Make Me to Know the Measure of My Days

Background

You never know what moment will call forth a new melody.  I was on a Peace Studies trip to Brazil in January of 1993, and we were staying at an old convent on the edge of a rainforest area.  Formerly bustling with life, the large compound was now used only by a few elderly nuns, and — an image I can’t forget — a small band of scarlet macaws that enjoyed their back garden.

I had brought a tin whistle with me, knowing I’d be far from pianos on the trip, and found a great acoustic in a now-unused dining hall, filled with old wooden tables and long benches, dusty and stacked atop each other. On one wall, I happened to notice an original “fine art” painting hanging there, depicting Jesus and John at the Last Supper.  As I walked up close, I couldn’t help but wonder about the painter behind this hidden gem of an artpiece, which seemed to vulnerably express how moving the tenderness of this intimate friendship was to him/her.

The strangely exotic yet familiar setting, with macaws of the jungle and nuns of the convent, combined with the soulful painting — that somehow seemed to radiate with feeling into that quiet room after years of being unseen — to put me in an unusual, receptive mood.  I began to play the tin whistle, and out came a haunting modal melody, true to the mystery of the moment.

I wrote it down when I returned home, but left it at that.  A number of years later, wanting to set it for choir, I found a psalm that caught my ear: Isaac Watts’ rendering of Psalm 39.  Its opening line was “Teach me the measure of my days,” which I adapted, needing two additional syllables to fit the tune (and gaining alliteration in the bargain): “Make me to know the measure of my days.”  I also discovered that, with a few similar syllabic additions, the traditional text of “Coventry Carol” would also fit the pensive mood of the tune.