Processional (Handel): A Song History

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Handel's Water Music had its premiere on 17 July 1717, during a royal outing on the River Thames for King George I, with the music performed from a barge on the water.[1] Two reports of the evening survive: a notice in the Daily Courant, which said the king's party went up the river to Chelsea, and a fuller letter in French from Friedrich Bonet, the Brandenburg resident in London, to officials in Berlin.[2] Bonet counted about fifty players on wind, brass and string instruments, with no singers, and wrote that the music was played three times, twice before supper and once after, each time for about an hour, although Britannica's account gives four performances.[1][2][3]

Painting of the River Thames in London with Westminster Abbey, a partly built stone bridge, a gilded barge and small rowing boats under a cloudy sky

Samuel Scott, The Building of Westminster Bridge, oil on canvas. The Thames at Westminster with a ceremonial barge, shown for the river setting of the Water Music; it does not show the 1717 performance.

Handel never issued the music as one finished work: parts of it were printed while he lived, but the complete set did not appear in print until 1788, decades after his death, in Samuel Arnold's edition.[1][2] Because of that, the original order of the movements is uncertain, and the movements are customarily grouped by key into three suites, in F, D and G major, made up largely of dances such as minuets, bourrées and hornpipes.[1] In the years after the river party, Handel reused the music in his theater productions, probably with changes.[3]

Larry Conger's mountain dulcimer arrangement is headed "Processional" and, on the sample page shown with the book, credits its source only as the Water Music suite, without naming which movement it is.[4] It appears in his Traditional Wedding Classics, a 19-page Fingers Of Steel collection of classic wedding tunes arranged for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, which comes with an MP3 recording of each tune.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Processional (Handel)"

Sources

  1. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Water Music".
  2. Bärenreiter: "Handel, Water Music (Halle Handel Edition), Preface by Terence Best".
  3. Hollywood Bowl: "Water Music Suite No. 1 in F, selections".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Traditional Wedding Classics".
  5. Image: Samuel Scott, The Building of Westminster Bridge, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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