Parry sets Blake's Jerusalem to music

A national anthem is rarely composed at a country-house in Sussex on a fortnight's notice for a single Queen's-Hall rally that no one expected to be remembered for more than a season. Parry took the Fight-for-Right commission from Robert Bridges in the late-February-1916 period on the personal-friendship channel and committed the fortnight-of-the-composition to the Blake-setting on the strength of the Bridges-Blake-text-recommendation. He delivered the completed-score at the Queen's-Hall on the morning of the tenth-of-March 1916 in his sixty-seventh year. By the evening-performance the Parry-Blake setting was the foundational English-public-anthem of the modern-era.

THE GLOUCESTERSHIRE BOY

Charles Hubert Hastings Parry was born at 2 Richmond Hill in Bournemouth in southern Hampshire on the twenty-seventh of February 1848, third son of Thomas Gambier Parry, the Gloucestershire-gentleman-painter-and-amateur-architect of the Highnam Court Gloucestershire country-house, and Anna Maria Isabella Fynes-Clinton. His mother died of post-childbirth tuberculosis when he was twelve days old; he was raised at the Highnam-Court family-seat by his father and the Gloucestershire-gentry household. He was schooled at the Twyford School at Twyford near Winchester from 1856, was admitted to Eton College in 1861 in his thirteenth year, and at Eton developed the early-musical-talent on the Eton-chapel organ-and-composition tradition under the Eton-precentor John Foster Macpherson.

He took the place at Exeter College, Oxford in 1867 in his nineteenth year to read Law-and-Modern-History, took the BMus during his undergraduate period on the Oxford-BMus parallel-degree arrangement (the Parry undergraduate-period BMus-thesis Prometheus Unbound being the foundational moment of his musical-composition career), graduated with the third-class-honours degree in Law-and-Modern-History in 1870, and worked across 1870-to-1875 in the Lloyd's-of-London insurance-underwriting position on his father's-wishes before committing to the full-time-musical-composition career in 1875 in his twenty-seventh year.

THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF MUSIC

He took the Royal-College-of-Music professorship of musical-history and composition on the 1883 establishment of the Royal-College on the foundation of the Prince-of-Wales-Royal-College-Charter, served as the Royal-College Director-of-Studies from 1894 in his forty-sixth year on the strength of the Royal-College-of-Music-founder Sir George Grove's-retirement recommendation, and held the Royal-College-of-Music directorship continuously across the next twenty-four years to his death in 1918. He trained across the Royal-College directorship-period the leading senior English-composer generation of the modern-era (the Royal-College students under his directorship included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells, Arthur Bliss, Charles Wood and George Butterworth).

THE FIGHT FOR RIGHT MOVEMENT

The Fight for Right movement was a British-patriotic-and-political organisation founded in the summer of 1915 by the Asian-explorer Sir Francis Younghusband to consolidate British-and-Allied-popular-support for the continuation of the First-World-War. The Fight-for-Right organised the Queen's-Hall rallies, the Albert-Hall meetings, and the popular-press campaigns across 1915-and-1916 that the Asquith-and-Lloyd-George wartime-government supported on the popular-mobilisation grounds. The Poet Laureate Robert Bridges had been the Fight-for-Right-movement literary-and-poetic adviser since the foundation-period, and the Bridges-Parry friendship of the Oxford-Royal-College long-standing-musical-and-literary correspondence channel was the arrangement through which the Parry-Blake commission was made.

Bridges had identified Blake's And did those feet in ancient time (the sixteen-line Blake-preface to Milton: A Poem in Two Books, published by Blake in 1804 at his Lambeth-printing-house in the Blake-Milton illuminated-book) as the suitable Fight-for-Right-movement musical-setting on the late-February-1916 correspondence-decision. Bridges wrote to Parry on the twenty-eighth of February 1916 (the letter preserved in the Parry-correspondence-archive at the Shulbrede Priory Hampshire family-archive) requesting the Parry-musical-setting of the Blake-text for the Queen's-Hall Fight-for-Right rally scheduled for the evening of the tenth-of-March 1916.

THE FORTNIGHT OF COMPOSITION

Parry took up the Blake-commission on the receipt of the Bridges-letter on the first-of-March 1916. He retired to his Knight's-Croft Rustington Sussex country-house (the Parry-Sussex country-residence on the South-Downs that he had bought in 1881 and held as his composition-retreat for the thirty-five-years of his subsequent compositional-career) on the second-of-March, composed the Jerusalem setting across the eight-day Sussex-composition period of the second-to-the-ninth-of-March 1916, and returned to London with the completed-score on the morning of the tenth-of-March 1916 for the Queen's-Hall rehearsal-and-performance.

The completed-score was a eight-bar D-major orchestral-introduction-figure (the famous marching-introduction that the modern-listener recognises immediately), the four-strophe strophic-setting of the Blake-sixteen-line text (the strophes being and did those feet in ancient time / and was the holy Lamb of God / and did the Countenance Divine / and was Jerusalem builded here), and the final modulation-to-the-major on the closing-Jerusalem line. The piece was scored for the organ-and-choir Queen's-Hall arrangement on the rehearsal-conducting that the Royal-College-of-Music senior-organ-professor Walter Alcock supplied.

THE TENTH OF MARCH

The Queen's-Hall Fight-for-Right rally of the evening of the tenth-of-March 1916 was attended by the approximately 2,500-Queen's-Hall capacity audience under the Sir Francis Younghusband chairmanship. Parry conducted the first-public-performance of Jerusalem in the rally-programme on the evening of the tenth-of-March 1916; the audience-response was the immediate popular-recognition that the Queen's-Hall-rally-press-reports of the next morning universally registered.

THE STANDING-WOMEN'S-INSTITUTE-AND-LAST-NIGHT TRADITION

Parry transferred the Jerusalem copyright to the Women's-Suffrage-movement on the strength of his suffragist personal-political commitment in 1917 (the Parry-Women's-Social-and-Political-Union copyright-transfer of the Jerusalem-text-and-music that the Mrs-Pankhurst suffragist-leadership had requested), and the Jerusalem became the foundational Women's-Suffrage-movement anthem of the 1917-and-1918 suffragist-rally-period. The Women's-Institute movement adopted Jerusalem as the Women's-Institute-anthem on the 1924 National-Federation-of-Women's-Institutes annual-meeting adoption-decision, and the Women's-Institute Jerusalem singing at the annual-meeting-and-local-branch meetings has been the Women's-Institute foundational-anthem continuously since.

The Last-Night-of-the-Proms Jerusalem performance has been the Royal-Albert-Hall Last-Night-of-the-Proms closing-programme item continuously since 1953 on the Sir-Malcolm-Sargent BBC-Symphony-Orchestra Last-Night-of-the-Proms tradition. The Jerusalem has been continuously the foundational English non-liturgical-anthem of the modern-era. Parry died at his Rustington Sussex country-house on the seventh of October 1918 in his seventy-first year, two-and-a-half years after the Jerusalem composition. He is buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral. The Parry name in modern English-music carries the weight of the Queen's-Hall rally evening of the tenth of March 1916.