This Czech carol has made it into English under another name, although we don’t tend to sing it at quite the clip these of these singers. It’s another one I’m going to make you listen to rather than telling you the English words – I was going to give you a clue by providing a direct translation of the title, but it turns out the internet is rubbish at Czech. I can tell you that ‘Jezisku’ means ‘baby Jesus’, but you could probably have worked that out for yourself, and if you can guess the usual English name for it from that, you win a mince pie.
Advent song for December 16: Tu scendi dalle stelle, Italy
The history of the Christmas carol is somewhat murky, but sources seem to agree that the first Christmas carols (as distinct from winter celebration songs, which are much older) emerged from Italy from around the second century onwards, and were always sung in Latin. Some early fragments of tunes or words survive (Veni Veni Emmanuel is a version of the Antiphons, which have been around since at least the eighth century), and of course we still sing some Christmas music in Latin, but from the thirteenth century onwards carols started to be sung in the language of the people. Tu scendi dalle stelle (usually translated as From Starry Skies Descending or From Starry Skies Thou Comest) dates from 1744, so it’s a baby compared to some Italian carols. There are versions by Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli, among others, but I have gone for a simpler choral version.
A pause
There’s no advent song today. I had one ready, but I find that in the wake of yesterday’s horrific news from Connecticut I am not in the right frame of mind to write a jolly Christmas post. I know that countless children die every day in eminently preventable ways, but while the path to preventing war and famine is a complex one, the path to gun control is an clear and simple one, and everyone in the US who has turned down the chance to take it is complicit in these murders, and in all those that will follow until something changes.
Most of the media coverage has been horrible, but here’s a good, non-partisan article on gun control from The Slate, if you’re interested.
Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.
Advent song for December 14: Carol of the Birds, Australia
I had a different song in mind for Australia until this week, when I suddenly had a good idea for next year’s advent calendar and realised that I wanted to save my original choice for that. So I went on a search for Australian Christmas songs and I’m glad I did, because it turns out they have some great ones. I was tempted by Aussie Jingle Bells (“Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Christmas time is beaut/Oh what fun it is to ride in a rusty Holden Ute”), but I’ve gone instead for the less well-known but more charming Carol of the Birds by the 20th century Australian composer William G. James, with words by John Wheeler which are so evocatively Australian that I’m going to break with tradition and include them here, so you can sing along:
Carol of the Birds
Out on the planes the Brolgas are dancing
Lifting their feet like war horses prancing
Up to the sun the wood larks go winging
Faint in the dawn light echoes their singing
Orana! Orana! Orana to Christmas dayDown where the tree ferns grow by the river
There where the waters sparkle and quiver
Deep in the gullies Bell birds are chiming
Softly and sweetly their lyrics notes rhyming
Orana! Orana! Orana to Christmas DayFriar birds sip the nectar of flowers
Currawongs chant in wattle tree bowers
In the blue ranges, Lorikeets calling
Carols of bush birds rising and falling
Orana! Orana! Orana to Christmas Day
(“Orana” is an aboriginal word meaning “welcome”.)
Advent song for December 13: Nu tändas tusen juleljus, Sweden
Today’s post is going up a little later than usual, because yesterday was my last day at my old job and now I have a long weekend off before I start the new one, so instead of hurriedly posting from the office I am sitting in my pyjamas in front of the Christmas tree, with a cup of tea and a crumpet, watching a terrible movie about two neighbours in a deadly vendetta over who has the most extravagant Christmas lights. I am enjoying it a lot.
I had a lovely last day at work, and on my way home I was thinking how great my old colleagues were, and how I will miss them, and as I was thinking it I came up the escalator from the tube into London Bridge station, and the Salvation Army brass band were in the concourse playing The First Nowell, and I got ever so slightly tearful (in a good, Richard Curtis sort of a way). And listening to this performance of Nu tändas tusen juleljus, or “Now are lit a thousand Christmas candles” has had the same effect. It’s just so pretty! It was composed in Sweden in 1898 and is a popular carol there, and this is just a lovely video, even though it’s amateur and shaky. Enjoy.
Advent song for December 12: The Wexford Carol, Ireland
I could, as the beloved pointed out, have chosen for my Irish carol Once in Royal David’s City, whose words were written by the Irish poet and hymn writer Cecil Alexander (who was, despite what you might assume, a woman, and incidentally don’t you think Cecil is a super-cool name for a girl? I do), also known for All Things Bright and Beautiful and There Is A Green Hill Far Away.
But the Wexford Carol (or Carúl Loch Garman, or Carúl Inis Córthaidh) is more obviously Irish, and is also several hundred years older, having originated in the county for which it is named sometime around the twelfth century – making it, incidentally, one of the oldest carols in Europe and certainly, I think, the oldest on my list.
And it is very beautiful. This is a five-minutes-plus version by the Palestrina choir of St Mary’s in Dublin, so instead of sitting hunched over your screen looking at the not-very-interesting video I suggest you turn up the volume and go and do something else while you listen to it.
Advent song for December 11: Inkanyezi Nezazi, South Africa
Thanks to Donna for suggesting this lovely song, which I vaguely remember from that time it was used in a Heinz baked beans ad back in 1997. This is the full-length version, first recorded in 1992, and the video I’ve chosen features lyrics in both Zulu and English, in which language the song is called “The Star and the Wiseman”.
You already know all about Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the isicathamiya (traditional Zulu music) choir founded by Joseph Shabalala in the 1960s after he heard their voices in a series of dreams, and if you are lucky you’ll have seen them performing on one of their many international tours. They are almost more of a brand than a band these days, but the gorgeous sound they make is as spine-tingling as ever:
Advent song for December 10: Pásztorok, Pásztorok, Hungary
This is another one I haven’t been able to find out very much about, although I have managed to work out that “Pásztorok” is Hungarian for “shepherds”, and that the first line means “Shepherds, shepherds rejoice” which is the sort of line many an English-language carol might start with.
But here’s the thing. I’ve listened to all of these songs so many times now, in so many variations, that I can no longer remember whether I already knew this tune before I started, or whether it was completely new to me. It sounds like a carol we might sing in English, but maybe all carols sound like that. So I need you, with your fresh ears, to tell me whether we have a local equivalent to Pásztorok, Pásztorok, or whether it’s just one of those tunes that sound immediately familiar:
(Have you found yourselves earwormed by any of these, incidentally? For me Tonttu, Musevisa and Florile Dalbe have taken up residence in my brain and seem disinclined to leave anytime soon.)
Too little, too late?
I always enjoy reading the search terms that bring people to this blog. The commonest, not including “gladallover” and its variations, are “baby baboon”, “nakheel tower”, “bram stoker”, “phantom of the opera” and “thelonious monk”. In each of those cases, and in most others, I know which post they will have found, and I hope that what they read there was what they were looking for. Sometimes, though, someone ends up here having searched for a very specific piece of information which I know I don’t have, and that always makes me feel a bit sad. So last week, when someone found me by searching
“How wide are the lanes at the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre?”
I decided I would find out the answer. I couldn’t find it on the internet, although I did find the measurements for a standard Olympic-sized pool, which I discovered has lanes two metres wide.
(I don’t know why it needs lanes two metres wide, when an Olympic pool is the one pool where you don’t have to overtake slow swimmers in your lane, but there you go.)
But that wasn’t enough. The main pool at the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre is described as Olympic-sized, but it has never been used for the Olympics. It might just be fifty metres long and anyway, there was no use in my finding an answer that could have been discerned from the very search that led someone here in the first place. I needed an answer from a more convincing source.
So I stopped looking at the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre website and instead I found the link that said “Contact us”, and I sent an email to the address they gave, asking how wide the lanes were. I instantly got an out-of-office reply (it turns out the pool was closed last week after elevated bacteria levels were discovered, so even if they’d been at home, they’d have had more pressing concerns than my question), but this morning I got the following email:
Hi Laura,
I don’t have an exact number but they would be approximately 2 metres wide.
Thea Harrild
Aquatics Coordinator
OK, so it’s not much more confident an answer than the one we found for ourselves, but at least it’s from someone who we can assume has seen the pool in real life, rather than only in glossy photos like the one above, and therefore knows that 2 metres isn’t miles out.
So thank you Thea, and person who searched for “How wide are the lanes at the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre?”, please come back. I think I can help now.
Advent song for December 9: Nos Galan, Wales
Nos Galan, also known as Oer yw’r gwr, is a Welsh folk song dating back to at least the eighteenth century (that’s when it was first written down, but it was already old then). I’m not going to tell you much more about it if you don’t already know what it’s called in English, because I want you to listen to this gorgeous version without preconceptions (you may have to skip an ad first, but I promise it’s worth it).
If you want to cheat, the Welsh lyrics and the English are both listed here. The English version isn’t a translation of the Welsh, though, because even though I only know a dozen Welsh words, one of them is “Cymru”, which appears in the third line of the Welsh version and nowhere at all in the version I grew up with. Google translate suggests that the first verse in Welsh is actually something like:
Cold is the man who can not love
Old beloved mountains of Wales
To him their warmest love
[Gwyia] joyful next year
(It couldn’t handle “Gwiya”. Do let me know if you know what it means.)
UPDATE: We have a better translation via Pegasus and specifically Rhian, their Welsh alto:
Rhian’s mum says it is used in specific idiomatic expression meaning ‘Hope there is much celebration for you next year”
So we can assume that the final line is to be translated as above. Phew. Thank you, Rhian’s mum.
Anyway, I like those words much better than the English ones, and this version of it has turned a carol I always thought of as quite dull into something magically beautiful. That’s Welsh singing for you, I suppose*.
*Technically, these singers are Dutch, but Dutch and Welsh are kind of similar, aren’t they? And it’s clearly a Welsh version of a Welsh song, and it’s by far the nicest version I could find, so I cheated a bit. Sorry.
Glad All Over 