In a letter to Alan Frank from 1971, William Walton talked of the trouble he was having composing the Jubilate Deo, which had been commissioned by the English Bach Festival to celebrate Walton's seventieth birthday. "Why can't I...slide out of the Jubilate?" he complained to Frank. "I'm a very slippery customer, as you should well know by now." He later proffers the expected misgivings about the work: "The Jubilate is not the most inspiring bit of nonsense—in fact, the only thing to be said for it is its brevity." Despite Walton's sardonic misgivings, however, the piece was received warmly by critics and audiences, and the concert during which it was premiered proved quite emotional for the composer. It took place in April 1972 at Oxford's Christ Church, where Walton had first received musical training as a boy in the choir school; between the nostalgic setting and the musical company in which the piece was presented (music by Bach and Taverner, along with Walton's The Twelve), the usually reserved composer was moved to tears.

Appropriately, in this work we find Walton at his most jubilant. The energy of the opening section is fueled by reiterated descending scales and sturdy bass lines in the organ, and bright, diatonic sonorities in the chorus. Occasional harmonic shifts always serve to give a sense of expansiveness. The pastoral shadings of the middle section of the text ("We are the people and the sheep of his pasture") evokes more subdued textures and dynamics from the chorus. As always, Walton commands shade as well as color, carefully managing the choral forces and the thickness of harmonies, as when a more straightforward, declamatory texture is broken into rich melismatic polyphony to suggest that divine truth "endureth from generation to generation." The benediction of the piece returns to the joyous character of the opening section.

Though the original version for chorus and organ leaves little to be desired on its own (despite Walton's characteristic complaints), Christopher Palmer's re-instrumentation of the organ part for organ plus brass, harp, timpani, and percussion (featured on a 1992 recording released on Chandos) highlights Walton's expressive gestures and heightens the sense of moment-to-moment contrast (though some might think his additions overstate Walton's case).

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