Let’s start at the very beginning, as D:Ream once said. The thing is, you have to like the Beatles A LOT to enjoy their Christmas EPs, released every year between 1963 and 1969, because they are only really interesting anthropologically, and only then if you are a Beatles fan, although it is always cheering to remember how funny they were, at least while they were still all friends, which in 1963 they were. There isn’t a great deal to recommend this musically, though, which is why every time I have to share what is essentially five minutes of rambling with you, I am going to balance it out with an alternative that is either less Christmassy or less Beatles-y, but never both and always good. Welcome to advent 2016, which has to recommend it that by the time it ends it will nearly be 2017, and as Julie Andrews once said, things can only get better.
There very nearly wasn’t a gladallover musical advent calendar this year, because awful things kept happening (I am referring to world events more than celebrity deaths, mostly, though one or two of the latter knocked me for six a bit), and then last month I resolved that in the face of awful things it is essential to still have nice things, and in a rush of inspiration I decided on a theme that would be a fitting celebration of what I thought would be the tenth annual gladallover musical advent calendar, (but turns out to be the ninth, because I can’t count).
And then, just last week, I lost a friend unexpectedly (to me; he and his family knew he was ill, but he didn’t want it widely known), and then I thought I couldn’t possibly go ahead with frivolous Christmas nonsense, until a subsequent Facebook conversation between friends of his resulted in a long list of songs to play at the wake, music being one of the things we all had in common and late nights with Sweeney playing the guitar while the room sang along a memory we all shared. And if you knew Sweeney you will know that there’s only one theme that we can possibly go with in his honour, and it’s The Beatles, and so that’s what we will do, which is a challenge because there aren’t that many Christmas Beatles songs and of the ones that there are, some of them are rubbish, but we will employ some poetic license and see where it takes us, and if I run out of songs we can have some jokes instead. See you tomorrow.
Well, they always finish with Hark The Herald, so we will too. I mean, you can’t not really, can you? It’s just clearly the biggest and best carol of all. No nuances or subtlety in this one; it starts big and stays big, and then gets bigger, and each time you think the descant has reached the dizziest height it can, it hits a higher one. Are you at work? Wherever you are, turn up the volume and sing along (but don’t break your voice on the descant).
This has always been my favourite, partly because it’s pretty, partly because it’s sweet and partly because it’s the first carol I learned to sing the alto part for, which means it is the reason I started to enjoy singing carols rather than simply listening to them. The alto part isn’t at all complicated, which is probably why it’s the first one I learned, but it is pretty.
And the words are pretty too, which I always forget because like the Lord’s Prayer or All You Need Is Love I’ve known it for so long that I never think about what I’m singing. But you can’t beat a line like Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by, can you?
Also, you get to sing the “How Silently” verse quietly, and then get louder, and that’s never not fun, and it has another perfect third-verse descant. Sing along with this one, why don’t you?
Another twentieth-century classic today, written in 1951 by John Joubert, who is still with us at the age of eighty-eight and has an eclectic collection of music to his name. I sang this with a choir in about 2006 and what I remember most is the feeling that you don’t really get to breathe – you just launch into it and keep singing right through until the end. The arrangement is striking but it’s the rollicking rhythmical headlong style of it that I really like. There is also a story, told by my parents, of me as a small child, old enough to read the title “Torches” but certainly not old enough to read the music (I would struggle now, if I didn’t already know it), singing this carol with the music propped up in front of me, upside-down. I’m afraid I failed to fulfil the prodigal promise of my early life, but I still like the song a lot.
I have mixed feelings about this one, actually, because while I think it is heart-stoppingly beautiful, for most of us it’s one to admire, rather than to join in with. We had our usual family carols yesterday and attempted several numbers that I’d never heard before, or at least never paid attention to, and I realised anew that it is not possible to read music and words at the same time and get both right. So listening to this now is making me feel a bit anxious.
This is, of course, because it’s a twentieth-century carol – dating from around 1919 – and they’re often a little tricksier than their older relatives. Stick with it, though, for a cameo from a baritone whom you’ll recognise as our solo Balthazar back on December 12th. I wonder what he’s doing now?
In The Bleak Midwinter is maybe the prettiest tune of all, as long as you make sure to listen to the Gustav Holst setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem rather than the less lovely tune by Harold Darke, which dates from 1911 rather than Holst’s 1906 and therefore is definitely a pale imitation of the original. Sorry, Harold Darke, but there it is.
Actually tomorrow’s carol might be the prettiest of all. I’ll let you make your own mind up.
The thing about The First Nowell is that is essentially the same musical phrase sung over and over for four and a half minutes, which is why it’s impressive that this arrangement by David Willcocks (who, incidentally, arranged about half of the carols we’ve heard so far, and who died in September this year aged 95 after a quite extraordinary life) manages to dart around, giving the tune to different sections at different times, introducing a descant line early on and then reverting to the main tune and generally showing off what a few dozen voices and an organ are capable of.
Whereas many of our favourite carols date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, there is a core of traditional carols that are much earlier and this is one, dating certainly from the sixteenth century but quite possibly as early as thirteenth century in its original form. So join in and enjoy the fact that you’re carrying on a Christmas tradition that’s at least as old as Elizabeth I.
My favourite anecdote about Christmas carols is one I heard on Radio Four one Christmas and I can’t remember whether I’ve told it here before, but in case I haven’t, and even if I have, here it is.
As you may know, the first verse is usually sung unaccompanied by a soloist, as it is here. At our family carols we used to rotate this role, with varyingly amusing results, until my cousin married a professional mezzo soprano, at which point it became clear nobody else was in the running any more (she usually tries to get out of it, but we never let her).
Anyway, the story told by a man on the radio who was probably, but not definitely, a choirmaster, was of a female soprano who was tasked with the solo, and who made the unfortunate mistake of starting off to the tune of Hark The Herald Angels Sing, which is similar enough to the tune of Once In Royal David’s City that she was able to stick with it, all unknowing, until she got to the line
Mary was that mother mild Jesus Christ her little child
which she sang to the tune of
With th’angelic host proclaim: “Christ is born in Bethlehem”
With the result that the only way out was to get to the end of the verse by singing
La la la la la la la La la la la la la la
To the tune of
Hark the herald angels sing “Glory to the new-born King!”
(It’s funnier if you sing it, which he did.)
Apparently the choir had spotted the error and gamely jumped in and sang the second verse to the correct tune, and all was well.
So I will always be fond of Once In Royal David’s City for that reason, and because it’s always been (at least, since 1919) the song that starts the Christmas Eve service from King’s, so it’s special, and because it was originally written for children to sing, so it’s also sweet and comprehensible. It dates from the mid-19th century and is the work of Cecil Alexander (a woman, and I’ve always liked Cecil as a woman’s name too, if I had a baby girl she might be a Cecil) who is also known for All Things Bright And Beautiful, but you can’t have it all.
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.
Glad All Over 