“The coronation ceremony of King Charles III and Camilla, the queen consort, on Saturday has been described as a millennium-old tradition of pomp and circumstance, reaching back to Charles’s most distant forebears,” writes Imani Danielle Mosley in Wednesday’s (5/3) New York Times. “But while the service and liturgy of the coronation of English and British monarchs stretches back to the 10th century, the tradition of its sound is far more recent … Many of the accounts of coronations before the 19th century have been lost, and the ones that remain make very little mention of music, if at all. The sound of the British coronation that has become so affixed in the cultural landscape is, in fact, a 20th-century invention … Charles III has commissioned new works for his coronation … The coronation [of Elizabeth II, 1953] showcased … music by the premiere contemporary British composers: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, Herbert Howells, Arthur Bliss, George Butterworth, Gordon Jacob, Charles Villiers Stanford, Gustav Holst, John Ireland and William Walton…. Composers writing music for [Charles III’s] coronation include Judith Weir, Master of the King’s Music; Tarik O’Regan; Paul Mealor; and Shirley Thompson; there will be a new coronation anthem from Andrew Lloyd Webber.”
