Händel Zadok the Priest - Organ Arrangement

[exchemist]

I sang this (Bass 1) before Christmas and was interested to come across this arrangement for organ. It works a lot better than I had expected. A great piece - and one we will hear (in original choral form) before too long, when Queen Elizabeth dies and Charles is crowned in Westminster Abbey.

 

[The Hammer]

Everything works well on the organ.

 

[exchemist]

Everything works well on the organ.

Well not perhaps everything, but this one was interesting. Handel was a great organist of course, but he also writes for the voice (unlike Bach, who writes whatever the mathematics of counterpoint inspire him to write, and the poor bloody singer just has to find a way to sing it.) So I wasn't sure how it would sound.

The introduction was in some ways better than the orchestral original, as that marvellous violin line tends usually to get a bit drowned. I had doubts that the choral part would sound effective but in fact it's fine. The organist was quite clever in choosing registrations to bring it to life.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Best reason to visit a church?

 

[pearl]

A great piece - and one we will hear (in original choral form) before too long, when Queen Elizabeth dies and Charles is crowned in Westminster Abbey.

Yes, can picture the coronation while listening.

St. Aquinas suggests in the Summa Theologica that anything considered beautiful must have three distinct qualities. The first is integritas, or integrity—meaning a thing has the wholeness of what it is supposed to be. A mountain cannot be beautiful without hardness and stability. A dog whose skin is covered with flower petals instead of fur might arguably be prettier than your average Doberman, but it is not fully a dog and thus cannot be a be a beautiful dog. Integritas ensures that a thing really is what it claims to be.

What makes for good liturgical music? St. Thomas Aquinas has 3 criteria for what works at Mass. | America Magazine

 

[exchemist]

Yes, can picture the coronation while listening.

St. Aquinas suggests in the Summa Theologica that anything considered beautiful must have three distinct qualities. The first is integritas, or integrity—meaning a thing has the wholeness of what it is supposed to be. A mountain cannot be beautiful without hardness and stability. A dog whose skin is covered with flower petals instead of fur might arguably be prettier than your average Doberman, but it is not fully a dog and thus cannot be a be a beautiful dog. Integritas ensures that a thing really is what it claims to be.

What makes for good liturgical music? St. Thomas Aquinas has 3 criteria for what works at Mass. | America Magazine

Hmm, the trouble with these criteria is that they seem inevitably so subjective that one is no further forward, really.

Nobody would suggest singing or playing this piece at mass, by the way. A coronation is not a mass. But the organ version could be played as a voluntary at the end of mass, I suppose. (Maybe at Christ the King, for example?).

 

[pearl]

Hmm, the trouble with these criteria is that they seem inevitably so subjective that one is no further forward, really.

Out of curiosity, was there not a time in Church history when music was absolutely forbidden during Mass?

 

[exchemist]

Out of curiosity, was there not a time in Church history when music was absolutely forbidden during Mass?

Not as far as I know. Gregorian chant goes back more than a thousand years and before that there was Ambrosian chant. And monks have always sung the offices, I think. I can't see why singing at mass would have been prohibited. Of course at the Reformation all sorts of things were banned or came under suspicion.

Luther himself, however, was a great believer in getting the congregation to sing, hence all those chorales that people like Bach later set with such beauty and ingenuity.

The one below was composed by Johann Schop in the c.17th and harmonised a century later by Bach in the Christmas Oratorio as follows (also known in English as "Break Forth O beauteous Heavenly Light") :

As ever with Bach, the bass line is to die for......