"This Have I Done for My True Love", or "Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day", Op. 34, no. 1 [H128], [1] is a motet [2] or part song [3] composed in 1916 by Gustav Holst. The words are taken from an ancient carol, and the music is so strongly influenced by English folk music that it has sometimes been mistaken for a traditional folk song itself. It has often been described as a small masterpiece.
In 1916 Holst was living in a country cottage two miles south of Thaxted in Essex. [4] There he became aware of the ancient Cornish carol "Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day" thanks to the town's vicar, Conrad Noel, [5] who, having come across it in an 1833 collection edited by William Sandys, copied out the words and pinned them up in church. Thinking the carol's traditional tune rather uninspiring, Holst produced his own setting for mixed choir, [6] which, though it betrays the contrapuntal and harmonic influence of the English madrigalists, [7] uses a modal melody [6] so redolent of folksong that it was frequently mistaken for one. [8] He dedicated the work to Noel. [6] The words of the carol present the idea of the redemption of mankind through "the General Dance"; [8] an image which so intrigued Holst that he went on to look for other works connecting dance with worship, and this search soon led to his composing the Hymn of Jesus . [9]
The work was first performed at Thaxted parish church on 19 May 1918, conducted by Holst. [1] The first London performance took place at the Aeolian Hall on 23 December 1919, the choir being the Oriana Madrigal Society conducted by Charles Kennedy Scott. [10]
Holst himself was proud of the work, calling it his "best thing". It was performed at Chichester Cathedral in 1934 when his ashes were buried there. [8] By 1937 it was being described as his best-known work; [11] it remains a choral favourite [12] and has often been called a small masterpiece. [13] [6] [12] It is commemorated by a church bell inscribed "I ring for the general dance" at Thaxted, [6] though even there objections were initially heard to its being sung inside the church, and Ralph Vaughan Williams had to defend its suitability for church performance as late as 1951. [12]
Gustav Theodore Holst was an English composer, arranger and teacher. Best known for his orchestral suite The Planets, he composed many other works across a range of genres, although none achieved comparable success. His distinctive compositional style was the product of many influences, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss being most crucial early in his development. The subsequent inspiration of the English folksong revival of the early 20th century, and the example of such rising modern composers as Maurice Ravel, led Holst to develop and refine an individual style.
The Planets, Op. 32, is a seven-movement orchestral suite by the English composer Gustav Holst, written between 1914 and 1917. In the last movement the orchestra is joined by a wordless female chorus. Each movement of the suite is named after a planet of the Solar System and its supposed astrological character.
Thaxted is a town and civil parish in the Uttlesford district of north-west Essex, England. The town is in the valley of the River Chelmer, not far from its source in the nearby village of Debden, and is 97 metres above sea level. The town is 15 miles (24 km) north from the county town of Chelmsford, and 5.5 miles (9 km) east from the M11 motorway. The parish contains the hamlets of Cutlers Green, Bardfield End Green, Sibleys Green, Monk Street, and Richmond's Green. Much of its status as a "town" rests on its prominent late medieval guildhall, a place where guilds of skilled tradesmen regulated their trading practices, and its English Perpendicular parish church.
"I Vow to Thee, My Country" is a British patriotic hymn, created in 1921, when music by Gustav Holst had a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice set to it. The music originated as a wordless melody, which Holst later named "Thaxted", taken from the "Jupiter" movement of Holst's 1917 suite The Planets.
Imogen Clare Holst was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator. The only child of the composer Gustav Holst, she is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In addition to composing music, she wrote composer biographies, much educational material, and several books on the life and works of her father.
Harold Edwin Darke was an English composer and organist. He is particularly known for his choral compositions, which are an established part of the respertoire of Anglican church music. Darke had a fifty-year association with the church of St Michael, Cornhill, in the City of London.
"In the Bleak Midwinter" is a poem by the English poet Christina Rossetti, commonly performed as a Christmas carol. The poem was published, under the title "A Christmas Carol", in the January 1872 issue of Scribner's Monthly, and was first collected in book form in Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems.
Carols for Choirs is a collection of choral scores, predominantly of Christmas carols and hymns, first published in 1961 by Oxford University Press. It was edited by Sir David Willcocks and Reginald Jacques, and is a widely used source of carols in the British Anglican tradition and among British choral societies. A second volume was published in 1970, edited by David Willcocks and John Rutter, and the collection is now available in five volumes. A compendium edition was published later. In addition to music for Christmas, the collection also offers works that are suitable for other Christian festivals such as Advent and Epiphany.
The Mass in G minor is a choral work by Ralph Vaughan Williams written in 1921. It is the first Mass written in a distinctly English manner since the sixteenth century. The composer dedicated the piece to Gustav Holst and the Whitsuntide Singers at Thaxted in north Essex, but it was first performed by the City of Birmingham Choir on 6 December 1922. Though the first performance was in a concert venue Vaughan Williams intended the Mass to be used in a liturgical setting. R.R Terry directed its first liturgical performance at Westminster Cathedral.
Stephen Austin Wilkinson was a British choral conductor and composer.
"Thaxted" is a hymn tune by the English composer Gustav Holst, based on the stately theme from the middle section of the Jupiter movement of his orchestral suite The Planets and named after Thaxted, the English village where he lived much of his life. He adapted the theme in 1921 to fit the patriotic poem "I Vow to Thee, My Country" by Cecil Spring Rice but that was as a unison song with orchestra. It did not appear as a hymn-tune called "Thaxted" until his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams included it in Songs of Praise in 1926.
"Personent hodie" is a Christmas carol originally published in the 1582 Finnish song book Piae Cantiones, a volume of 74 Medieval songs with Latin texts collected by Jacobus Finno, a Swedish Lutheran cleric, and published by T.P. Rutha. The song book had its origins in the libraries of cathedral song schools, whose repertory had strong links with medieval Prague, where clerical students from Finland and Sweden had studied for generations. A melody found in a 1360 manuscript from the nearby Bavarian city of Moosburg in Germany is highly similar, and it is from this manuscript that the song is usually dated.
Jane Marian Joseph was an English composer, arranger and music teacher. She was a pupil and later associate of the composer Gustav Holst, and was instrumental in the organisation and management of various of the music festivals which Holst sponsored. Many of her works were composed for performance at these festivals and similar occasions. Her early death at age 35, which prevented the full realisation of her talents, was considered by her contemporaries as a considerable loss to English music.
Roderick Gregory Coleman Williams OBE is a British baritone and composer.
"Quempas" is the shortened title of the Latin Christmas carol "Quem pastores laudavere", popular in Germany in the sixteenth century, and used as a generic term for Christmas songs in a German caroling tradition. Quempas is also the name of a collection of old carols published by Bärenreiter since 1930.
A Boy Was Born, Op. 3, is a choral composition by Benjamin Britten. Subtitled Choral variations for men's, women's and boys' voices, unaccompanied , it was originally composed from 1932 to 1933. It was first performed on 23 February 1934 as a BBC broadcast. Britten revised the work in 1955. The composer set different texts related to Christmas to music as theme and variations, scored for an a cappella choir with boys' voices.
This is a summary of 1931 in music in the United Kingdom.
Thomas Hewitt Jones is a British composer and music producer, working predominantly in the fields of contemporary classical and commercial music.
The Hymn of Jesus, H. 140, Op. 37, is a sacred work by Gustav Holst scored for two choruses, semi-chorus, and full orchestra. It was written in 1917–1919 and first performed in 1920. One of his most popular and highly acclaimed compositions, it is divided into two sections. The Prelude presents the plainsong Pange lingua and Vexilla regis first instrumentally and then chorally; the second section, the Hymn, is a setting of his own translation of the Hymn of Jesus from the Apocryphal Acts of St John.
Benjamin Britten's Five Flower Songs, Op. 47, is a set of five part songs to poems in English by four authors which mention flowers, composed for four voices (SATB) in 1950 as a gift for the 25th wedding anniversary of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. It was first performed in the open air at the couple's estate Dartington Hall, with Imogen Holst conducting a student choir. The set has been frequently recorded by English and foreign chamber choirs and ensembles, including Polyphony, Cambridge Singers and the RIAS Kammerchor.
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