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.
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.
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.
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.
As requested by Mike, both this time around and back in 2011 when I got everyone to tell me their favourite Christmas songs without telling them why. Last time I accidentally gave this song to someone else before realising it was the same one Mike had requested, so this time, Mike, it’s all yours.
This is actually an advent carol rather than a Christmas carol, so this is the time to be singing it. I have tried to find out a little of its history to share with you and make me sound learned, but I have discovered that you need a better level of general theological knowledge in order to understand even the basics, so I shall direct the curious to Wikipedia and let the rest of you get on with listening to the song. Happy Advent!
Traditionally, Sunday is crooners day on the Gladallover advent calendar. There are no crooners in the King’s College Choir, so I am substituting the crooniest carols, of which this is one. I am not wild about this arrangement, but – as Ma Morgan has just pointed out (I am at her house because it’s Christmas) – I am not wild about Silent Night full stop, so this version is as good and as bad as any. Although I do prefer the German language version, but as far as I can make out that has never formed part of the King’s College tradition. 5/10, King’s College! Could Do Better.
I like the carols whose names bear no relation to their words. I also like carols which come in at least two versions. Happily, the Coventry Carol is both, the name apparently coming from the song’s origins as part of a 16th-Century mystery play that was traditionally performed in and around Coventry, and here’s a story to send a shiver down your spine: it only gained popularity as a Christmas carol when, in 1940, shortly after the city was bombed, the BBC broadcast a performance of it from the ruins of the cathedral.
But you were already shivering, if you know this carol, because it’s what the mothers of newborn children sing as they try to protect them from Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents, so it is not just haunting but sinister, and thus best served by its original tune, which is also both of those things, although the newer setting by Kenneth Leighton is beautiful, and since the King’s Choir have obliged us by performing them both, and since it’s Saturday and you probably have time to listen to them both, here they both are. It gets sunnier, but only slightly, tomorrow.
Traditional tune:
Kenneth Leighton setting (the comments on this end up involving the featured soloist, and are worth reading if you have even more time to spare):
The first, but definitely not the last, carol to feature a searing descant in the final verse. When sopranos sing the descant the altos have to sing the tune, which means that to sing carols as an alto you need (most of) a soprano range. Although if you’re me, you sing the alto part for most of it and then screech the descant, because it’s the most fun bit to sing.
(Although if what you want is a version of While Shepherds Watched that is fun to sing, you can’t get better than the Ilkley Moor version.)
Otherwise known, I learn as the “Christmas Day Carol”, but as we all know, advent ends on December 24th and so this is as good a place for it as any in this year’s calendar. Do you think the nineteenth century was the golden age of Christmas carol composition? It certainly gave us some gooduns, this included. I especially like the arrangement of the second verse here, and the way it, like lots (but not all) of the best carols, swells into an impossibly triumphant-sounding climax. It kind of definitely does sound like the Son of God was just born on Earth!
If you are like me and went to a state primary school in the UK, this was probably the first Christmas carol you learned. Actually I’ve just looked it up and apparently it’s the first Christmas carol everyone learns, or at least everyone who learns carols at all. Which I suppose makes sense, because the words are short and simple and there are animals in it, so I can see how it would appeal to small children. That said, it took me a long time to work out what “the cattle are lowing” meant, though I am glad to have found out because when you see the word “lower” as part of a cryptic crossword clue, it quite often indicates that you should be thinking about a cow.
Actually I didn’t learn Away In A Manger at school, but at St James’s Playgroup. St James’s Church was (and is) around the corner from where we lived, and it had (and has) a sculpted crucifix outside it which I was absolutely certain, aged around four, was the real Jesus. So it is the source of all kinds of early religious influence in my life, though I suspect the headteacher who taught me that “the Christian god forgives and the Jewish god punishes” may have been the one who eventually inched me towards my early and ongoing position of tolerant and interested atheism.
Anyway. There is an arrangement of this with an especially pretty alto part, but this isn’t it, I suspect because all-male choirs don’t tend to have many altos, though I have pulled that guess out of thin air and would be delighted to be corrected.
(Actually I’ve just found this page on Wikipedia, which suggests that I am probably, but not certainly, right.)
Sorry about the awful video. I have sacrificed visuals for the sake of aural integrity.
Edit: you can hear (sort of), and read, the pretty alto part here.
Glad All Over 