Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary
Notes by TŌN percussionist Philip Drembus
Mary II was Queen of England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1689 until her death in 1694. English composer Henry Purcell, who had previously written odes for six of the queen’s birthdays, wrote a final piece for the queen upon her death. Funeral Music for Queen Mary was first performed at Queen Mary’s funeral service in early 1695, and then performed again later that year at Purcell’s own funeral service. It was originally written as a pairing of a march and a canzona to be played by a quartet of trumpets.
Following the premiere of the piece, Purcell reused the music to serve as background in Thomas Shadwell’s play The Libertine in late 1695. Later, in the mid-1700s, English composer William Croft intentionally imitated parts of Funeral Music for Queen Mary in the vocal score for his Funeral Sentences. Purcell’s music continued to be adapted and arranged, perhaps most notably for a modern audience by Wendy Carlos in the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange.
More recently, American composer Steve Stucky again reorchestrated the funeral music in the early 1990s at the request of the LA Philharmonic. Stucky’s arrangement called for a group of instruments including full woodwind, brass, and percussion sections, as well as piano and harp. Stucky said of his arrangement, “In working on the project I did not try to achieve a pure, musicological reconstruction but, on the contrary, to regard Purcell’s music, which I love deeply, through the lens of three hundred intervening years. Thus, although most of this version is straightforward orchestration of the Purcell originals, there are moments when Purcell drifts out of focus.”
Stucky’s arrangement joins the numerous arrangements and orchestrations of Purcell’s original material that have preceded it. His score, in particular its use of instruments such as contrabassoon, tuba, and vibraphone—none of which had been invented when Purcell was composing—imagines the Funeral Music for Queen Mary in a contemporary style while staying true to the original source material.