Music
Music played at coronations is primarily classical and religiously inspired. The most oft-used piece is Zadok the Priest, a religious composition by George Frideric Handel based on texts from the Bible. The work was commissioned for George II's coronation in 1727, and has featured in every coronation since, an achievement unparalleled by any other piece. Hubert Parry's I Was Glad was written as the entrance anthem for the coronation of Edward VII, and contains a bridge section partway through so that the King's or Queen's Scholars of Westminster School can exercise their right to be the first commoners to acclaim the sovereign, shouting their traditional "vivat"s as he or she enters the coronation theatre. This anthem and Charles Villiers Stanford's Gloria in Excelsis have also been used regularly in recent coronations, as has the national anthem, God Save the Queen (or King). Other composers whose music featured in Elizabeth II's coronation include Sir George Dyson, Gordon Jacob, Sir William Henry Harris, Herbert Howells, Sir William Walton, Samuel Sebastian Wesley, Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Canadian-resident but English-born Healey Willan. Ralph Vaughan Williams suggested that a congregational hymn be included. This was approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, so Vaughan Williams recast his 1928 setting of the English metrical version of Psalm 100, the Jubilate Deo ("All people that on earth do dwell") for congregation, organ and orchestra: the setting has become ubiquitous at festal occasions in the Anglophone world.
Read more about this topic: Coronation Of The British Monarch
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation’s prayer ever in dumb music ascending.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall....”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Yes; as the music changes,
Like a prismatic glass,
It takes the light and ranges
Through all the moods that pass;”
—Alfred Noyes (1880–1958)