Waiting for Christmas
Today is the first day of Advent. In Christian tradition this is a time of preparation and waiting for the arrival of the infant Jesus on Christmas Day. These days Advent is often treated as the start of the Christmas season. Traditionalists maintain that Christmas starts only on the evening of 24 December and insist that that no tree or decoration should appear before then. I’m afraid they have rather lost that battle.
In the UK you can find Christmas foodstuffs appearing in shops from October, maybe even earlier. High Streets will put up decorations in November – in London the main shopping streets started switching on their decorative lights in the first week or so of November. By the time December starts we’re on a fast slide down to 25 December and the big feast.
One group of people who always start their preparations early are those who sing in choirs.
My own church choir started planning for Christmas in October and we started rehearsing Christmas music a month ago. Secular choirs too will have made an early start. In the music library where I volunteer, all our copies of Benjamin’s Britten’s masterpiece, Ceremony of Carols, were booked out on loan by mid-August, and the majority were reserved by the end of April!
Singing at Christmas
Christmas is a season when much music will be sung. Christmas carols are hugely popular, more so probably than any other kind of church music or classical music, so there are many services and concerts of Christmas music. People who sing in choirs (like me) can experience a surfeit of Christmas music during December, singing in carol concerts, carol services and ad hoc carol performances. This can leave you jaded as you trot out Hark the Herald Angels Sing for the 19th time.
I did get a bit tired of it all a few years back and resolved to cut back on my festive singing engagements. But then I sang in a carol concert to a packed Royal Albert Hall in London and I realised what a privilege it was to entertain 5,000 people who were absolutely enthralled to be there listening to us. It would have been churlish to be anything other than joyful.
This year I’m singing in three church carol services, a musical evening in my old workplace, and a carol concert arranged by Bristol University alumni in London. I’m also joining a group to do some carol singing on the street for one evening. Across all those I’ll be singing a mixture of old and new music, including three specially written pieces.
Program planning for Christmas is a fine skill. There is a tension between making sure that all the favourite old familiar carols are included yet providing variety and novelty for the audience (and singers). Luckily there is an enormous amount of Christmas music available and new pieces (or new arrangements of old tunes) are written every year. The highlight of many people’s Christmas is hearing the carol service from King’s College, Cambridge – a tradition that dates back to 1918. They always feature a newly commissioned piece of Christmas music in the service.
David Willcocks was director of music at King’s College for many years and he was the joint editor of Carols for Choirs (CfC), published in 1961, and its 1970 successor Carols for Choirs 2. These books contained a mixture of easily singable standard carols plus some more adventurous and challenging pieces of Christmas music. They became the go-to carol books for choirs, and were known by the colour of the covers – CfC1 was the green book and CfC2 was the orange book. It always struck me as odd that these books, the embodiment of the King’s College, Cambridge Christmas carol tradition, were published by Oxford University Press.
Cover of Carols for Choirs 3 – the blue book
I became acquainted with the green book in the early 1970s, and I remember playing through the whole book on the piano, very badly! Later I came to know the orange book too, and carols from these two sources featured in my Christmas singing through the mid 1970s. Then in 1978, when as a student I sang in the choir of Clifton Cathedral, a new carol book was added to the series – Carols for Choirs 3 (also known as the blue book). The choir purchased a set of copies of CfC3. The new book contained several arrangements by Willcocks and several by the other editor, John Rutter. Rutter has produced many fine carols and arrangements, to the extent that some people complain that his music is everywhere at Christmas. I enjoyed getting to know some new carols and new arrangements, to add some new spice to the Christmas repertoire.
My favourite Christmas carol
One of the first pieces we sang from the new book was the Wexford Carol – an arrangement by Rutter of an Irish traditional carol. The original melody is very beautiful and Rutter treats it sensitively. It starts with a baritone solo and I recall that our music director, Christopher (Chris) Walker, sang it. The text of the carol tells the Christmas story, and the opening words address the listeners explictly. Chris was a great communicator – he turned to the congregation and sang the opening words of the story directly to them; it came over very effectively, drawing the congregation into the story.
Good people all, this Christmas time Consider well and bear in mind What our good God for us has done In sending his beloved son
In Rutter’s arrangement the choral parts then enter gradually, wordless and almost imperceptible at first, as the soloist continues to tell the story. Then the choir takes over the tale for a couple more verses until the soloist comes in again at the end to finish the story.
Talking about the carol
This carol became a firm favourite of mine. I was surprised and pleased last year to discover a podcast devoted to the origin of the carol. Maggi Van Dorn is a US audio producer, working ‘at the intersection of religion and culture’. She has made several podcasts delving into the background of favourite Christmas carols, under the series title Hark! The stories behind our favorite Christmas carols. The podcast about the Wexford Carol is about 45 minutes long. She also wrote an essay as a companion piece to the podcast.
The carol originates in Enniscorthy, in County Wexford, Ireland. Van Dorn travelled to that part of Ireland on holiday and while there she learnt more about the carol. It probably originated in the 15th or 16th century and was passed on in an oral tradition. It was first transcribed by Grattan Flood, an organist and a scholar of Irish music and history, in about 1920. Flood published his simple choral arrangement of the carol and it has been popular in Enniscorthy ever since. It even made its way into the 1928 edition of the Oxford Book of Carols, a popular collection of carols at that time.
It’s a great story, and Van Dorn plays the detective as she hunts down the history of this carol, interviewing various people. The podcast also features her interviewing another expert on church music, to outline the musical qualities of the carol – none other than Chris Walker! It was good to hear Chris talking about this carol, which I remember so well and which I’d learnt from him 45 years earlier.
Chris Walker was the first Director of Music at Clifton Cathedral when it opened in 1973, so he created its tradition of music. He left in 1991 after 18 years in charge of the music there and moved to the US, becoming a leading figure in US church music. He was Director of Music at St. Paul the Apostle Church, LA for 20 years up to 2021. Now he works as a composer, conductor and lecturer.
In the podcast he made some interesting observations on the Wexford (or Enniscorthy) carol. In particular he reflected on its transition from being passed on by oral tradition to being written down by Grattan Flood. When passed on orally there can be variations in the precise notes, depending on who is singing it. Transcription sets it in stone, and captures the particular inflexions of the person who sings it to the transcriber, in this case Grattan Flood on that day in 1920. That singer’s version of the tune has thus been fixed as the definitive version that we know over 100 years later.
There is quite a feast of information on the web about this carol and you can easily go down multiple rabbit holes learning more about its history and the history of Grattan Flood. The Wikipedia page gives a short summary and some jumping-off points.
Grattan Flood’s arrangement of the carol is available as a free download and I hope I can sing it one day – it’s more straightforward than the Rutter version.
If you’re interested in Christmas music and musical history I do recommend listening to the podcast.
