Herald AV Publications

HAVPCD320 – Jolly Boating Weather

	Disk Title	Jolly Boating Weather
		Music from Eton. including Eton Boating Song and Carmen Etonese
	Soloists	Chamber Orchestra, Brass Ensemble, School Concert Choir & Orchestra
		Chamber Orchestra, Brass Ensemble, School Concert Choir & Orchestra
	Choir	The Choir of Eton College Chapel Choir
	Conductor	Ralph Allwood
	Location	Eton College Chapel
	Audio Tracks	15

Music from Eton

The contents of this recording were chosen with a particular event in mind, the five hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation in 1440 of the Kynge’s College of Our Lady of Eton, beside Windsor by the eighteen-year-old monarch King Henry VI. Peter Smith’s Fanfare for Brass, Percussion and Organ [1] is one of a whole series of flourishes for specific occasions—mostly concert tours by the Eton Chamber Orchestra and Choir during the summer holidays. The one here recorded was commissioned for the service commemorating that anniversary on 29th May 1990.

The Brass Ensemble, Paul Plummer, organ, conducted by Jim Wortley Every school has a few tribal traditions and some of them tend to be musical. Of the many traditional Eton School Songs only the Carmen Etonense [8] the Boating Song [9] and the Vale are still heard regularly. They are all sung once a year at the conclusion of the summer term’s School Concert. There is a magnificent Spy cartoon depicting Sir Joseph Barnby in characteristic conductor’s pose. His distinguished career included the first English performance of Wagner’s Parsifal on 10th November 1884 in the Royal Albert Hall. During his time as Precentor (Director of Music) at Eton, he produced the Carmen in collaboration with A. C. Ainger, a master of over thirty years’ standing. Another Eton master, William Cory, was responsible for the text of the Boating Song. It found its way to India via the Eton Scrap Book (1865) where it encountered its composer, the young Captain Algernon Drummond, then serving with the Rifle Brigade. There is no evidence to suggest that the Captain left any other record of his musical talent behind him

School Concert Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Ralph Allwood. Parry’s setting of William Blake’s Jerusalem [15] has a traditional place in the last chapel service of each term. School Concert Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Ralph Allwood. King Henry VI’s original 1440 charter included provision for four clerks, six choristers, twenty-five ‘poor and indigent scholars’ and a school master. The clerks were required to be ‘skilled in chant’ and one of them—he alone entitled to a bonus of £6 per annum, and a wife—was to be the organist. The twenty-five scholars were expected to acquire a competent knowledge of plainsong.

Of course, over the centuries, almost all these details were continually under review. At times a choir school existed, most recently from 1909 to 1968, when it was judged to be too small and too expensive to re-launch. Funds freed thereby found their way into the setting-up of a number of annual musical and instrumental awards for the main school itself. Nowadays, holders of these awards form the backbone of the present College Chapel Choir, and we also hear them as members of the Chamber Orchestra, the Brass Ensemble, and as soloists too, playing the organ. It was while editing material for The English Hymnal that Vaughan Williams first came across a theme in the Phrygian mode by Thomas Tallis (c.1505–1585). The work it inspired was commissioned for the Three Choirs Festival, held at Gloucester in 1910. No composition has done more ro establish Vaughan Williams’ international reputation as one of England’s greatest composers than his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis [7] for string orchestra.

The Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Inniss Allen. The Brass Ensemble contributes Domenico Scarlatti’s Baroque Sonata [5] in a tactful arrangement by Stephen Dodgson, conducted by Jim Wortley.

The original Eton Choirbook is still preserved in the College Library. Since no other substantial manuscript of this period survives, it is now of incalculable value as a typical record of what choirs sang in the period immediately preceding Henry VIII’s forcible dissolution of the monasteries. In fact, Nesbett’s Magnificat [6], though present in fragmentary form in the Eton manuscript, has been rediscovered more complete in the Scottish choirbook associated with Robert Carver, Canon of Scone Abbey.