A rather informitive article about caroling that originally appeared in the Telegraph
You may find the original article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/8963230/O-come-all-ye-tone-deaf-if-only-once-a-year.html
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You may find the original article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/8963230/O-come-all-ye-tone-deaf-if-only-once-a-year.html
O come all ye tone-deaf – if only once a year
Christmas carols give even the hardest-hearted the licence to shed a sentimental tear.
Belting out the old familiar tunes - most of which aren't actually that old... Photo: PA
7:00PM GMT 17 Dec 2011
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Years ago, I was a lodger in the vicarage of Hampstead’s parish church, a
life-conditioning experience that offered an insider view of Christmas.
And one thing I remember was the endless ringing of the phone from late
November onwards with a thousand repetitions of the same enquiry: “What time
is the carol service?” To the point that the vicar’s wife – a feisty soul
who spiked her husband’s chances of a bishopric by writing books about the
church as a conspiracy against women – would lose her cool and snap: “If you
ever came here other than at Christmas, you’d know.”
It’s probably been much the same during the past few weeks (no doubt with a
more welcoming response). Tonight, when Hampstead has its 2011 carol
service, the church will be packed as it never is during the rest of the
year, with people it doesn’t see at any other time. What’s more, they will
be singing – which is also something they most probably don’t do at any
other time.
Apart from Auld Lang Syne and the National Anthem, there isn’t much music for
collective singing that the average Brit without a personal connection to
Gareth Malone feels comfortable with. But Christmas carols are another
matter. They give you licence to be self-exposing, sentimental, human (even
corporate bankers shed a tear during Silent Night). And more significantly,
they capture the effect that Christmas has on us all, irrespective of
religious belief. The effect of concentrated time, collapsing.
There’s one carol in particular, O Little Town of Bethlehem, that sums it up
in spiritual terms: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee
tonight.” But even secularists can probably feel something similar: a
meeting of hopes, fears, happenings and memories, albeit without reference
to any “thee”. Christmas connects us with our pasts, with all the other
Christmases we’ve known. More than that, it connects us with the collective
past: with all our squabbling forebears who, at this one moment, have
contained their loathing of each other, gathered peaceably in Cotswold
churchyards, medieval cloisters or the trenches of the Somme, and sung these
tunes. Throughout the centuries, or so it’s nice to think.
Needless to say, the truth is different. Christmas is, of course, a largely
19th-century invention: so are all those carols. Most of them aren’t hugely
ancient. Most of them aren’t even carols, if you’re strict on definition.
And the ones that are tend not to have particularly spiritual origins,
mixing the sacred with the secular – although that’s something to commend
them to a modern congregation, similarly vague on where it stands with God.
Historically, a carol was a dance-tune, sung to simple, repetitive texts and a
robust affair – as much to do with drinking and fertility rites as with the
birth of Jesus. It wasn’t welcomed in church where, up to the Reformation at
least, Christmas music was still steeped in the contemplative calm of
plainsong. And when the Reformation kicked in, it came with a distrust of
Christmas that prepared the ground for Cromwell’s abolition of it from 1644
to 1660. So no carol singing then.
But history being an untidy process, it was a Cromwellian soldier who came up with the first English carol text to enter common repertory: the Wither’s Rocking Hymn (best-known these days in a setting by Vaughan Williams). It caused him trouble, and the Stationers Company refused to allow publication on the grounds that it was “popish, superstitious, obscene and unfit to keep company with the psalms”. But it set a precedent. And in 1700 it was joined by While Shepherds Watched, which for a long while was the only Christmas carol officially allowed in Anglican liturgy.
By 1782 there was a second, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (or, as it originally ran, Hark, How all the Welkin Rings). But from that, you see how slow the process of acceptance was. Only in the mid-19th century – prompted on the one hand by the rigorous Methodist promotion of hymn-singing, and on the other by romantic, Anglo-Catholic medieval fantasies – that the standard repertory built up. In some cases it was a scholarly process of refashioning old texts and fitting them to new tunes (or vice versa), masking their newness in the Gothic Revival manner of texts like Good King Wenceslas – which may seem old and exotic but was actually cobbled together in East Grinstead by a Victorian liturgist called J M Neale. And it was of course these Victorians who bequeathed us a vision of Roman-occupied Judea very like East Grinstead, 1850: See Amid the Winter’s Snow and its companions wilfully adjusted the Nativity to Anglican experience.
As for false antiquity, the seemingly timeless King’s College service of lessons and carols was invented in 1918 – by a priest who had just come back from the trenches, where he’d acquired a taste for liturgical improvisation. And the first classic collection of Christmas music in print was the 1928 Oxford Book of Carols: presiding genius, Vaughan Williams. But by then the carol had taken a different turn: reinvented yet again as a refined, exquisite anthem for the choir, without participation from the pews. The early 20th century confirmed a long historical process that took carols off the streets (where they were public property) into the sanctuary (for trained musicians, robed and surpliced and apart).
Some commentators see that as a bad move, but it generated an outstanding choral culture serviced by the likes of Herbert Howells and Peter Warlock (whose Bethlehem Down, the most magical of all modern carol-anthems, exists thanks to a Telegraph competition). And happily, that culture still exists. Only the other week, I heard the elite professional choir Tenebrae sing a carol concert, and the whole event was a showcase for new or recent work – by composers like Roxana Panufnik, Judith Bingham and Patric Standford (whose This Day got my personal vote).
The problem is that all the good new carols these days are for choirs. Even John Rutter, living king of Christmas music, isn’t coming up with modern classics for a congregation. And to my mind, the fixed universe of carols that everyone can join in badly needs refreshing: thank God Christmas comes but once a year when it means another round of Silent Nights and Once in Royals. But I guess the 100 million-plus who tune in to King’s, Cambridge next week, and the throngs who make their yearly trip to Hampstead parish church tonight, will take a different view. For them it will be the same, much-loved old stuff that meets together with their hopes and fears. Even if it isn’t actually that old.
But history being an untidy process, it was a Cromwellian soldier who came up with the first English carol text to enter common repertory: the Wither’s Rocking Hymn (best-known these days in a setting by Vaughan Williams). It caused him trouble, and the Stationers Company refused to allow publication on the grounds that it was “popish, superstitious, obscene and unfit to keep company with the psalms”. But it set a precedent. And in 1700 it was joined by While Shepherds Watched, which for a long while was the only Christmas carol officially allowed in Anglican liturgy.
By 1782 there was a second, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (or, as it originally ran, Hark, How all the Welkin Rings). But from that, you see how slow the process of acceptance was. Only in the mid-19th century – prompted on the one hand by the rigorous Methodist promotion of hymn-singing, and on the other by romantic, Anglo-Catholic medieval fantasies – that the standard repertory built up. In some cases it was a scholarly process of refashioning old texts and fitting them to new tunes (or vice versa), masking their newness in the Gothic Revival manner of texts like Good King Wenceslas – which may seem old and exotic but was actually cobbled together in East Grinstead by a Victorian liturgist called J M Neale. And it was of course these Victorians who bequeathed us a vision of Roman-occupied Judea very like East Grinstead, 1850: See Amid the Winter’s Snow and its companions wilfully adjusted the Nativity to Anglican experience.
As for false antiquity, the seemingly timeless King’s College service of lessons and carols was invented in 1918 – by a priest who had just come back from the trenches, where he’d acquired a taste for liturgical improvisation. And the first classic collection of Christmas music in print was the 1928 Oxford Book of Carols: presiding genius, Vaughan Williams. But by then the carol had taken a different turn: reinvented yet again as a refined, exquisite anthem for the choir, without participation from the pews. The early 20th century confirmed a long historical process that took carols off the streets (where they were public property) into the sanctuary (for trained musicians, robed and surpliced and apart).
Some commentators see that as a bad move, but it generated an outstanding choral culture serviced by the likes of Herbert Howells and Peter Warlock (whose Bethlehem Down, the most magical of all modern carol-anthems, exists thanks to a Telegraph competition). And happily, that culture still exists. Only the other week, I heard the elite professional choir Tenebrae sing a carol concert, and the whole event was a showcase for new or recent work – by composers like Roxana Panufnik, Judith Bingham and Patric Standford (whose This Day got my personal vote).
The problem is that all the good new carols these days are for choirs. Even John Rutter, living king of Christmas music, isn’t coming up with modern classics for a congregation. And to my mind, the fixed universe of carols that everyone can join in badly needs refreshing: thank God Christmas comes but once a year when it means another round of Silent Nights and Once in Royals. But I guess the 100 million-plus who tune in to King’s, Cambridge next week, and the throngs who make their yearly trip to Hampstead parish church tonight, will take a different view. For them it will be the same, much-loved old stuff that meets together with their hopes and fears. Even if it isn’t actually that old.
