Anthem 52 Kevin Mulryne

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.