Follow The Colours
"Follow the Colours" is a song written by the English composer Edward Elgar, with words by Capt. William de Courcy Stretton. The song is for male voice solo with an optional chorus of male voices.
The song was written as the result of a commission from the Worshipful Company of Musicians in 1907. It is said that Alfred Henry Littleton (chairman of Novello’s music publishers) had to plead with Elgar to go ahead, as there was much Elgar disliked about the idea. Its original title was "Marching Song", and it was first performed by a four-part choir (S.A.T.B.) at the Empire Day concert in the Royal Albert Hall on 24 May 1908. It 1914 it was adapted by the composer for solo and optional male chorus, orchestrated and republished as "Follow the Colours". It was performed at the Royal Albert Hall on 10 October 1914.
The mood is at best cheerful optimism, at worst bombastic: but this was before the real horrors of the war which Elgar later recalled more sensitively a year later with For the Fallen.
The chorus generally reinforces the solo singer in the second and fourth lines of each verse, and joins in the refrain.
The accompaniment is for full orchestra, and is an example of brilliant but sensitive writing for the large percussion section, which consists of three timpani, side drum, triangle, bass drum and cymbals.
Read more about Follow The Colours: Lyrics, Recordings
Famous quotes containing the words follow the, follow and/or colours:
“Your friends praise your abilities to the skies, submit to you in argument, and seem to have the greatest deference for you; but, though they may ask it, you never find them following your advice upon their own affairs; nor allowing you to manage your own, without thinking that you should follow theirs. Thus, in fact, they all think themselves wiser than you, whatever they may say.”
—William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)
“Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In a borealic iceberg came Victoria; she
Knew Prince Albert’s tall memorial took the colours of the floreal
And the borealic iceberg;”
—Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)