Anthem 40 - Upward I lift my eyes

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 [email protected].

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.