🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April (the rabbits rush in tomorrow, bearing muguets pour le premier mai), with my response to a posting on Facebook by John McIntyre yesterday
Hail! Bright Jeremiah, hail! fill ev’ry heart!
With love of thee and thy celestial art
— adapted from Nicholas Brady’s text for Henry Purcell’s “Hail! Bright Cecilia” (Z.328)
JMcI’s posting yesterday was a bright performance of a Baroque gem:
Uwe Komischke, Trompete und Thorsten Pech, Orgel spielen ein Highlight der barocken Trompeten-Literatur: Henry Purcell Trumpet Tune
which you can experience in a YouTube recording here.
Fabulous music. Actually by Jeremiah Clarke, though long attributed to Purcell. (“Hail! Bright Cecilia” really is by Purcell.)
Ann and I were married to it in Princeton (organ only, at a much more stately tempo, suited to processing down the aisle to the altar), Jacques and I would have been married to it in Palo Alto (if that had been possible before he died; we had plans). So it’s guaranteed to make me break down in weeping: tears of happy memory, tears of loss (still wrenchingly painful, decades later). This was the second time it had come up on my computer in two days, so I was a wreck.
About the music, from Wikipedia:
The Prince of Denmark’s March, commonly called the Trumpet Voluntary [AZ: or Trumpet Tune, as above], was written around 1700 by the English composer Jeremiah Clarke, the first organist of the then newly-rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral [in London].
For many years the piece was attributed incorrectly to Clarke’s elder and more widely known contemporary Henry Purcell. The misattribution emanated from an arrangement for organ published in the 1870s by William Spark, the town organist of Leeds, England. It was later arranged for several different ensembles by Sir Henry Wood.
The oldest source is A Choice Collection of Ayres, a collection of keyboard pieces published in 1700. A contemporary version for wind instruments also survives. According to some sources, the march was written in honour of Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne of Great Britain. [AZ: compare Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, husband of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain]
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