Spotlight on Sunday’s Anthem - O Clap Your Hands

For Sunday, June 1, 2025
O Clap Your Hands by Ralph Vaughan Williams

By David Jolliffe

The choral anthem for the 11 a.m. service on Sunday, June 1, 2025, is the stirring motet, O Clap Your Hands, by the early twentieth-century British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Composed, originally performed (at Westminster Abbey), and recorded in 1920, the text for the motet is drawn from Psalm 47. The vigorous piece clearly reflects an atmosphere of ebullient joy resonating through Britain at the conclusion of the long and bloody First World War. Heralded by a “voice of triumph,” the music soars with power as the choristers proclaim that “God is gone up with a shout!” A little-known fact about Vaughan Williams: He was an agnostic but still composed Anglican church music. He said, “There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.”