Glory be to God for dappled things

This setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem Pied Beauty was commissioned by the Rev Jim Bates, Vicar of Kingston, for the service in Kingston Parish Church celebrating the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. The first performance was given by the combined choirs of the Kingston Parish Church and Twickenham Choral Society on the 2nd June 2002. A good proportion of the text is reflective or descriptive – it winds through a number of examples of dappled things with suitably celebratory music: ‘skies of couple-colour’, ‘rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim’, ‘fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls’ and so on winding down to a centrally peaceful section in which Hopkins writes of ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’ before returning to the celebratory mood. This grand anthem would be suitable for intermediate to advanced choirs to perform, particularly at festival services and important church occasions.