Singing God's Praises 1

The Psalm is about an unshakeable faith in God 'even though the earth be moved', yet the staunch slow-march tune to which it is sung commemorates an air operation which entailed precise but large-scale destruction. The stirring theme is by Eric Coates, a most successful and interesting composer (e.g. of the longest-running signature tune on radio).

Carols are not by any means the whole of his output, but anyone preparing a Carol Service might need to try quite hard not to find themself using his arrangements (in the ubiquitous Carols for Choirs series) or original settings. He is also responsible for widely-sung and accessible versions of such somewhat carol-like texts as For the Beauty of the Earth, the Gaelic Blessing and many others.

Any mainstream modern hymnal will probably include this and several others of his works.

The slow-march-like tune (though in fact in a lilting 3-in-a-bar time-signature) is the 'trio' theme of the Jupiter movement.

This one is by Jack Hayford.

The Spirituals quite often spring from Psalm texts (or other broadly contemporary Old Testament narratives) ~ but they are nothing like an intentional set of psalms, as such, in the sense that any of these other styles or groupings are.

Their iconic and soulful renditions of such classic Negro Spirituals (an honourable and musicologically correct term, should you happen to wonder!) as Let my people go! ~ a classic of Liberation Theology from an earlier generation ~ well repay hearing. The 'spiritual' tradition was one of the less utterly baleful, and more enduring, by-products of the whole sorry saga of transAtlantic slavery; the suffering of the slaves expressed itself through music that fused ancestral African rhythms and impulses with the Old Testament stories read to them at obligatory Sunday gatherings. This resonant repertoire quite rightly took its place, on precedent and on merit, in the 'soundtrack' of subsequent liberation and protest movements. Robeson, who with his own ethnic heritage was a superb and natural interpreter of Spirituals (among much else) was associated with such music and hence, by extension, with communist (or at least anti-capitalist) politics, so his name went onto the Hollywood banned list in the era of political and cultural paranoia known as the 'McCarthy witch-hunts'.

It is in the Oxford Book of Carols, for instance, and calls for a deep Russian bass bottom B in its penultimate bar (that's over half an octave below the bottom of the bass clef).

These were, respectively, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (also of Jerusalem fame, among much else) and Joseph Parry, who were not related.

This hymn, in a magnificent but sensitive ceremonial arrangement by Vaughan Williams, was used at the 1953 Coronation and may well be used on future occasions as and when these arise.