Royal Wedding March Music
Keri Gamrath
I don't know about you, but I was delighted to revel in the beautifully performed, LIVE music featured this morning for the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Catherine, now-Duchess of Cambridge, which yes, I did watch live at 3 a.m. in California.
Here is a link to a list of the works performed, which included organ works, trumpet works, choral works and orchestral works, by mostly British composers, past and present. There were works commissioned especially for the wedding: "This is the day which the Lord hath made," by British composer John Rutter, and "Ubi caritas" by Paul Mealor of Anglesey.
It was so heartening to me, to see an event which so effectively recognized and celebrated a country's musical culture, not to mention the fact that it featured so many live musicians. It seems that William and Catherine know well the art music of their country and genuinely support it. I loved the color, the costume, the tradition and the pageantry, but I thought the music made the day.
What is the aural word for "spectacular"? This is it, "I Was Glad" by Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry: choir, orchestra, organ, trumpets. I'm pretty partial to boys' choirs these days, too. Here it is for anyone who missed it this morning: (Start at 1:27)
April 29, 2011 at 08:56 PM I was delighted to see a couple gratuitous shots of the violinists! I didn't have a chance to view the entire ceremony, but I did enjoy some of the music while getting my son ready for school.
April 30, 2011 at 06:29 PM Thank you so much for posting this, Laurie! I had pretty much ignored the wedding hoopla until I saw what you had written and the videos. What a marvelous idea to have Parry's "I Was Glad"/Psalm 122 as the processional. I won (or rather, my wife won for me by buying up most of the raffle tickets...:-) a chance to conduct Parry's masterpiece with the Boston Cecilia a couple of years ago. What wonderful music! It is nice to know that the Western Classical Music Tradition still exists somewhere other than in Japan, Korea, and China. Brittania Rules! Lawrence Franko
PS Did they HAVE to cut off the video before the end of the piece?? Snif. PPS Yes, pray for the Peace of Jerusalem, the city of peace that has almost never known peace... PPPS Perhaps you could do a forum on violinists who love playing choral music. I think most violinists's phrasing and pacing could benefit greatly by their being more familiar with our ur-instrument, the human voice!
May 1, 2011 at 02:20 PM Oh, that was lovely, and yes, the music was sublime (as were the trees inside the abbey - that shocked me!). I'd seen the first clip earlier on BBC News Online, a few hours after the wedding, and the footage lasted a bit longer, until the music ended, and an overhead camera took over, giving us this aerial view of the whole ceremony that brought tears to my eyes. I tried to find that clip just now over at BBC News, and it's buried in all the other stuff. If anyone can hunt it down, those last 30 seconds (or so) are well worth watching. Lawrence, you're right - it's such a shame the way it cuts off right now.
May 1, 2011 at 08:58 PM I'm not a royalist at all, but I thoroughly enjoyed the wedding!! The music was the only real thing attracting me to the wedding (and the dress!!) and I thought that the choice of music was brilliant (and the fact that I have sung 'I was Glad' for the entrance to a wedding before made it even more special!) and the clockwork of the whole thing was amazing! I also think Kate looked stunning in that dress! One of the things that made the whole thing more special for me is the fact I personally know one of the choir boys from another cathedral choir we both used to sing in! :)
May 2, 2011 at 11:21 AM The commentary was something I tried to avoid . I switched over to satellite pictures from Brazil and listened to the lady going into raptures . I can`t speak the language but it had less chance of niggles about expense.
Felix Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" in C major, written in 1842, is one of the best known of the pieces from his suite of incidental music (Op. 61) to Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is one of the most frequently used wedding marches, generally being played on a church pipe organ.
At weddings in many Western countries, this piece is commonly used as a recessional, though frequently stripped of its episodes in this context. It is frequently teamed with the "Bridal Chorus" from Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin,[1] or with Jeremiah Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March",[2] both of which are often played for the entry of the bride.
The first known instance of Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" being used at a wedding was when Dorothy Carew wed Tom Daniel at St Peter's Church, Tiverton, England, on 2 June 1847[3] when it was performed by organist Samuel Reay. However, it did not become popular at weddings until it was selected by Victoria, The Princess Royal for her marriage to Prince Frederick William of Prussia on 25 January 1858.[1] The bride was the daughter of Queen Victoria, who loved Mendelssohn's music and for whom Mendelssohn often played while on his visits to Britain.
A good friend and I were talking about this song a few weeks ago. He, by all means a popular musician, suggested the song to me as something I might want to arrange for my kids. The concept of doing so made me laugh (it would not present a challenge for even middle school kids to play it) and then it made me think. And we talked about Chumbawamba and their whole plan to create this song in a laboratory and make a lot of money off of it so that they could achieve other goals.
And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. The song contains the famous Trumpet Voluntary, which is written for middle school bands a hundred ways (I've arranged it for my middle school bands!) and contained in the venerable Standard of Excellence, vol. 1 (the "Red Book"). Trumpet Voluntary is also known as The Prince of Denmark's March, although written by an Englishman, and has been used for centuries for major events, even in the most recent major British royal wedding. I don't know who the Prince of Denmark was at the time, but he must have liked the trumpet, as it existed in 1700. And in 1998, I sang this song on every marching band bus ride home, not recognizing the melody that I had played out of the Standard of Excellence book.
Cultural conspiracy theorists believe that subliminal messages are found within lots of pop songs. I think they might be onto something, but it's not the Illuminati creating the messages, it's the band and choral directors of the world, peppering the minds of young people with musical mechanisms that they carry on into their popular music careers. Watch out.
"Tubthumping" - Chumbawamba
Intro: Chumbawamba was an anarchic punk band formed in Lancashire, England, who spent 30 years engaging in major public political protests. In the midst of their long career as a band, they struck pop gold with the song "Tubthumping". Inescapable in the late 1990s, the song hit number one in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy, and New Zealand, number two in the UK and reached number six on the US Billboard Hot 100 charts. The song also topped the Billboard Adult and Alternative Charts and was nominated back home for a BRIT Award for Best British Single of 1998. While the song seems in some ways non-sensical, it conveys the struggle of working people in England, which often comes with the stigma of alcohol abuse. The band was asked to play the song in a number of major venues and on awards shows; in most of these performances, they used the opportunity to espouse leftist politics (both in the context of the UK and the US) and continued their political ways, despite their fame.
Analysis: Seeing that the song might as well have been created in a lab to stimulate maximum catchiness, at 2:57 (in the video recording linked below) the song samples the Prince of Denmark's March, which is also known as Trumpet Voluntary, written by Jerimiah Clarke c. 1700. The melodic sample is played on the trumpet (quite logically) and joins a bevy of other melodies that play concurrently until the end of the song.
Considerations for Teaching: "Tubthumping" is so incredibly prevalent in popular culture that surely students have heard it before. While the song is a far cry from the attention-garnering political and protest stunts the band is otherwise known for, the song does describe alcohol abuse ("He drinks a whisky drink / he drinks a vodka drink / he drinks a lager drink / he drinks a cider drink"). However, unlike many popular songs, the lyrics do not seem intended to encourage drinking among listeners but to describe the drinking habits of working class people in England.