. It's on the theme of New Year, somewhat appropriately. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 52: Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light, The year is dying in the night, Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring happy bells across the snow, The year is dying, let him go, Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Welcome to Anthem 51 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week, I was still on the search for more unusual Christmas carol words. After quite a bit of unsuccessful browsing, I found an order of service for King's College Chapel way back in 1918. It's fascinating to see what has changed and what hasn't since then. One of the most interesting sets of words was for a carol I had never come across before - 'Childing of a maiden bright'. From the 15th Century, the words are suitably archaic in places and each verse ends with a different Latin phrase, as we know, not a unique characteristic, but one I like. The words are a little unusual in that they mention 'flocks of fiends' rather then sheep and a few other odd ideas. Again, I found these words intriguing and fun to set. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 51: Childing of a maiden bright Life to-day hath brought to light; And hath put that prince of might With his flock of fiends to flight: Christus natus hodie. Whoso aught hath done amiss, An it rue him sore for this, Mary's Babe will shrive i-wis, Gentle as a lamb He is: Miserere, Domine. He at Bethlehem was born, Salem gave him crown of thorn, Life of want and death of scorn - All for love of man forlorn. Ergo benedicite. On this Infant may we call, Born for man in oxen-stall: He vouchsafe us bliss withal In His everlasting hall. Cum Maria Virgine.

Welcome to Anthem 50 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. Wow. I've made it all the way to 50 anthems. I've surprised myself - and probably you as well, I imagine. I'm also pleased to say that the 50th anthem is one of my favourites so far. The words come from yet another Carol Service order of service, this time from Pembroke College, Oxford. The 15th Century words were set by William Matthias but I haven't listened to his version, as yet. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 50: A babe is born all of a may, To bring salvation unto us. To him we sing both night and day. Veni Creator Spiritus. At Bethlehem, that blessed place, The child of bliss now born he was; And him to serve God give us grace, O lux beata Trinitas. There came three kings out of the East, To worship the King that is so free, With gold and myrrh and frankincense A solis ortus cardine. The angels came down with one cry, A fair song that night sung they In worship of that child: Gloria tibi Domine. A babe is born all of a may, To bring salvation unto us. To him we sing both night and day. Veni Creator Spiritus. O lux beata Trinitas. A solis ortus cardine. Gloria tibi Domine. Noel!

Welcome to Anthem 49 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. By contrast to last week, this anthem was much easier to compose. In order to catch up with the rapidly disappearing weeks of 2024, I set myself the target of writing this anthem in 2 days. I wondered if I could write a carol that would fit into one of the 'standard' patterns congregations would recognise - and I think I got pretty close with anthem 49. THe words come from another carol service, this time at St Stephen's Church, Canterbury. It's a 15th century Kent carol. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 49: Today our God of his great mercie Hath sent his Son with us to be, To dwell with us in verity, God who is our Saviour. Today in Bethlehem did befall, a child was born in ox's stall, Who needs must die to save us all, God who is our Saviour. Today there spake an angel bright, To shepherd there who watched by night, And bade them take their way forthright, To God who is our Saviour. Therefore 'tis meet we kneel today, And Christ, who died on cross, we pray To show his grace to us alway, God who is our Saviour.

Welcome to Anthem 48 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It was lovely to sing in Holy Trinity Church's Advent Carol Service last Sunday - my first service back with the choir. Charlotte was also able to come along and the singing was good. It's been a difficult week for composition. Everything seems to have gone very slowly and I basically a week behind where I should be. I'm sure I'll catch up with only 4 anthems to go. I found the words in another Advent Carol Service booklet - this time from Belfast Cathedral - where my family are from, incidentally. I used the whole of the first long verse and part of the last. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 48: Rorate coeli desuper! Heavens, distil your balmy show'rs; For now is ris'n the bright Daystar, From the rose Mary, flower of flowers: The clear Sun, whom no cloud devours, Surmounting Phoebus in the east, Is comen of His heav'nly tow'rs, Et nobis puer natus est. All Gloria in excelsis cry, Heaven, earth, sea, man, bird and beast; He that is crowned above the sky Pro nobis puer natus est.

Welcome to Anthem 47 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. I went back to Advent this week - or at least I looked for some more Advent lyrics. It occurred to me that I could find some lyrics in service booklets for Advent Carol Services so I tried to search for those. The second one I found was from The Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Mary the Virgin of Worcester's 2020 Advent Carol Service. They performed a carol with words by John Audelay (d. c. 1426). These seemed ideal for what I was trying to write. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 47: There is a flow'r sprung of a tree, the root thereof is called Jesse, a flow'r of price there is none such in paradise. This flow'r is fair and fresh of hue, it fadeth ne'er, but e'er is new; the blessèd branch this flow'r on grew was Mary mild that bare Jesu; a flow'r of grace; against all sorrow it is solace. When Gabriel this maid did meet, with ‘Ave Maria' he did her greet; between them two this flow'r was set and safe was kept, no man should wit, till on a day in Bethlehem it could spread and spray.

Welcome to Anthem 46 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week, in comparison to last week, was more straightforward, in terms of composing anyway. I realised that I hadn't written very many Advent carols (have I written any as part of Anthem 52?) and, considering the Advent Carol Service is my favourite of the Church year, I should remedy that situation. So I had a look through my usual Isaac Watts source. I couldn't find any Advent words at all so I widened the search. Very soon I came across this: O Come, Divine Messiah, a French Advent song written by M. l'abbé Pellegrin (1663-1745) and translated by Sister Mary of St. Philip in 1877. These words seemed ideal to set so I was off to a good start. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 46: 1. O come, Divine Messiah, The world in silence waits the day When hope shall sing its triumph, And sadness flee away. Refrain: Dear Saviour, haste! Come, come to earth. Dispel the night and show your face, And bid us hail the dawn of grace. O come, Divine Messiah, The world in silence waits the day When hope shall sing its triumph, And sadness flee away. 2. O come Desired of nations, Whom priest and prophet long foretold, Will break the captive fetters, Redeem the long-lost fold. [Refrain] 3. O come in peace and meekness, For lowly will your cradle be: Though clothed in human weakness We shall your God-head see. [Refrain]

Welcome to Anthem 45 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It was a slightly odd week for composition. I found it difficult to get going but when I did it seemed to go fairly well. Guess where I found the words? Yes, you're correct - Isaac Watts. This time it's a very positive set of lyrics so I decided on a loud anthem, with emphatic organ accompaniment. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 45: Behold, the grace ap­pears, The pro­mise is ful­filled; Mary, the won­drous vir­gin, bears, And Je­sus is the Child. The Lord, the high­est God, Calls Him His on­ly Son; He bids Him rule the lands abroad, And gives Him Da­vid's throne. Glory to God on high! And heav'n­ly peace on earth; At our Re­deem­er's birth!

Welcome to Anthem 44 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It was time for an unaccompanied anthem this week - in fact another Christmas Carol. You won't be surprised to hear that the words come from Isaac Watts yet again. It's a lullaby sung by a mother, recalling the infant Jesus and Mary. From my experience of singing many carols, I think it's a little unusual. However, it's rather effective, in my opinion. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 44: Hush, my dear, lie still and slum­ber, Holy an­gels guard thy bed, Heav'nly bless­ings with­out num­ber, Gently fall­ing on thy head. How much bet­ter thou'rt at­tend­ed, Than the Son of God could be, When from Hea­ven He des­cend­ed, And be­came a child like thee! Soft and easy is thy cra­dle, Coarse and hard thy Sav­ior lay: When His birth­place was a stable, And His soft­est bed was hay. Oh, to tell the won­drous sto­ry, How His foes ab­used their king; How they killed the Lord of glo­ry, Makes me an­gry while I sing. Hush, my child, I did not chide thee, Though my song may seem so hard; 'Tis thy mo­ther sits be­side thee, And her arms shall be thy guard. May'st thou learn to know and fear Him, Love and serve Him all thy days; Then to dwell for­ev­er near Him, Tell His love and sing His praise.

Welcome to Anthem 43 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. Despite fitting in little bits of composition time around everything else that is currently occupying us, this anthem seemed to flow fairly well. I've resisted the temptation to start writing Christmas Carols until now. Writing carols is how I discovered that I could compose for choirs quickly, much to my surprise so I have been looking forward to having another go at this seasonal activity. The words came from the practically inexhaustible source of Isaac Watts, yet again and I went for verse 1 and 2 and the final one from his carol. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 43: Behold, the grace ap­pears, The pro­mise is ful­filled; Mary, the won­drous vir­gin, bears, And Je­sus is the Child. The Lord, the high­est God, Calls Him His on­ly Son; He bids Him rule the lands abroad, And gives Him Da­vid's throne. Glory to God on high! And heav'n­ly peace on earth; Goodwill to men, to an­gels joy, At our Re­deem­er's birth!

Welcome to Anthem 42 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. You might have picked up elsewhere that our home situation has changed dramatically in the last week or two as we have moved my father-in-law in with us. This new caring responsibility has meant very little time for anything else as we get used to it but, somehow, I did manage to squeeze in a bit of composition. Probably due to the situation, I found writing music a bit of a slog this week but I did get there in the end. Isaac Watts came to my rescue once again with some words. I chose a short, 2-verse hymn that wouldn't tax my brain too much (not that it really matters how long the text is to be fair) and this was the turn of the unaccompanied choir anthem. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 42: Thy name, al­migh­ty Lord, Shall sound through dist­ant lands; Great is Thy grace, and sure Thy Word; Thy truth for ev­er stands. Far be Thine hon­our spread, And long Thy praise en­dure, Till morn­ing light and ev­en­ing shade Shall be ex­changed no more.

Welcome to Anthem 41 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It feels like I'm on the 'home stretch' with the Anthem 52 project. It's been difficult at times but this week's composition came fairly easily. Once again, it's an Isaac Watts text. I was looking for some words that would lend themselves to a quieter, more serene anthem this week. It was the turn of the accompanied style and I have found it much easier to write loud anthems with organ accompaniment this year. I also wanted to break my own habit of writing the initial phrases of the vocal parts in a rising pattern. When I found these words included 'descend and dwell' that seemed to fit the bill nicely. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 41: Come, dear­est Lord, des­cend and dwell By faith and love in ev­ery breast; Then shall we know, and taste, and feel The joys that can­not be ex­pressed. Come, fill our hearts with in­ward strength, Make our en­larg­èd souls pos­sess, And learn the height, and breadth, and length Of Thine un­mea­sur­able grace. By all the Church, through Christ His Son.

Welcome to Anthem 40 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week was Harvest Festival at our sister Church, All Saints, Luddington. It was great to take quite a large choir from Holy Trinity and we sang ‘The Heavens are Telling' by Haydn from his oratorio, ‘The Creation'. There are a couple of trio sections and I drew the short straw in my tenor capacity. It went rather well. In other news, I've made it to Anthem 40 which feels like another milestone. I've also been thinking about the next stages in my process after the completion of Anthem 52. I am sure that not all the anthems I've written are worthy of compiling into some kind of collection. That isn't to say they haven't been worthwhile to compose. Every time I have completed an anthem I have learned something, including a lot of 'what not to do' revelations! Following the process of some award programmes, I think I'm going to listen to all the anthems and create a 'longlist' of those I deem to be worth revisiting and adding to a collection. Then I will ask friends, family and you to help me narrow the longlist down to a 'shortlist'. A final pass will result in approximately 10 anthems that I will refine and polish up for publication. I can already think of 5 or 6 I expect to be in this final list but I'm bound to be surprised! Back to this week's anthem, however. Once again I chose some words from my current favourite source - Isaac Watts. These ones were fairly 'visual' and the theme of lifting up ones eyes seemed like an obvious choice for setting as an anthem. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 40: Upward I lift mine eyes, From God is all my aid; The God that built the skies, And earth and na­ture made; God is the tow­er to which I fly; His grace is nigh in ev­ery hour. My feet shall ne­ver slide And fall in fa­tal snares, Since God, my guard and guide, Defends me from my fears. I'll go and come, nor fear to die, Till from on high Thou call me home.

Welcome to Anthem 39 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. I've been trying to catch up with anthem production this week. I was only a few days behind but I don't want to be faced with a deficit at the end of the year. So here is an anthem I completed rather quickly. I don't think it has suffered from the speed of composition but you will have to be the judge of that. I used the same collection of Isaac Watts words as last week and I looked for something a bit more upbeat. It seemed to work because the process of writing didn't depress me (in the non-clinical sense) like last week's did. Here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 39: Once more, my soul, the ris­ing day Salutes thy wak­ing eyes; Once more, my voice, thy trib­ute pay To Him that rules the skies. Night un­to night His name re­peats, The day re­news the sound, Wide as the Heav'n on which He sits, To turn the sea­sons round. A thou­sand wretch­ed souls are fled Since the last set­ting sun, And yet Thou length'n­est out my thread, And yet my mo­ments run. Dear God, let all my hours be Thine, Whilst I en­joy the light; Then shall my sun in smiles de­cline, And bring a pleas­ing night.

Welcome to Anthem 38 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It was good to return to Holy Trinity Church with the choir this week, even if it wasn't with Charlotte whose Coventry musical life is just getting going. As I write this, she is preparing for an audition to join the Coventry Cathedral Chorus - I'm sure she will enjoy that a great deal. It was Ollie's (our new interim Director of Music) first Sunday with the choir and we sang Choral Evensong. It went well. I'm looking forward to having some of my own anthems added to the choir's repertoire...one day...  This week was a bit more of a struggle than last week, in terms of composition. It started off fine as I suddenly remembered that the main criterion of anthem competition I entered earlier in the year was to set words by Isaac Watts, the prolific 18th Century writer. I went back to the source I used to find the text for that anthem and rediscovered an enormous collection of words. 824 texts are mentioned with many linked to on the single page: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/w/a/t/t/watts_i.htm As well as hymn words, Watts wrote more poetic texts and I chose a short one from Hymns and Spi­ri­tu­al Songs, Book 2, 1707–09, num­ber 26. Here are the words (I missed out one verse):   Words for Anthem 38: Lord, we are blind, we mor­tals blind, We can't be­hold Thy bright abode; O 'tis be­yond a crea­ture's mind To glance a thought half way to God. Infinite leagues be­yond the sky The great Eter­nal reigns alone, Where nei­ther wings nor souls can fly, Nor an­gels climb the top­less throne. Yet, glo­ri­ous Lord, Thy gra­cious eyes Look through, and cheer us from above; Beyond our praise Thy grand­eur flies, Yet we ad­ore, and yet we love.

Welcome to Anthem 37 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It's been a week of changes for me and my family. Charlotte has started her university course and there is a new Interim Director of Music at Holy Trinity Church. Both of these changes are, of course, very positive. Charlotte is finding her feet and getting to know her lecturers and the rest of her group as well as settling in to her Uni Hall of Residence. What fun! Ollie is our new DoM but we all know him because he was our Organ Scholar a few years ago before going off to Uni. It's going to be fascinating to see how both of these new situations work out.  Back to this week's anthem, only a few days after I found it I don't have a clear recollection of how I decided to use part of Psalm xxiv (24). However, the words are highly effective for an anthem and the end of the Psalm contains some of the most well-known anthem words of all: "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors : and the King of glory shall come in. Who is the King of glory : even the Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory." If you don't know the anthem by Mathias take a listen to this really good Covid-time version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxj-hW9U6Cw  I chose words form earlier in the Psalm: Words for Anthem 37: The earth is the Lord's, and all that therein is : the compass of the world, and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas : and prepared it upon the floods. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord : or who shall rise up in his holy place? Even he that hath clean hands, and a pure heart : He shall receive the blessing from the Lord : and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

Welcome to Anthem 36 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This is the first anthem I have written away from home. We were on holiday in Devon this past week but Anthem 52 waits for no man - or woman or whatever. For my 30th Wedding Anniversary holiday I managed to write anthems to plug the gap before I went but that wasn't possible this time. I knew I could take my laptop on this holiday and there would be some 'down time' so it was an interesting task to try. I regret not remembering to take my 'over-ear' headphones because using earbuds wasn't a lot of fun. It made the writing more difficult. However, I did manage to find some reasonable words, again a prayer from a service rather than a Psalm, like the previous anthem. Commonly known as the 'General Confession', it's a prayer familiar to millions of Christians around the world, I'm sure. Despite this, or perhaps due to this, I found it a worthwhile set of lyrics for anthem 36. Words for Anthem 36: Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done, And there is no health in us: But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders; Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults, Restore thou them that are penitent, And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

Welcome to Anthem 35 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. I've got a little behind in adding these updates over the past couple of weeks. I have managed to write the anthems but not the podcast episodes. Hopefully, I will be fully back on track after this week. The main reasons for this are a family holiday in Devon and a trip to Coventry to settle my daughter into her University accommodation for her first year. She is studying Music Production and Songwriting - more on that topic soon I'm sure. Back to Anthem 35. This time I found some interesting words in the Irish Book of Common Prayer, not in the usual Psalms sections but in one of the orders of service. I thought it was a passage from St. Luke's Gospel but it's actually a collect used in The Ordering of Deacons service and elsewhere. The words are still good for an anthem though. Words for Anthem 35: Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most gracious favour, and further us with thy continual help; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify thy holy Name, and finally by thy mercy obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Welcome to Anthem 34 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week I needed to be swift (not Taylor) to complete anthem 34 because I am visiting Bath with my wife to hear our daughter, Charlotte, singing at the RSCM Choir Course. This is the second year in a row that she has had the opportunity to attend the course, thanks to The Friends of the Music of Holy Trinity Church. 3 choristers from Holy Trinity are there this year, enjoying singing in a variety of contexts, including services at Bath Abbey. I'm very much looking forward to that trip. So I couldn't waste any time coming up with a text for the anthem. While looking through the Irish Book of Common Prayer, I spotted the opening to Psalm cxlv (145). These seemed like promising words and here they are: Words for Anthem 34: I will magnify thee, O God, my King : and I will praise thy Name for ever and ever. Every day will I give thanks unto thee : and praise thy Name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord, and marvellous worthy to be praised : there is no end of his greatness. I also added an Amen section in at the end (obviously) because the piece seemed to need it.

Welcome to Anthem 33 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. THis week's text comes from a very long psalm - cxix (119). It is split up in the Irish Book of Common Prayer into many sections and the words I chose are verses 145 - 152. There are a lot more words than I usually set and I think that's at least partly down to how the process went. It was comparatively easy to write this anthem. It seemed to flow better than last week's. I don't know if the end result is better or worse but the resulting anthem feels fairly complete and coherent. Words for Anthem 32: I call with my whole heart : hear me, O Lord, I will keep thy statutes. Yea, even unto thee do I call : help me, and I shall keep thy testimonies. Early in the morning do I cry unto thee : for in thy word is my trust. Mine eyes prevent the night-watches : that I might be occupied in thy words. Hear my voice, O Lord, according unto thy loving-kindness : quicken me according as thou art wont. They draw nigh that of malice persecute me : and are far from thy law. Be thou nigh at hand, O Lord : for all thy commandments are true. As concerning thy testimonies, I have known long since ; that thou hast grounded them for ever.

Welcome to Anthem 32 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week, everything seemed to take a long time. I eventually found some words to use, buried in Psalm cvi (106) that seemed to lend themselves to an anthem. I didn't have many preconceptions about how the anthem should sound this week beyond the fact that it needed to be unaccompanied. I let the writing 'decide' where it wanted to go and added in some harmonic changes. Interestingly, I thought it sounded a bit like some of my other compositions so perhaps others will as well. So here are the words I chose: Words for Anthem 32: Deliver us O Lord our God, and gather us from among the heathen : that we may give thanks unto thy holy Name, and make our boast of thy praise. Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting, and world without end : and let all the people say, Amen.

Welcome to Anthem 31 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It was back to Compline this week - again. Imagine my surprise when I found these words, very close to the others I had used for Lux and Nox: I will lay me down in peace, and take my rest; for it is thou, Lord, only, that makest me dwell in safety. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen. As usual, there was a word that when translated into Latin follows the same pattern as the previous two anthems - peace - pax. So the theme and mood of this week's anthem was set. It was time to write for choir and organ, so it would be another challenge and, presumably, it would result in a different sound to Nox and Lux ... or maybe not. Anyway, here are the Latin words: Words for Anthem 31: In pace in idipsum * dormiam et requiescam. Quoniam tu Domine singulariter in spe constituisti me. Gloria Patri et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Welcome to Anthem 30 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week I hit upon a neat idea. When I composed the unaccompanied anthem number 26, Nox, I found the words in the service of Compline. So I decided to go back to that service and look for some more. A passage that caught my attention was this one in English: Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us. This theme of light stood out. Then I realised that the Latin for light is 'lux'. Perhaps it would be possible to make this new anthem a partner for 'Nox', meaning night. So we have Nox and Lux. Listening to them now as a pair, there isn't a lot of difference in how they sound which could have been done to stress the difference in the meaning of the titles but never mind.   I chose to use the Latin words again - it's just a single verse of Psalm iv (4) after which I added 'Amen' like the end of the psalm in Compline. Words for Anthem 30: Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui Domine: dedisti laetitiam in corde meo.

Welcome to Anthem 29 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This was the last week of the academic year and my choir sang a final choral evensong at the ancient Guild Chapel in Stratford. It was founded by the mediaeval Guild of the Holy Cross and is just across the road from the site of William Shakespeare's final house in the town. William's father is reputed to have been behind the whitewashing of the elaborate mediaeval wall paintings in the Chapel that have been restored recently. When I attended King Edward VI School, and then my son Edward did the same, school services were held in the Guild Chapel. The school was founded by the Guild to provide education for their sons and William Shakespeare is a former pupil. It has been a lovely tradition for a number of years for the final Evensong of the year to be at the Guild Chapel which has a much better acoustic than Holy Trinity Church. There is also a recently-renovated organ there which is very loud! Unfortunately, the choir stalls are at the other end of the building to the organ so it can be tricky to coordinate the music. However, it was a great occasion despite the sweltering heat that saw one tenor wilting towards the end of the service. Anyway, back to this week's anthem. When looking at the psalms set for this week, I spotted the words of a rather well-known anthem - "They that go down to the sea in ships : and occupy their business in great waters ; These men see the works of the Lord : and his wonders in the deep." The setting of these words by Sumsion is one of my favourite anthems. Not everyone shares my opinion of course. The section 'stagger like a drunken man' can be taken as a bit daft but I think it's fun. Finding these lines wasn't really a surprise because my choir sang this anthem last week. It was 'Sea Sunday' after all. I didn't try and do my own version of this part of Psalm cvii (107) but rather the opening using these words: Words for Anthem 28: O give thanks unto the Lord for he is gracious : and his mercy endureth for ever Let them give thanks whom the Lord hath redeemed : and delivered from the hand of the enemy ; And gathered them out of the lands, from the east, and from the west : from the north, and from the south.

Welcome to Anthem 28 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. After the success of using words from Compline for Anthem 26 (Nox), I decided to mine the same source for this week. This time I chose words meaning the following in English - "Thou, O Lord, art in the midst of us, and we are called by thy Name. Leave us not, O Lord our God." In Latin it's: Words for Anthem 28: Tu autem in nobis es, Domine, et nomen sanctum tuum invocatum est super nos: ne derelinquas nos, Domine Deus noster.

Welcome to Anthem 27 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. If you are reading these show notes as soon as it they are released in July 2024, I am currently on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean celebrating my 30th Wedding Anniversary. As a result, as I have mentioned a couple of times, I have posted an anthem I wrote in January 2024 rather than a brand new one. So the project still remains a new anthem every week, as long as you are prepared to let me have a little artistic license. The reason I am able to publish the anthem now is that I didn't win the competition. It was great experience though. The rules of the Isacc Watts Composition Competition included that the words must be by Watts (a prolific 18th Century hymn writer) and the anthem had to be for choir and organ - with the option of a part for a school choir in unison. Here are the words I chose from Watt's catalogue: Words for Anthem 27: Come Holy Spirit, hea'vnly Dove, With all Thy quick'ning powers Kindle a flame of sacred love in these cold hearts of ours. Look how we grovel here below, Fond of these trifling toys, Our souls can neither fly nor go To reach eternal joys. In vain we strive to rise And our devotion dies.

Welcome to Anthem 26 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. Well, I have made to halfway in my epic project. I have produced 26 anthems in 6 months. I'm not delighted with all of them but I am delighted that I have tackled my decades-long compositional inactivity. Hopefully, there is plenty more to come in months 7-12 of 2024. This week I am celebrating my 30th Wedding Anniversary by going on the trip of a lifetime with my beautiful wife, Sarah. As I have previously mentioned, next week's anthem will be the one I wrote in January but this week's is a brand new one. While hunting for text to use, I came across an article about Compline - often the final church service of the day. Singing Compline is one of my favourite choral activities partly due to its use of plainsong and partly due to its words which seem to be perfect for a late evening service. The English version of the opening sentence is ‘the Lord almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end'. I've always loved that phrase. When I saw the Latin original of the opening prayer, I thought it would make a great unaccompanied anthem. Here are the words: Words for Anthem 26: Noctem quietam et finem perfectum concedat nobis Dominus omnipotens. Amen.

Welcome to Anthem 25 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week marks the beginning of the busiest - and the calmest - time for me so far this year. It's my wife and my 30th Wedding Anniversary and we are going on the 'trip of a lifetime' to The Maldives. This means that I am in the process of writing and organising anthems to ensure there isn't a gap in my progress towards Anthem 52. Clearly, time has been squeezed and so I haven't been able to create a Logic Pro version of this week's anthem, nor will I be able to for the next two weeks either because I will be out of the country and have to set everything to publish while I am away automatically. So there will be new anthems in these 3 weeks but the content published will be more minimal than usual. I also intend to 'cheat' by using the anthem I wrote earlier in the year for the composition competition as Anthem 27. I hope you don't mind. Anyway, this week I completed Anthem 25 using Psalm V (5), set for this week in the Church of England Lectionary. Here are the words: Words for Anthem 25: Ponder my words, O Lord : consider my meditation. O hearken thou unto the voice of my calling, my King and my God : for unto thee will I make my prayer. My voice shalt thou hear betimes, O Lord : early in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up. For thou art the God that hast no pleasure in wickedness : neither shall any evil dwell with thee.

Welcome to Anthem 24 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. I managed to make a little progress with the new Plugin this week, which is pleasing. Without going into a lot of technical explanation (which would be pretty boring) I ended up being able to set the first phrase of this week's anthem in the wordbuilder function. So you can hear a very rough approximation of the opening words sung by the software - Hail Son of God Savior of Men. The first part, Hail Son of God, is repeated in different ways across the different parts. I know I could have made the words sound better but at least they are almost all recognisable, if you also look at the words as they are sung. It took a long time to set up the words in this first phrase. Each syllable needs to be typed individually - and repeated where the notes change on the same word. Once you have worked out a short phrase, this can be saved and reused on other voices but then has to be tweaked when the rhythm and the word lengths are different. I can see how the long-winded process produces good results but the time investment is huge. This is fine if you are creating a piece of choral music for a film or something but for my weekly workflow, I am going to have to practise and improve my speed. We shall see how I get on with that. So I resorted to setting the rest of the anthem to a simple 'ah' sound. It's not too bad a sound overall. I'm fairly pleased with the short anthem itself. The lyrics come from a different source to recent weeks. It's a prayer from Paradise Lost (at least I think so), a work by John Milton, the 17th Century English author. Here are the words: Words for Anthem 23: Hail Son of God, Savior of Men, thy Name Shall be the copious matter of my Song Henceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praise Forget, nor from thy Father's praise disjoin.

Welcome to Anthem 23 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com – @realanthem52 or Instagram – @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. Technology is a fantastic thing, when it works. When it doesn't it's among the most frustrating things imaginable. This has been another highly frustrating week, due to technology. The anthem writing didn't go too badly and I ended up being fairly satisfied with what I produced for my 23rd attempt. The lyrics come from one of the week's psalms again, this time Psalm l (50). Here are the words: Words for Anthem 23: The Lord, even the most mighty God, hath spoken : and called the world, from the rising up of the sun, unto the going down thereof. Out of Sion hath God appeared : in perfect beauty. There are even fewer words than usual but plenty of opportunities for a bit of word painting.

Welcome to Anthem 22 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. I hope you will notice a marked difference in the sound of the anthem this week. A strange confluence occured when I went looking for choir plugins that incorporated actual words, not just generic Ah or Oo sounds. Firstly, I found one almost immediately that looked great and secondly, it was on offer for 60% off! Thirdly, after some recent invoices of mine for audio editing work had been paid, I was in the position to just about afford the plugin. It's called Hollywood Choirs by EastWest Sounds. The name is, perhaps, slightly off-putting as I'm not sure the Hollywood blockbuster style of choir would necessarily fit my anthems too well but, in fact, the plugin has a huge range of moods and modes. It's highly configurable so there will inevitably be a steep learning curve for me, as they say, but, without doing any tweaks at all, the voices are much better than the previous choir plugins I have used. However, the joy of the plugin is that you can indeed program it to sing words. It has a feature called 'wordbuilder' where you can type in words in English, phonetics or its own system called 'votox'. The choir has been recorded singing many hundreds of sounds and the software is pre-programmed to blend these together to make recognisable words. It even has the capability to sing in a range of European languages including Latin. I haven't had time to work out exactly how to use the wordbuilder so I've had to just leave everything at the default settings, even the words it is using. So when you hear the anthem, it won't be singing the right words but I hope you agree with me that it already sounds a lot more natural than my previous Logic Pro efforts. Clearly, I am not saying it is as good as a real choir but I think it will help me a lot to hear what the anthems could sound like if sung by humans. An interesting complication to using this new software is that I had to write the parts out in separate lines, not the compressed score approach I have been used to using. What I realised when listening back to the anthem yesterday is that this has resulted in more freedom in my writing, particularly between the soprano and alto parts. There is a lot more swapping of pitches in this anthem - by which I mean the altos sing higher than the sopranos at times, due to the shapes of the vocal lines. I think this is positive and I'm seriously considering always writing like this in future. An unexpected bonus has sprung out of the constrictions of using a new plugin! As for the anthem itself, I chose another of the psalms set for this week, xlviii (98). I only ended up using the first couple of verses and the last one. Here are the words: Words for Anthem 22: Great is the Lord and highly to be praised : in the city of our God, even upon his holy hill. For this God is our God for ever and ever : he shall be our guide unto death.

Welcome to Anthem 21 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It's Pentecost this week so I looked for an ancient Pentecost prayer. A 1st Century one by Æthelwold is probably out of copyright so that fitted the bill. Here are the words:   Words for Anthem 21: May God the Father bless us; may Christ take care of us; the Holy Ghost enlighten us all the days of our life. The Lord be our defender and keeper of body and soul, both now and for ever, to the ages of ages. Æthelwold c 908-984

Welcome to Anthem 20 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This time, I went back to one of the psalms set for this week - Psalm xciii (93). I altered the order of some parts and combined a couple of lines to make the setting easier. Here are the words: Words for Anthem 20: The Lord is King, The Lord has put on glorious apparel and girded himself with strength. He hath made the round world sure : that it cannot be moved. The floods are risen O Lord, the floods have lift up their voice : the floods lift up their waves. The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly : but yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier. I felt that I needed to create something for my 20th anthem that showed some of the aspects of what I've learned so far. Having strong intentions hasn't necessarily resulted in them coming to fruition so for in this project but this time I'm pleased with the anthem that emerged.

Welcome to Anthem 19 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It's Ascension Day this week. At Holy Trinity Church, the choir used to ascend the very dusty, cobwebby spiral staircase in the far South West corner after the Ascension morning service to sing on the roof of the Nave. I think it was the only time in the year that staircase was ever used except for maintenance I suppose. It goes without saying that I'm talking about an activity that ceased sometime in the 1980s when health and safety started being taken a little more seriously. The lead roof we strolled about on was sloped towards the precipice and it was surprising no choisters ever fell off. Nowadays, only the Vicar climbs up onto the roof - and it's the much lower - and safer - North Porch roof which is used. Still, it's fun to see and hear him up there. To fit in with the occasion, I decided to write an anthem this week with an appropriate text, in Latin. Here are the words:   Words for Anthem 19: Ascendit Deus in jubilatione, et Dominus in voce tubae. Dedit dona hominibus. Alleluia. Dominus in caelo paravit sedem suam. Alleluia.

Welcome to Anthem 18 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This anthem is based on another Psalm set for the week - this time Psalm cxlvii (147). I used some verses in full and others I missed parts out in order to create a useable set of words. As has happened more than once, I started off with the intention of making this anthem harmonically adventurous but then it turned itself into something more predictable. I do like it, though. Here are the words:   Words for Anthem 18: Great is our Lord and great is his power : yea and his wisdom is infinite. The Lord setteth up the meek : and bringeth the ungodly down to the ground. O sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving :   I also realised that the first 4 notes are identical to last week's opening notes in the soprano (treble) part. That's a bit weird but the anthems sound almost entirely dissimilar so I'm not that concerned about it! I also ignored my own advice from last week on the length of anthems. This one is perhaps the shortest of all so far. It might be a good introit, perhaps. In its short span, there are a lot of notes, however. I got a little bit carried away with the quavers (quarter notes) in the 3/4 section, despite the relatively fast tempo and I think it creates an upbeat, positive character. In this case, I think that's a good thing. The words are clearly meant to be celebratory so the anthem buzzing away with fleet-footed runs seems appropriate. I deliberately played with some sequences of 6ths to see how they work and, despite what I said earlier, some of the harmonies are a little unexpected, providing a frisson of interest, hopefully. I am finding A major a fun key to write in and this anthem doesn't really stray from that - partly due to its short span. The construction is also simple - basically it's A B A B C - see if you can hear that as it wizzes past. Unfortunately, I have managed to make the Logic version very heavy and muffled in the bass so I'll have to try and fix that for next week's anthem.

Welcome to Anthem 17 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. Everything has been much more positive this week. I have had a go at composing another 'Shakespeare Anthem', in the general tradition of fast, joyful pieces. Strangely, I can't remember exactly how I decided on using verses from Psalm cxlviii (148) but the theme of praise seems to have been a productive one. Words for Anthem 17: O praise the Lord of heaven : praise him in the height. Praise him, all ye angels of his : praise him, all his host. Praise him, sun and moon : praise him, all ye stars and light. Let them praise the Name of the Lord : for he spake the word, and they were made; he commanded, and they were created.

Welcome to Anthem 16 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It was a difficult week. There was a lot going on at work and as a result I was very tired which, as previously noted, makes composing rather difficult. Despite this, I did manage to write a complete anthem even though there were more than the usual number of stops and starts in the process. Several avenues were deleted and I'm not sure about how it ended up. It's never a good idea to review things when you aren't feeling up to it and I shouldn't have looked back through the recordings of all my anthems so far last night, while I was in a low state due to tiredness. I left myself feeling that none of the pieces so far were of any worth and the expected progress hadn't happened. I'm in a bit of more positive mood today but I'm going to leave the older anthems alone for the moment and come back much later on to see how I think I have improved - or not improved... Back to this week's anthem, however. I may have mentioned right back in the introduction to this podcast that April is a big month for Stratford-upon-Avon, where I live. Shakespeare's Birthday is on 23rd of the month and the traditional celebrations take place on the weekend closest to the date. As begun by students and staff almost 200 years ago, a procession starts from King Edward VI Grammar School (among former pupils are William Shakespeare, me and my son) and ends with the laying of flowers at Shakespeare's grave in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church (where my daughter and I are members of the choir and my wife and son are former members). When I first arrived in Stratford in 1977, representatives of a large number of countries attended to unfurl their national flags on flagpoles around the centre of the town and it was a grand affair. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) the political difficulties and the cost of inviting ambassadors and others has become prohibitive. The festivities are still great fun and remarkable for somewhere as small as Stratford. Several aspects of the celebrations remain the same including the Shakespeare Service at Holy Trinity Church and its Shakespeare Sermon, usually given by a clergy person with an interest in or a connection to Shakespeare studies and sometimes by an academic like my late father who was Professor of English at Warwick University and a member of the Holy Trinity congregation. An innovation for that service began a relatively short time after I joined the choir in 1979 - the (almost) annual commissioning of the appropriately-named Shakespeare Anthem. This is one of the activities undertaken by The Friends of the Music of Holy Trinity Church and has featured several famous composers over the decades including Andrew Fletcher, Arthur Wills, Guy Woolfenden, John Joubert, Francis Jackson, Philip Stopford and many others. This year, the anthem is by a female composer for the first time - Becky McGlade. No spoilers but I'm very much enjoying rehearsing her anthem and you can find out all about her on her website. With this time of year in Stratford whirling around my head, I decided to have a go at a Shakespeare Anthem of my own. I'll probably try another one next week as well. I didn't use an actual passage from Shakespeare, mainly because I couldn't find one, but during my web search, I chanced upon the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust collections website. The Trust has looked after Shakespeare's Birthplace in Stratford for many years as well as some other houses that belonged to his extended family. I worked at a house called Hall's Croft when I was a student and my wife worked at the world famous Anne Hathaway's Cottage. The Trust also looks after a wonderful collection of items connected to Shakespeare including a book of prayers. While it isn't a copy definitely used by William Shakespeare, it was published during his lifetime and is exactly the kind of prayer book that might have been in his library. So the prayer depicted above seemed like a good choice to set. Who knows, perhaps it was read aloud by William or one of his family? I took a little editorial licence with the old English spellings of the words in order to make it work in an anthem but it's mostly the same: Words for Anthem 16: I do commende and betake my life both body and soule, now and for ever. Unto thee, with the father and the holy Ghost, one God of most excellent majestie, be all prayre, honor, and thankesgiving, for ever and ever. Amen. There are only 2 sentences and a final amen but that wasn't my problem. It just didn't seem to flow. I ended up adding dots to quite a few of the notes because I thought that one of the issues was that the rhythm was very straight. I also went back and made the bass part lower in several places. Listening back today, I think the anthem is a little bit more attractive than I was expecting and, again, I'm wondering how much this had to do with my overall mood. Anyway, it starts in F major and switches to G major shortly afterwards. Later it makes its way back to F major and I went for contrast in movement rather than key signature or feel in a central section that features a lot of quavers (8th notes). The texture here is much more complex and I think it does shift the anthem to a different gear. The end returns to something more like the original feel with a very loud and positive ending. I completely forgot to add an amen section but never mind. You might be able to hear some of the aspects I tried to fix during the week but you may not.

Welcome to Anthem 15 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week I returned to the Church of England Lectionary and one of the psalms set for this week - xxvi or 26, depending on your preference. Here are the lyrics: Words for Anthem 15: Be thou my Judge, O Lord, for I have walked innocently: my trust hath been also in the Lord, therefore shall I not fall. Examine me, O Lord, and prove me: try out my reins and my heart. For thy loving-kindness is ever before mine eyes: and I will walk in thy truth.   Once again, I found that fewer words makes for a more manageable writing process. I also used a semi-random technique for the first time. I set the first line of the Psalm 'Be thou my Judge O Lord' by placing the notes on the stave without listening to them being played by the software at the same time. I knew I wanted another pseudo-canon entry approach for the start of the vocal parts so I sketched out what I thought it would look like. Then I listened to how it actually sounded and tweaked it until it sounded as good as it looked. It worked rather well and I converted it into an organ introduction with some nice offbeat movement.

Welcome to Anthem 14 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This time, I continued with another Easter anthem with text from another anonymous Easter prayer: Words for Anthem 14: May the glad dawn Of Easter morn Bring joy to thee. May the calm eve Of Easter leave A peace divine with thee. May Easter night On thine heart write, O Christ, I live for thee!   These could have been good words for a big, loud anthem but instead what came out was rather subdued. Beginning an anthem is an odd experience. I tend to start at the beginning of the words and work forward, just seeing what crops up, rather than having a definite plan. This may change but it seems to be working at the moment.

Welcome to Anthem 13 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. I've had enough of Lent. Well, in terms of writing anthems, at least. This week I had a go at an Easter anthem and next week I may do the same. My usual web search for lyrics turned up the, perhaps surprising, Easter Prayers page of the Country Living magazine website - https://www.countryliving.com/life/g30679333/easter-prayers/ I was drawn to the short and attractive anonymous prayer called 'The Brightest Light'. Here are the words: Words for Anthem 13: The veil of darkness transformed to the brightest light. The most dreadful end became the most beautiful beginning. The depths of despair fade to reveal hope everlasting. The curse of death defeated by eternal life.    

Welcome to Anthem 12 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. Another mixed week ended rather well. As soon as I spotted that one of the psalms set for this week was cxxx (130) I knew I had to set it. The biggest reason for this was that the name of this psalm in Latin is 'De profundis' - there can't be a better anthem name in existence. Also, the words in English are highly descriptive: Words for Anthem 12: Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. O let thine ears consider well: the voice of my complaint. If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: O Lord, who may abide it? For there is mercy with thee: therefore shalt thou be feared. I look for the Lord; my soul doth wait for him: in his word is my trust. My soul fleeth unto the Lord: before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch. O Israel, trust in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy: and with him is plenteous redemption. And he shall redeem Israel: from all his sins.  

Welcome to Anthem 11 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week's composition seemed to go a lot more smoothly than usual. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. As it was Mothering Sunday this week, I hunted for a prayer to set. I didn't want to go for the traditional Ave Maria because I dislike the Schubert version and I wouldn't be able to separate the words from that music. Nothing personal, it's just not a tune that suits me. I found a useful website and a variety of good prayer words here - https://www.prayinglatin.com/prayers-to-our-lady/ - and went for part of Regina Caeli, Queen of Heaven. Here's the part I set: Words for Anthem 11: Deus qui per resurrectionem Filii tui, Domini nostri Iesu Christi, mundum laetificare dignatus es: praesta, quaesumus, ut per eius Genetricem Virginem Mariam, perpetuae capiamus gaudia vitae. Per eundem Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. ______________ O God, who by the Resurrection of Thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, granted joy to the whole world: grant we beseech Thee, that through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, His Mother, we may lay hold of the joys of eternal life. Through the same Christ our Lord. R. Amen. Translation https://www.prayinglatin.com/prayers-to-our-lady/

Welcome to Anthem 10 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. Finally into double figures! It feels like a bit of a milestone to have completed the tenth anthem of 2024. It wasn't all plain sailing this week, however. I managed to find some words from Psalm 91 (xci), set for this week in the Church of England lectionary, that felt possible to use - or at least three and a half verses: Words for Anthem 10: I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope, and my stronghold: my God, in him will I trust , For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noise-some pestilence. He shall defend thee under his wings, and thou shalt be safe under his feathers: his faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: I decided to go for choir a cappella and try to include some interesting harmonic effects. This was partly after re-listening to some of the previous anthems and being disappointed by their lack of risk-taking in this department. I wonder what I will think of those early anthems this time next year. So, I deliberately added unusual shifts in cadences, to see what would happen. I'm absolutely no harmonic expert but I think, for example, the anthem starts in C major and then the first cadence takes it into G major, followed swiftly by E major. I remember being afraid or at least deeply confused by key changes when I was at college. It was undoubtedly because I didn't play the piano and I hadn't been able to grasp 'how' to change key in a piece. My composition teacher mentioned 'modulation by insistence', an idea I liked a lot! Through the process of these 10 anthems and also from watching some YouTube videos, I now feel emboldened by my experiments and heartened by the current attitude towards composition I have discovered. In common with a lot of other activities, the old, elitist attitudes are fading and there seems to be a lot more openness now to experimentation without needing to know exactly what is going on in the intricacies of harmonic structure. In my opinion, this can only be a good thing. This doesn't mean I found it easy this week to write anthem 10. I had long periods of doubt about the parts in between the cadences. They seemed very static. I was deliberately trying out block chords rather than contrapuntal, weaving part writing but it seemed to lack a sense of direction. I probably did more tinkering with the notes than in any previous anthem and eventually decided to add a middle section with interweaving lines as a contrast to all the chordal writing. This seemed to work. There was still something holding the sense of motion back, however. I realised that the bass part was high and close to the tenor part for the majority of the time. Adding more motion into the pitch of the bass solved the problem. I have to admit that, having been a bass in a choir for many years, I tend to listen out for the bass lines in most pieces and if it's static, I am less interested. Note to self - always think about the motion in the bass part.

Welcome to Anthem 9 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or instagram @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It's exciting to have almost made it to double figures! Perhaps unwisely, I was determined this week to stick to my guns and finish something I started. I almost abandoned this anthem and started again but ended up pushing through, just to see what would happen. I chose an ancient Lenten prayer this time. Here are the Latin words and the English translation: _____________________________________________ Concede nobis, omnipotens Deus, ut per annua quadragesimalis exercitia sacramenti et ad intelligendum Christi proficiamus arcanum, et affectus eius digna conversatione sectemur. Per. _____ Grant to us, Almighty God, that through the annual exercises of the Lenten sacrament we may both make progress to understanding the mystery of Christ and follow after his compassion with a worthy conversion. Through our Lord Jesus who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. ____________________________________________ This prayer has been attributed to the fifth-century Pope Gelasius I in what was known as the Gelasian Sacramentary, created in the following couple of centuries after he died. It's a short prayer but I thought I could evoke some of its sentiment. The shape of the resulting anthem began to form as I wrote it. Beginning with a slow introduction, I played around with the tonality and some interesting chords to create the idea of petitioning God using the opening words Grant to us, Almighty God - Concede nobis, omnipotens Deus. I then increased the speed and movement to continue the prayer and played around with the idea of a gradually descending pattern, combined with gradually becoming quieter. It produced some interesting chords and feeling, I think. Part of the idea was to create a kind of chant with repeated phrases sung by the choir in block chords. An experiment of course but I am quite pleased with how it sounds. As the original Latin prayer does not include the final sentence and ‘Amen' added in the English translation, I had to search for an appropriate Latin ending and found the simple and shorter form of ‘Per Christum Dominum nostrum, Amen'. I decided to make this ending more positive-sounding than the petitions of earlier in the anthem so the choir and organ end up with a loud closing passage.

Welcome to Anthem 8 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or instagram @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com.   I'm delighted to say that I managed (despite a few technical difficulties) to speak to Cheryl Fraces-Hoad this week for my first Anthem 52 interview. As you'll hear in a few minutes' time, Cheryl was generous and open about her process and thoughts on composition. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did - which is a lot!   Before that, though, I completed anthem 8 after another stop-start week. Initially, I wanted to set part of another psalm for the beginning of Lent but I couldn't find a passage in the Church of England Lectionary which would work. So I decided to trust in the abilities of Google and typed in ‘ancient lent prayers'. I soon found a prayer from St Augustine of Hippo - possibly the best name of any saint - and noticed his dates were 354-430 AD - probably out of copyright, then. Here are the words: _____________________________________________ Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit, that my thoughts may all be holy. Act in me, O Holy Spirit, that my work, too, may be holy. Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit, that I may love only what is holy. Strengthen me, O Holy Spirit, that I may defend all that is holy. Guard me, O Holy Spirit, that I myself may always be holy. Amen. ____________________________________________  

Welcome to Anthem 7 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. If you are listening to this episode as soon as it's released in February 2024, I am in Devon with (part of)  my family. I did manage to complete Anthem 7 before I went though, as you'll hear. After last week's atonal piece, I decided to go the other way. I've wanted to have a go at working from existing models for a long time so I chose ‘O taste and see' by Vaughan Williams because of its brevity and simplicity of structure. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could come up with my own version of organ introduction, simple but beautiful treble solo and canon-type chorus parts. If you're wondering what i mean by canon, Wikipedia defines it like this: “A canon is a piece [made up of] of voices (or instrumental parts) that sing or play the same music starting at different times. A round is a type of canon, but in a round each voice, when it finishes, can start at the beginning again so that the piece can go “round and round”.” ‘O taste and see' isn't a strict canon in the way something like Pachelbel's Canon is - it just uses part of the technique. Words for Anthem 7: O come, let us worship, and fall down: and kneel before the Lord our Maker For he is the Lord and we are the people and the sheep of his hand. Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts: as in the provocation

Welcome to Anthem 6 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. It's been another tricky week - at least in terms of composition. It's also been my birthday which went rather better. I've bought myself a pipe organ virtual instrument that will be making its debut on next week's anthem, I think. In the Church of England, we have entered 'Ordinary Time', between the end of Christmas (Candlemas) and the beginning of Lent. I had a look at what psalms were set for this week and chose some verses from Psalm iv (4): Words for Anthem 6: Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness: thou hast set me at liberty when I was in trouble; have mercy upon me, and hearken unto my prayer. O ye sons of men, how long will ye blaspheme mine honour: and have such pleasure after leasing? Know this also, that the Lord hath chosen to himself the man that is godly: when I call upon the Lord, he will hear me. As I have mentioned before, writing plaintive music makes me feel low and this week's composition was no exception. However, I fought my way through many different iterations of this anthem and deleted a large number of phrases until I finally settled on something I think works - just about. It's in a much more atonal style where I've tried to concentrate only on the sounds, not on the technicalities of harmony. There are dramatic crescendos and gaps and I have tried to end with a resolution of sorts - the music ends on an E major added ninth chord (I think) with the dynamic instruction to fade away to nothing (a niente). Given time to revise this piece after leaving it for a considerable time, I imagine I will extend it or re-shape it in another way but it's the first proper anthem I have completed in a non-traditional harmonic style. Reproduction in Musescore is fairly bad. For example, I have had to put in spurious slurs to even out some silly, bumpy quavers and the ritardando (slowing down) at the end just doesn't happen so it's not possible to hear that effect at all. Unfortunately, I'm still struggling with the Epic Choir virtual instrument in Logic so this anthem may sound decent with a real choir - or maybe even worse - but it's certainly been a useful learning process this week. I wonder what you'll think of the results. Well, what do you think? Let me know on X.com @realanthem52, Instagram @realanthem52, as a comment below or via email show@anthem52.com I hope you will join me next week for a new episode - and a new anthem - only 46 to go - but until then the question remains - will I make it to Anthem 52?

Welcome to Anthem 5 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or instagram @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. Before I talk about this week's composition, I thought I might give a few recommendations of folk on social media who I have enjoyed following this week. Perhaps you'd like to follow them as well. On Instagram (where you can follow me @realanthem52), @emily.oxtoby_music is a talented young organist and singer who shares her exploits in a very engaging way. Also on Instagram, composer and choir leader of @singspacechoir, @oliviasparkhall's latest venture is a book for children and young adults about vocal health. I've bought a copy for my daughter, Charlotte. Do follow those accounts which I will add to the show notes for this episode and while you're at it, why not follow Charlotte @artistwhoisautistic? This week's anthem writing went rather well. Maybe it's because I have recovered from my annoying illness or something completely different but I enjoyed producing a Candlemas anthem from traditional English words I found on the remarkable A Clerk of Oxford site. I don't think it's active any more but it still contains a lot of blog posts connected with choral singing. I'll put the link to it in the show notes over on Anthem52.com. Here are the two verses and one chorus I set: _____________________________________________ The greatness of God in his love has been shown, The light of his life on the nations is thrown: And that which the Jews and the Greeks did divine Is come in the fullness of Jesus to shine. The Light of the World in the darkness has shone, And grows in our sight as the ages flow on. The Light of the World is more clear to our sight As errors disperse and men see him aright: In lands long in shadow, his churches arise And blaze for their neighbours the Way of the Wise. ____________________________________________  

Welcome to Anthem 4 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 or Instagram - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This has been an unusual week in a number of ways. Firstly, I wrote two new anthems and I explain that in the episode. I have also been unwell and off work with a nasty cold but fortunately there were no choral services at Holy Trinity this weekend which gave me a bit of recuperation time. I said last week that I was going to try something a little darker than last week's irrepressibly cheerful piece. I did try. However, I was reminded of a report I once read which said that actors who played characters suffering from mental illness were prone to it themselves. You can understand why - if you act like you are experiencing symptoms for 3 hours every night, it surely must affect you. I'm not likening my little composition efforts to someone playing King Lear every day - that would be disingenuous - but when I tried to use words from a random psalm about suffering and asking for forgiveness, the music I came up with made me feel bad when I was working on it. I now know that I was getting sick at the time so I think that had a lot more to do with it than the music itself but I had to abandon that anthem completely. Instead I opted for some verses from psalm 65 or lxv in Roman numerals. Words for Anthem 4: Blessed is the man whom thou choosest and receivest unto thee: he shall dwell in thy court, and shall be satisfied with the pleasures of your house, even of thy holy temple Thou shalt shew us wonderful things in thy righteousness, O God of our salvation: thou that are the hope of all the ends of the earth, and of them that remain in the broad sea: Well, what do you think? Let me know on X.com @realanthem52, as a comment below or via email show@anthem52.com I hope you will join me next week for a new episode - and a new anthem - only 48 to go - but until then the question remains - will I make it to Anthem 52?

Welcome to Anthem 3 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I'm Kevin Mulryne and I hope you will enjoy listening to my progress throughout 2024. Please do visit the website Anthem52.com, follow along on x.com - @realanthem52 and send me a message to show@anthem52.com. This week's anthem has been much easier to write - that doesn't mean it's any more successful of course - you'll have to see what you think. Here are the words I ended up setting:   O give thanks unto the Lord and call upon his Name: tell the people what things he hath done. O let your songs be of him and praise him: and let your talking be of all his works.   Well, what do you think? Let me know on X.com @realanthem52, as a comment in the show notes for this week at anthem52.com or via email show@anthem52.com I've had a bit of fun putting another progress counter on the front page of the website Anthem52.com this week. You can now check in with how I'm getting on by seeing at a glance little thumbnails of the anthems which have been completed. Guess how many thumbnails there are so far. I don't know if I will always opt for contrasting anthems each week but I have a feeling next week might be a bit darker than this week. Relentlessly cheerful is great but maybe needs some contrast. My first mystery guest might make it onto the episode next week so stay tuned for that. One thing is for sure, she will know a lot more about composing anthems than me. I hope you will join me next week for a new episode - and a new anthem - only 49 to go - but until then the question remains - will I make it to Anthem 52?  

Welcome to Anthem 2 in my attempt to write a new choir anthem every week for a year. I assumed (there's my first mistake) that as it was Epiphany this week, the story of the three wise men visiting the stable would be an easy catalyst for a carol, in the same vein as the multiple Advent and Christmas carols I had produced before the turn of the year. I was wrong. I now realise, looking back over the week, that I was completely exhausted from the return to work and all the other things going on. This is an important lesson for me in creative terms - it's almost impossible to compose worthwhile music when your brain is tired. Another lesson was to abandon something which isn't working sooner. After several false starts I ended up setting How Lovely Shines the Morning Light. Words for Anthem 2: How lovely shines the Morning Star! The nations see and hail afar the light in Judah shining. O David's son of Jacob's race, my Bridegroom and my King of grace, for you my heart is pining. Lowly, holy, great and glorious, O victorious Prince of graces, filling all the heav'nly places. Well, what do you think? Let me know on X.com @realanthem52, as a comment below or via email show@anthem52.com I'd like to thank my daughter, Charlotte, who has been doing some fantastic work for me as part of her college work experience. She has done some quick and detailed research and critiqued the Anthem 52 website amongst other tasks. Well done to her. Also, well done and congratulations to Paul Walton and Tim Popple whose kickstarter appeal to launch Descants are for life, not just for Christmas is now fully funded - it's clearly a collection people are very interested in. Finally, thank you to everyone who has been in contact this week in any way, including Jamie McQuinn, Bob Keeley and Greg Clinton who commented in various ways.  I hope you will join me next week for a new episode - and a new anthem - only 50 to go - but until then the question remains - will I make it to Anthem 52?