Anthem 52

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 [email protected].

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:

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 [email protected].

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:

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 [email protected].

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:

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.

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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.

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 [email protected].

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:

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 [email protected].

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:

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Concede nobis, omnipotens Deus, ut per annua quadragesimalis exercitia sacramenti et ad intelligendum Christi proficiamus arcanum, et affectus eius digna conversatione sectemur. Per.

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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.

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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 [email protected].

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:

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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.

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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 [email protected].

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.

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 [email protected].

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):

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 [email protected]

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 [email protected].

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:

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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.

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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 [email protected].

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.

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 [email protected]

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?