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.
Not the jolly, jaggedy Mike Oldfield rendering but the haunting, unaccompanied vocal version which is the first track on my folks’ possibly-older-than-me vinyl copy of Carols From King’s, and therefore the first official song of Christmas. This is also the record we always used to decorate the tree to, so In Dulce Jubilo will always, for me, be the sound of Dad nearly, but not quite, falling off a ladder in his endeavours to string the lights all the way to the very top of the (ten-foot, trimmed enough to just fit into the front room) tree.
First of all, thank you for all the ideas you sent me for this year’s advent calendar. I’m not going to share any of them here because I am storing them up for the future – I think we’re good now at least into the next decade.
But for 2015 I have decided to go with an idea that I’ve been toying with ever since the start, but never felt able to commit to. In my plea for help I said I’d decided against doing “my favourite carols” but I didn’t say why. I think it was because it felt both too restricting and too broad, but then I lit upon the idea of choosing my favourite carols as sung by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and suddenly I felt enthusiastic about it, because Carols From King’s is a memory that predates any actual concrete hook to hang it on: it’s a thing, a sound, that has always been in my life.
I used to listen to the annual Christmas Eve service from King’s, which has been broadcast on Radio 4 every year since 1954, while getting ready for the party that my parents used to have every Christmas Eve, back when they were entirely game for hosting parties for three days in a row. I used to listen to it in our kitchen while helping to make mulled wine and mince pies (always handmade, with pastry stars instead of a closed lid and a shake of icing sugar on top to look like snow), and it is, I promise, the Christmassiest music of all. So this year we aren’t going to be kitsch or ironic or clever – though we will be all of that again in years to come. This year, we are just going to listen to twenty-four of the very best Carols From King’s.
I’m about 75% sure of what’s in and what’s out but if you have a favourite, let me know and I’ll see if I can squeeze it in. See you back here tomorrow!
It’s around this time of year (after Halloween and Guy Fawkes are out of the way) when I usually start to plan my musical advent calendar*. I list possible songs, and listen to them over and over and decide what will go where and, especially, what will go last, because while I can get away with having some filler at the beginning of the month, the last few songs, and the Christmas Eve song most of all, obviously have to be killers. I watch different versions of videos and listen to different recordings and all in all, put in a large amount of effort in order to do justice to the year’s theme.
And here, reader, is where I have come unstuck! I can’t think of a theme for advent 2015. These are the themes we have already had:
2008: My favourite Christmas songs (I hadn’t decided, at that point, that this would be a Thing.)
2009: More of my favourite Christmas songs (Clearly I had decided it would be a Thing, but I still wasn’t planning ahead.)
2010: Christmas number ones (This was the year I realised I needed a theme.)
2011: I asked my Facebook and Twitter friends to pick the songs, then wrote about the people, rather than the music.
2012: Christmas songs from around the world (My secret favourite.)
2013: Twenty-four different versions of White Christmas (My other secret favourite.)
2014: Sad Christmas (Although that was quite awesome too.)
…and here are the themes I have considered and rejected for 2015 so far:
My favourite Christmas carols
A Country and Western Christmas
Crooners at Christmas
Twenty four Christmas songs by the same artist (There are only a few people this could be, and none of them is exciting enough to pull off a whole advent unaccompanied.)
The years I liked best were the years when I had to do some research, and ended up listening to songs I’d never heard before. So I would like another theme that I will have to work at a little bit. Please send me your suggestions, here, via Twitter or Facebook or email, or even in real life. Whoever provides me with a winner will get a special prize and my undying affection.
*I am aware that I haven’t written anything since the last advent calendar, but that will All Change in 2016, for sure!
…is Nancy Kline’s Time To Think: Listening To Ignite The Human Mind. A couple of weeks ago I went along to an Agile Leadership Community talk by the engaging and very smart Geoff Watts on Servant Leadership (of which more another time), and the moment he started to talk about Kline the busy busy busy chimes started jangling in my head, because what she writes about is very much along the lines of what I talked about at #dareconf last week, only she does it from a position of wisdom, experience and erudition that outstrips mine by a mile. I’m only halfway through but would heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to be better at listening (and it’s harder than it sounds).
I find my tastes veering towards the pastoral side of management when it comes to professional reading material, and sometimes I wonder whether that’s because the people stuff is the stuff I’m best at, and all I’m doing is reinforcing the walls of my comfort zone. But the best writing articulates a truth, or a set of truths, that you already knew deep down, and Kline does that here better than almost anyone.
Glad All Over 