Tag Archives: advent calendar

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Advent Calendar Day 21 – O Frondens Virga (Hildegard of Bingen)

Something a bit different today, because if your weekend is looking anything like mine (one choir rehearsal, two lots of carolling, and two family Christmas get-togethers), you probably need something soothing and restful to cope with the stress.  Also, as we get closer to Christmas, and those very stylised, traditional services on Christmas Eve with candles and the same readings and carols really in almost every church around the globe, year after year, I always find myself with an image in my head of reaching back to hold hands in a long chain of people throughout the centuries, who have sat through services very much like these, listening to these same readings (and even some of the same hymns) for nearly 2,000 years.

(One of the things I love most about candlelit services is that this is the only time one really gets a sense of what churches must have looked like in the days before electricity and gas lighting, with only natural light and candles to light the space.  Though in Australia, of course, very few of our churches pre-date some sort of artificial lighting…)

I don’t have any music from the first few centuries AD that I can share with you, alas.  While the text of Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence goes back to 275 CE or earlier, the best known tune is 17th century, and I can’t find an earlier version. The Latin version of Of the Father’s Love Begotten dates to 413 CE as plainchant, but nobody seems willing to record it without embellishment.

Which leads me, inevitably, to the 12th century, and Hildegard of Bingen.  I have a great fondness for Hildegard, who, in addition to being a composer of numerous musical works, was an accomplished herbalist, poet and playwright, and was not shy about writing letters to the Kings and Popes of her day telling them where they were going wrong.  (I suspect that it is no coincidence that a lot of rules were brought in after her death restricting the movement and activities of cloistered women.  Nobody was game to cross her while she was alive, but they weren’t going to stand for any more of that once she was gone, thank you.) Hildegard’s convent at Eibingen is also very close to the home of one of my dearest friends (who tells me that there were always a *lot* of Hildegards in her class at school).

O Frondens Virga is an antiphon to the Virgin Mary, and the lyrics translate as:

O branch, coming into leaf, standing upright in your nobility as dawn advances: rejoice now and be glad and deign to free us, helpless and weak, from the evil habits of our age; and stretch out your hand to lift us upright.

The leafy and fertile imagery is very Hildegard, and Kathelijne Van Laethem’s voice has a pure clarity that suits the music perfectly.

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Advent Calendar Day 20 – A Musicological Journey through the Twelve Days of Christmas (Courtney)

It’s Friday again, and that means it is time to take off our rose-tinted spectacles (it’s possible that you are relieved to hear this by now), and indulge in some Friday Frivolity.

I love this piece of music SO MUCH.  Love, love, love, love, love it!  I’ve been saving it for the last Friday in Advent, because I think we all need to take a deep breath now that Christmas is only a week away, and let it out in a big giggle.  Also, after nearly three weeks of Advent Carols, I feel we are all likely to have a greater appreciation of the musical genre games being played here than we might have had before.

Seriously, how fun is that?  The more church music you’ve done, the cleverer it is (there is some definite Palestrina in there, and Vivaldi and Handel both get a turn, but then there is Wagner, and the Carnival of the Animals for Seven Swans a Singing, and it is so, so clever, and one day, I will find a way to teach this to my work choir, and it will be *glorious*.

Enjoy, and I hope your weekend is as stress-free as is possible at this time of year!

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Advent Calendar Day 19 – Legend “The Crown of Roses” Tchaikovsky

By now, we are all clear, I think, that there are no roses without thorns, and it falls to Tchaikovsky to lead us into one of the darker rose bowers for this week.  This carol actually gets sung quite a bit in Lent and around Easter, but, while this is not something I’ve highlighted this year, Advent does actually share a fair bit of common ground with Lent, as the shared liturgical colour hints.  Both are times of waiting and (in some traditions) of fasting, and both share a common theme of preparation and repentance.  While the repentance theme is generally underlined more strongly in Lent than in Advent, Advent is also when we get a lot of the apocalyptic readings in the Common Lectionary, so the theme is there to be had.

And, after all, while Christmas is when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we do so knowing that the end of his story is his death at the hands of the people he tried to help.

All of which is to say that this is not a cheerful carol.  Not in the slightest.

I do not speak Russian, but the words in English are as follows:

When Jesus Christ was yet a child
He had a garden small and wild
Wherein he cherished roses fair
And bound them into garlands there.

Now once as summertime drew nigh
There came a troop of children by
And seeing roses on the tree
With shouts they plucked them eagerly.

“Do you bind roses in your hair?”
They cried in scorn to Jesus there.
The boy said humbly “Take, I pray
All but the naked thorns away.”

Then of the thorns they made a crown
And with rough fingers pressed it down
Til on his forehead, fair and young,
Red drops of blood, like roses, sprung.

I’m not even going to try to commentate on that.  There is plenty to say, but I suspect you can find what you need yourself.  I was going to find you a recording in English, but then I came across this rendition by a Russian choir.

Interestingly, the choir in question is the USSR Ministry of Culture Chamber Choir, and this recording was made in 1988.  And that’s something else I don’t even know where to start unpacking.  1988 was a year before the Wall came down, an event that I remember principally as marking the end of my fear that we were all going to die at any minute in a nuclear holocaust, and also as requiring my German teacher to buy lots of new maps.  My understanding was that Communist Russia definitely frowned on Christianity (and indeed, on religion in general).

But this beautiful carol is sung with great feeling and evidently with official approval, and my brief foray into internet research suggests that they in fact sang quite a bit of religious music.  I wasn’t able to find out much about this choir, and I cannot stress enough how little I know about internal USSR politics, but I find the idea of a state-sponsored choir singing this beautiful, mystical religious music in Russian in the USSR in the 1980s fascinating.

 

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Advent Calendar Day 18: Maria durch ein Dornwald ging (Maria walks amid the thorn)

For our third day in our Advent Rose week, we return to Germany with another traditional carol, this time featuring roses neither as symbols or Mary or of Jesus, but as a miraculous response to Mary walking through a field of thorns while pregnant with Jesus.  This carol dates from the 15th century or earlier, and I haven’t been able to discern whether this is just the text or the melody too.  I suspect it is both, because it does have a bit of an Early Music sound to it.

The lyrics are definitely medieval – you can see them if you click through to the recording by the Short Tailed Snails below, and I’ve put my (probably dubious, but better than some I’ve found online) translation below.

I really like the simplicity of this version of the carol, with its open fifths that add to the medieval effect, but if you’d like a more fully-realised choral version, the Thomanerchor (a boy’s choir founded in 1212, who may well have been singing this music since the day it was first composed) have a rather lovely recording of it from 1980.

Mary walked through a forest of thorns
Kyrie eleison
Mary walked through a forest of thorns
That for seven years had borne no leaf
Jesus and Mary

What did Mary carry under her heart?
Kyrie eleison.
A tiny little child without pain
That is what Mary carried under her heart.
Jesus and Mary

The thorns bore roses there,
Kyrie eleison.
Where the little child was carried through the forest,
There the thorns bore roses.
Jesus and Mary

The original carol goes on for an extra three verses after the three which are sung in these recordings, and indeed, in most recent recordings, and these verses cover John the Baptist, and a brief catechism about who Jesus is and how he sets us free from sin.  Given how thematically different they are from the first three verses, I strongly suspect someone else added them on later, to make the song sound a bit more holy.  Personally, I think the carol is better without them.

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Advent Calendar Day 17 – There is no rose of such virtue (Chanticleer)

Are you ready for more roses?  Today’s rose is a 15th century English rose, and is a text that has been sung to many different arrangements.  Interestingly, it seems to have become a big thing in the last century or so – I’ve found melodies and arrangements by artists who I know – Britten, the Mediaeval Baebes, Joubert, and, regrettably, Sting – and ones who are new to me – Young, Koppin, McDonald, Memley (my favourite of this lot), and, honestly, each YouTube video leads to another new version of this piece.  I’m beginning to feel I could fill an Advent Calendar just with this text.

(It’s a lovely text, but really?)

Anyway, I’m feeling a bit traditional this week, so we are going to eschew all this 20th and 21st century madness for a proper, old-fashioned version, which goes to what I understand to be the original tune, as sung by Chanticleer.  After all those lush dissonances, it’s a pleasure to hear a nice open fifth or two, and a melody that makes sense on its own…

… and that, apparently, is all I want to say about it.  I’m exhausted after listening to fifteen different 20th-century arrangements of this song*…

… oh, I will add that I rather like the slideshow on this one.  Nicely put together.

*Andrew is now mocking me because I told him that after a while all the 20th century arrangements start blurring together into one lush yet spoooooky dissonance.  He says that they aren’t that alike, really**.  He wasn’t in here listening to them.  (They aren’t that alike, really.  But there is a definite trend in the direction of being slow, atmospheric and just a little bit atonal, and I’m afraid my palate is just not refined enough to care.  I’m too busy looking for my next cheap Baroque fix.)

**Andrew now claims that I am misrepresenting him.  This is what a surfeit of 20th century music does to me.  It completely destroys my moral compass.  Or, alternatively, it leads me to make what I maintain was a perfectly reasonable paraphrase of what was actually said.  But apparently, Andrew does not agree with me.  Unfortunately for Andrew, this is my blog, so I get to write whatever I like.  He will have to start his own blog.

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Advent Calendar Day 16 – Es ist ein Ros Entsprungen (Lo, how a rose up-springing) (Praetorius and Vulpius)

In honour of the rose-coloured vestments for Gaudete Sunday, I have decided that we are going to view this entire week through rose-themed glasses.  It helps that everyone, regardless of language, seems to have hit on the idea of associating Mary, and sometimes Jesus, with roses, so there is quite an astonishing range of rose-themed carols to choose from.

For today, we will start with a very famous German carol from the 16th century, with harmonies from the 17th century, so it’s nicely aged.  The complete lyrics (in both English and German) can be found by clicking through to the video I’ve attached below, but in this particular carol, it is Jesus who is depicted as a rose coming into bloom at midwinter from the branch of Jesse, and dispersing sweetness everywhere.

I was going to give you a straight choral version, à la Praetorius, and indeed, I thought that was what I had found here, but after the first verse it went unexpectedly fugal before returning to its original tune.  Surprise!  But one can never really have too much polyphony, so I’m all for it.

If this isn’t weird enough for you, Jan Sandström has had a turn at making it 20th century and atmospheric, which is pretty cool.  And if on the other hand, you are a traditionalist at heart, here’s a really lovely recording with Kathleen Battle and the Boys’ Choir of Harlem, which is beautifully sung and very peaceful.

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Advent Calendar Day 14 – O Little One Sweet (J.S. Bach)

Did I mention that I’m really, really into Bach at the moment?  The fact that this is the second bit of Bach you are getting in this Advent Calendar might be a clue (and it’s not the last, either – I’m not going to let you get to Christmas without at least a little peek at the Christmas Oratorio).

I loved this carol well before I knew it was Bach’s arrangement because of the utterly gorgeous – and in places totally counterintuitive – alto line.  As an alto, I am always delighted when a composer gives me something more interesting than a row of Fs (which is one reason I am all over both polyphony and Baroque music). Actually, the weirdness of the opening bar should have alerted me to its composer, now I think about it.  No other 17th century composer would do that to their alto section (20th century composers have no mercy on anyone, of course, but the results are rarely so beautiful). This is such a beautiful thing to sing, and I love the way the harmonies cross over.

I listened to a few versions of this, but eventually had to choose this performance by The King’s Singers.  One of the reasons Bach can be difficult to sing (aside from his counterintuitive key changes) is that he didn’t really write for the human voice as an instrument – he wrote music that happened to use voices as a medium.  (This is not hyperbole on my part – unlike composers such as Handel or Purcell, Bach didn’t really care what voices could or couldn’t do, he cared about what the music was supposed to do, and his singers just had to put up with that.  Later in life, he wrote several pieces for no instrument at all – just pure music.)

So it seems fitting to reflect the purity of Bach’s musical vision with The King’s Singers, who sing everything with a clear tone that is as close to pure music as anything I’ve heard.

(And really, make sure you listen to that alto line.  It’s being sung by the second chap from the left and he is really enjoying it, as well he should.  You should, too.)

 

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Advent Calendar Day 13 – The 12 Days of Christmas – a Conductor’s Christmas Nightmare, and Dear Nola (Solomons, Kelly)

It’s Friday again, which means it’s time for more 12 Days of Christmas-themed silliness!

You get two videos for the price of one today, because I couldn’t decide which of these I wanted to feature.

On the one hand, we have Frank Kelly, with his classic ‘Dear Nola’ spoken word letter, in which Nola is simply too generous with her gifts, and we learn that birds do not belong in the house.  (This has the advantage of continuing the birds theme we’ve had going for the last few days, which is never a bad thing.)  But, if you are like me, you probably heard the LP of this every Christmas when you were little, so this is all familiar territory to you.

And then on the other hand we have David Solomons, who has written a piece called ‘The Conductor’s 12-Day Christmas Nightmare’, which is a fairly accurate description of what church and community choirs can be like.  My favourite part is the bit where five sang in tune, though the chorus of ‘sorry!’s at the end is also a highlight.  And also something that is frequently heard in the choirs I am involved in.

Enjoy your Friday!  It’s Christmas parties galore where I work today, so I hope yours is as much fun.

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Advent Calendar Day 12 – Carol of the Birds (James and Wheeler)

In addition to being the 10th of December and the 12th day of Advent, today is my sister-in-law Tanya’s birthday!  Happy birthday Tan!  Tanya is extremely fond of Australian birds, and so there was only one possible Christmas Carol to post today, even if it’s a little early in the season for it, and that is the Carol of the Birds.

I have a great fondness for the carols William James wrote to lyrics by John Wheeler. As an Australian, all the winter solstice symbolism embedded in both church and secular Christmas traditions is kind of out of place.  (Our minister last year replaced the advent candles with vases into which he poured water, which makes a much better metaphor in our climate – flames in our summer are decidedly unwanted.  Water in the desert is another matter.)  And I get a bit cranky after the fifth time I hear ‘Frosty the Snowman’ played in the supermarket when it’s 35°C outside.  Don’t get me wrong – I love a good rendition of In the Bleak Midwinter as much as the next woman, but there are many, many snow-based carols that I could gladly live without.  (Sometimes, it’s hard not to feel like the whole Northern hemisphere is mocking us…)

So carols with Australian bush birds, and drovers on dry Australian plains watching black swans fly overhead, or red dust and leaves being blown by hot northerly winds, or even stars shining in dark desert skies with brown moths fluttering in the light, feel very refreshing to me.  Which, since I am an urban girl, is probably as inappropriate as carols about snow, but these carols do feel more like home.  The underlying awareness of heat and dryness feels right.  And, of course, most of us sing these carols at some point in primary school, so there is a definite nostalgia aspect to this (though if you’ve ever heard a bunch of ten year olds reaching for that ‘orana’… well, let’s just say that it’s a pretty good imitation of what a sulfur-crested cockatoo sounds like, and leave it at that.)

I recently found out that William James, who wrote this carol and several other Australian favourites, was also the church organist and Music Director at the church I do most of my singing at.  So that’s a nice connection, too.

 

 

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Advent Calendar Day 11 – El Cant Dels Ocells

I was going to post this song later in the week, but given my accidental Basque theme, I couldn’t resist adding some Catalan to the mix.  This piece is a traditional Catalan carol which I found by accident when looking for a different bird-related carol in honour of my sister-in-law’s birthday tomorrow.  (Happy pre-birthday, Tan!)  It’s hard to find a perfect arrangement of this one, but I think my favourite one is this one, sung by a Catalonian boys’ choir. I love their soloist, and the gentle harmonies of the arrangement.

If you are partial to a more operatic / romantic version of this piece, then here’s a version in English, sung by the Robert Shaw Chorale. Lyrics are below. It’s rather a lovely translation, but obviously the demands of scansion kept it from being a very literal one. There is, however, a pretty good translation on Wikipedia.

“When in the Eastern skies the wondrous star did rise and fill the earth with splendor, came birds in joyful throng to sound their dainty song in a carol sweet and tender. Hosanna to the child and to his mother mild, full reverently to render! 

The kingly eagle came to praise his holy name in mighty proclamation. The sparrow then replied, “tonight is Christmastide, a night of jubilation.” Then robin redbreast sang , “now death has lost its sting, in Christ is our salvation.” 

The nightingale sang sweet, the lovely babe to greet, in Mary’s arms he’s lying. The cuckoo and the quail flew over hill and dale in admiration vying. The barn owl’s eyes were dim, such radiance blinded him, and homeward he went flying.”

And if you’d just like an instrumental version on cello with pretty pictures of birds, try this one. It’s pretty gorgeous.

Except that actually, that last one has a bit more to it than that.   I didn’t realise this when I started hunting for bird-related carols, but this particular song – and particularly the version by Pau Casals – became emblematic of both peace and of Catalonian independence.  You can read what he had to say about it here.

(Nope, I wasn’t expecting politics on this blog either.  Sorry.  But it was turning into a rather large elephant in a very small room, and not acknowledging it seemed worse…)