Joanna Forbes L’Estrange The Mountains Shall Bring Peace – a new RCSM commission for HM King Charles III Coronation

   

Music especially commissioned to mark the Coronation of King Charles III has been made available for choirs. The new anthem entitled The Mountains Shall Bring Peace written by Joanna Forbes L’Estrange was commissioned by the Royal School of Church Music and forms part of their singing project Sing for the King.

Joanna – a former Swingles singer and musical director – boasts a considerable archive of music written for choir. Tenebrae’s recent Christmas release Winter’s House on Signum Classics featured the unostentatious Advent O Carol by Forbes L’Estrange on an album packed full of carols written many of the UK’s most popular new music composers.

It’s a magnificent anthem brimming with varied musical ideas and, come the main reflective theme, Joanna’s musical theatre passions are discernible in the pop-infused melancholic harmonies.

When Joanna and I meet to discuss the project I put it to her that such writing, creating something new, melodic, and celebratory isn’t necessarily the straightforward process one might assume it is.

“I think there’s such a skill in writing a good tune. When I wrote this coronation anthem, the main crux of the brief was ‘write a good tune, please.’ She continues, “And my goodness, it’s harder than you think. You know, I was I found myself analyzing all the really good hymn tunes and thinking, what is it that makes everyone loves singing this, you know, Bread of Heaven? Everyone loves that, you know, irrespective of whether their regular church goes on or not.”

And therein lies the ultimate challenge. How to know when you hit upon something that encompasses the mood and is something choirs will want to sing?

“You know, it’s easy to think that if you’re writing for amateur choirs, or for singers who wouldn’t really count themselves as singers, that you need to have a nice stepwise motion and keep it all within a certain range,” Joanna explains. “Avoiding creating anything too extreme. But in my experience, I think people love a good octave leap, or a good seven leap. If it’s in the right context, it’s exciting, It’s going to feel exciting.”

There is an infectious enthusiasm to the way Joanna describes her compositional process. It is something she clearly loves doing. And like any good author who talks animatedly about the book they’ve written such as I end up wanting to read it, there’s a sense that Joanna pulls off a similar trick in her writing. Who wouldn’t want to sing this stuff if the composer herself talks so animatedly about it?

News of RCSM’s commission came as a mix of surprise and bewilderment. “So I asked them, ‘Why have you asked me?’” Unbeknownst to Joanna it turned out that her compositions topped the most popular in the RCSM catalogue – her Magnificat, Precis and Responses (driven partly by conductor, composer and organist Anna Lapwood), and most recently her Carol of the Crib, setting words by Timothy Dudley-Smith to music for Christmas.

Is responding to a commission for amateur choirs like this a bit of a gamble, that the music you finish up with isn’t responded to as positively as she hoped? “There’s always an element of risk. To be honest, I’m always relieved if people say, ‘We love it!’ I always end up thinking ‘Oh, thank God, because you never really know.’

The RSCM is inviting choirs around the UK, the Commonwealth and beyond to join in song to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III by learning and singing Joanna’s anthem.

The project has been endorsed by the Church of England and is included in their information pack for church communities celebrating the Coronation. 

To date, some 150 choirs have registered to take part (a minimum of 2600 singers so far), including the Long Covid Choir and the choir of Winchester Cathedral. As the date of the Coronation approaches, the RSCM expects these numbers to increase significantly as more choirs sign up to the project. The piece will be performed in church services, Coronation concerts and Come and Sing events around the UK in the coming weeks. 

The Mountains Shall Bring Peace is available from the RSCM’s webshop (www.rscmshop.com) at £24.95 (RSCM
members £19.95) for the downloadable music pack (this includes ALL versions, and is licensed to the purchasing
choir/institution so can be shared with all choir members) and £2.95 for printed copies (£2.21 for RSCM Members).

Full information about the RCSM’s Sing for the King project is available online.