Early this century, I was asked if I would contribute a few anthems to a new collection which was aiming to provide ‘good-quality but less complex material’ for the use of church choirs during the different seasons of the year. One of the pieces that I submitted, ‘For all thy saints’ was designed for All Saints Day, which falls at the beginning of November. It was a setting of a strong nineteenth-century text, a song of thankfulness to all saints, and a hope that all people may follow their example (today we tend to use ‘saints’ to refer to all who seek to live a good life rather than specific Christian Saints, hence the small ‘s’). My anthem was duly published, in The New Oxford Easy Anthem Book (2002) – but the first time I actually heard a performance of it was last Sunday, and even then I was singing in it!
This gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate an anthem which I had almost forgotten. I had gone for a forthright setting of the text, beginning with a stately unison arch-shaped melody which, although in the key of C major, seems to avoid too much emphasis on the key-centre, with the note C mainly appearing in short off-beat notes, and not beginning or ending the melody. This appears to enable the music to move relatively seamlessly through different keys, with the final note providing a pivot for a key-change. Thus, this melody appears several times in different keys and with a four-note fragment developed contrapuntally. In the final verse we return to the opening key of C, now strengthened harmonically and with the four-note contrapuntal fragment providing a powerful Amen and confirming joyously the key of C major.
I recorded our performance last Sunday, in our All Saints/All Souls Choral Evensong, and turned it into a scrolling score, which you can hear here. Our choir is small, and with some voices suffering from November coughs and colds, but I think we caught the spirit of the anthem, and I’m very pleased that we were able to bring it to life.
Here’s a link to The New Oxford Easy Anthem Book, which contains the music, along with 62 other anthems by a wide range of composers.