CORONATION BOOK

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20764, 26 June 1937, Page 11 (Supplement)

CORONATION BOOK

MARKED FEATURES IN SERVICE

CORONATION MUSIC In the Coronation Service Book, containing all the music sung at the ceremony, says “J.A.W.,” in the London ‘'Daily Telegraph,” the choice of music was necessarily governed, in the first place, by the particular requirements of the service; but the opportunity was not lost of providing a selection representative of English music from the sixteenth century to the present day. Tradition was maintained by the inclusion of Handel’s sonorous anthem, “Zadok the Priest,” written for the Coronation of George 11, and regularly performed since; and there is a further link with the past in Parry’s “I was glad when they said unto me,” written for the Coronation of Edward VII, with its dramatic interpolation of the “Vivats” sung by the King’s Scholars of Westminster. These two anthems accompanied the anointing and the entry into the church respectively.

For the act of homage the precedent of a single large-scale anthem was abandoned in favour of six shorter ones, representing different periods of English church music. Tye, Gibbons, Purcell, Boyce, Wesley and Dyson were the composers of this group. Similarly the music of the communion service was chosen from the work of four composers, including Stanford’s elaborate “Gloria,” written for the last Coronation. The most substantial of the new works was Vaughan Williams’s Te Deum. Simple in structure and faithful to the composer’s melodic principles, it does not forget the buoyancy proper to a festival. In a big building like the Abbey and with all the necessary associations of pomp and pageantry it made a telling climax to the ceremony. The other composers were faced with the task of providing short, concise settings for particular points in the ceremony. The task was a challenge to invention which they have not all successfully met. English church music suffers from the fact that cathedral organists are habitually improvising; this constant improvisation is reflected in their compositions. The settings of the Introit, Confortare and Offertorium would have been more effective if the composers had schooled themselves to produce simple a-cappella settings. There is no time in such brief music for instrumental wandering. More successful is George Dyson’s setting of the 150th Psalm, which has an epigrammatic directness as well as a healthy originality. * The one serious defect in the book was the version of “God Save the King” at the end. The preface claims that it has “the virtue of simplicity.” Actually the instrumental accompaniment is fussy and irritating.