Category: Music

Advent Carol for December 17: Gabriel’s Message

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

I said before I started this year’s advent calendar that I wasn’t going to do it this year because I was too busy, and I was right; which is why there hasn’t been a song since Wednesday. But fear not! Because today I will bring you three – one for breakfast, one for lunch, one for dinner – and bring us back up to date.

We’ve had December 17th’s song before in its original Basque form, but the much better-known version sung in English dates from the late nineteenth-century and is notable for having just about the prettiest tune ever. The words are lifted from the book of Luke and tell the story of the annunciation, so really we should have had it much sooner, but I was saving the best ones for last.

Advent Carol for December 16: Past Three O’Clock

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

This carol has everything – a jaunty organ part (complete with jaunty organist); a cheery tune; an arrangement of such devilish complexity that I don’t think a single bar is repeated; a startling high note in the refrain and a sweeping descant to round off the final verse. The main tune is a traditional one, but the lyrics and that lively refrain are the work of our old friend George Ratliffe Woodward, whom I can’t however love wholeheartedly because he also gave us Ding Dong Merrily and you know how I feel about that one. This one, though, I love wholeheartedly.

Advent Carol for December 15: Up! Good Christen Folk

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

Is it bad that everything about this carol makes me laugh? From the exclamation mark in its title through the endlessly silly “Ding dong ding” refrain (and the way at slows at the end, presumably to give more import to the dinga-donga-dings) to the charming “will this do?”-ness of the lyric

In a stable

(‘Tis no fable)

And all of that is before you notice that it careens into Latin in the final verse for no discernible reason except possibly because it fits the tune better. This estimable series of decisions was made by George Ratcliffe Woodward, a(nother) nineteenth-century Anglican priest who set his lyrics to a tune from the Piae Cantiones, composed in 1582 by a Finnish Catholic and published the same year by a Swedish Lutheran, making this quite possibly the most ecumenical of our carols so far. It’s still silly, though.

Advent Carol for December 14: The Rocking Carol

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music, Uncategorized

We’ve had this one before, back when we were doing carols from around the world, but the version that has made it into the King’s College choir repertoire is less jolly, sweeter and quite spectacularly beautiful. Listen in particular to all the vocal parts which aren’t the tune, each of which does its own thing and meanders around something only vaguely connected to what everyone else is singing, and yet the whole thing together sounds perfect. If you are a choir looking for something to learn and sing this Christmas, learn and sing this (as long as you have some confident sopranos somewhere in the mix).

Advent Carol for December 13: O Holy Night

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

Another nineteenth-century carol today, this time from France, although I’ve heard so many easy-listening renderings of it that if you’d asked me a week ago I would probably have guessed it was a mid-twentieth century American number. This recording is taken from the same performance, on Christmas Eve 2009, as yesterday’s version of We Three Kings, for which I make no apology because it is, once again, perfection. If you heard an actual choir of real angels, it would sound like this.

(Well, OK, actually there is a very slight wobble on the top note towards the end, but since the singers are humans and not angels, and since the sopranos are mostly very little boys, I forgive them completely.)

Advent Carol for December 12: We Three Kings

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music2 Comments

The most exciting thing to happen at my annual school carol service at St Paul’s church in Locksbottom came when I finally got to the fifth year, because we always used to have the first and second-years sing Gaspar (Gold), the third and fourth-years sing Balthazar (Frankincense) and the fifth-years and sixth-formers sing Melchior (Myrrh), which meant that in 1992, 1993 and 1994 I got to sing what must be the hair-standing-on-end-est lyric in any carol anywhere:

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying
Sealed in a stone-cold tomb*

People reading in a hurry would often confuse the word order in the last line and sing “sealed in a cold stone tomb”, which illustrates nicely how perfect and poetic the correct line is. And the words start good and stay good – I still shiver in a good way at Heaven sings ‘Alleluia’ – ‘Alleluia’ the Earth replies.

Anyway, it turns out that John Henry Hopkins, Jr, the Pennsylvanian rector who wrote We Three Kings (shout out once again to the nineteenth-century clergy, source of so much carolling goodness), intended that the three middle verses should be sing by three soloists, and that is how King’s College choir perform it here, and what’s more they clearly also know that the third verse is the money shot. Watch and you’ll see what I mean. And keep watching until the final note, which is a proper fist-pump moment. And watch in full-screen with the sound turned up high, because everything about this video is brilliant.

*”Congratulations, it’s a boy!”

Advent Carol for December 11: I Saw A Maiden

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music, Other cities

I’m sorry this so late, but it’s been a busy day: I’ve

(wait for it)

…been to Hull and back.

(True story!)

Anyway, I Saw A Maiden, also known as Lullay Myn Lykyng (and isn’t that a better name?) started life as a middle English poem, the text of which (you can find the original in the British Library) was written in the fifteenth century, making it our oldest carol so far, although the music is from later. It is, as you will have discerned, a lullaby, but this time it’s about Mary singing to Jesus, so we needn’t be harrowed at the hands of any massacres this evening. Good.

I can’t find a video for this song, so you’ll have to be content with a Spotify link and this picture of the Humber Bridge, which isn’t taken by me because my picture of the Humber Bridge was rubbish.

The Humber Bridge

Advent Carol for December 10: Angels From The Realms Of Glory

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music

I love this one, and only partly because its Glooooooooooooria chorus is so much prettier and more fun to sing than Ding Dong Merrily’s (actually that is the main reason. I hate Ding Dong Merrily, like, I actually get cross when I hear it. I’m not saving it for later; it’s not making an appearance at all. Sorry). This is another good solid nineteenth-century effort, and while I can’t think of anything else interesting to say about it, this unaccompanied rendering does show off the choir’s voices in all their perfection.

Advent Carol for December 9: Personent Hodie

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music1 Comment

I can remember singing, or at least hearing, an English language version of this, but traditionally it is sung in Latin and is kind of terrifying. This is all the fault of Gustav Holst, whose setting this is, and whose use of unison singing combined with that crashing organ part goes not at all well with the words, which if you translate them are certainly steadfast and vigorous, but not actively frightening. However, despite its sixteenth-century Scandinavian origin as a song sung on St Nicholas’s Day (December 6th, so I am playing hard and fast with our dates here, sorry), it has in more recent times become associated with the massacre of the innocents (I know! It’s surprising how many people must at some stage have thought this was an occasion to be sung about), and so I imagine it’s intentionally disconcerting. Tomorrow’s song is sweetness and light, I promise.

Advent Carol for December 8: Bethlehem Down

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music2 Comments

This carol has my favourite origin story of all (so far). Accounts vary, but everyone seems to agree that composer Peter Warlock and lyricist Bruce Blunt wrote the carol together in 1927, entered it into a Christmas carol-writing contest that the Daily Telegraph was running, won the competition and, as Blunt later put it, “had an immortal carouse on the proceeds”. I think that from now on whenever I go out drinking I will refer to it as an “immortal carouse”. It may have had a prosaic inception, but the words and the melody are both so beautiful that today I am going to share both with you:

When he is King we will give him the Kings’ gifts,
Myrrh for its sweetness, and gold for a crown,
Beautiful robes, said the young girl to Joseph,
Fair with her first-born on Bethlehem Down.

Bethlehem Down is full of the starlight –
Winds for the spices, and stars for the gold,
Mary for sleep, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.

When he is King they will clothe him in grave-sheets,
Myrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown,
He that lies now in the white arms of Mary,
Sleeping so lightly on Bethlehem Down.

Here he has peace and a short while for dreaming,
Close-huddled oxen to keep him from cold,
Mary for love, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.