This is another carol I find essential for Advent, and who better to perform it than The King’s Singers? I absolutely love this arrangement, too, with the alternating between higher and lower voices, solo and choir, unison and harmony.
Enjoy.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE6BzoMt0Ro&w=560&h=315]
I included this one last year. I still love it, so we’re having it again. Besides, it turns out that this is the text for Advent 4, which was last weekend (a time which seems very, very long ago). I love the liveliness of this, and the beautiful singing, and I am determined to learn it and find people to sing it with one of these days.
No more today because I am too tired to think (and, alas, too tired to nap). But at least I am on holiday now. If I can actually *get* to sleep, I’ll be able to catch up a bit.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpmRZUxhhwE&w=560&h=315]
I was going to give you Josquin Des Prez today (O Virgo Prudentissima), and I actually got as far as finding the recording and putting it in here, but then found that I had absolutely nothing to say about it except that it is pretty (which it is), and that you should certainly listen to it (which you should).
So instead we are having more funereal music today, but since I have it on excellent authority that Advent is also a time for contemplating our ends, I’m not going to feel guilty about this. We can have Rorate Coeli tomorrow. This fits my mood today.
We sang this for the first time right before the start of Advent this year, possibly because our choir director shares the views of Tree on this subject. We rehearse most of our music twice before performing it, and at the second rehearsal we learned that a member of the congregation had died quite suddenly that day – one of those women who volunteers all over the place and organises readings and is on the tea roster and the flower roster and the church council and the English conversation group, and so forth. Suddenly, the piece was very appropriate.
I’ve spent the evening figuring out sheet music and organising a time to tape an accompaniment for the songs I will be singing at Nonno’s funeral. I won’t be singing this, but it’s what’s in my head right now. And it is, I think, a beautiful piece of music.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tEiPKy-1kw&w=560&h=315]
My grandfather died today. He was 91, and had actually been doing very well for someone who had an awful lot of very dodgy organs for some time, beating all comers at chequers and scopa and apparently being something of a social center at the nursing home where he has been since March. He’d only really been sick for a few days – and it was only yesterday when it started to look serious. We found out this morning that everything was failing and it was only a matter of time, and mum rang at around 10:30, while I was in an all-Institute meeting, to say that he was unconscious and she was heading down to the LaTrobe Valley (2 hours away) to say goodbye.
Only at 11:00, I had to conduct our much-advertised and anticipated final work choir performance. We even had a harp to accompany us. This did not seem like something I could cancel at the last minute. Also, I needed to get my head around what was going on, and a choir break seemed like the way to go.
So I went down and conducted and sang, which was unbelievably surreal, because we were actually doing really well and even had fancy things like dynamics, and sometimes I was fully in the music, but mostly I was either encouraging different parts or calculating all the things I had to do this week and working out which ones I could drop and whether I could get down there today or tomorrow and how I was going to get everything done and who I could give various tasks to.
We sing Silent Night in five languages, including Italian, and the Italian version made me think of Nonno, so we sang it twice. And we sang, too, a piece that isn’t strictly a Christmas carol, but seems appropriate to this or any season – Dona Nobis Pacem. And I have to say, we have never sung it so well. So we did that one twice, too.
And then I gave everyone cake, thanked them, and ran upstairs to send a flurry of emails delegating everything in sight and to let my bosses know that I was off to Morwell. And about half an hour after I got there, Nonno quietly stopped breathing.
So that was that. I’m not feeling especially Adventish today, but if Dona Nobis is good enough for my choir, it’s good enough for this Advent Calendar. The only flaw in this version is that she stops after the very first time you get three parts – I wanted it to keep going for a lot longer.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K8B1YEi_wQ&w=560&h=315]
(oh, and there was one moment of humour in the afternoon, when we were discussing whether Nonno should be buried wearing his wedding ring. “He’d better be,” said one of my aunts. “Mum will be really annoyed if he gets there and he’s lost another one!”. Apparently, Nonno went through three or four rings during his marriage, and Nonna used to get understandably upset with him for losing them!)
Today’s carol is chosen simply because of its lullaby-like refrain. I was up until 2:30am last night (this morning) finishing confectionery, and I’m so tired that lullabys are very appealing right now…
This carol is medieval both in melody (all those open 5ths!) and lyrics, and is another one that doesn’t really bear much relationship to anything in the Bible, but is rather imagining Mary lulling baby Jesus to sleep. It’s a very gentle piece of music, and it certainly speaks to me tonight…
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr-csOGecGc&w=560&h=315]
After yesterday’s fairly boisterous Australian carol, I wanted a contrast – something very classical and beautiful. Also, I’ve been itching for an excuse to include Natalie Dessay’s voice somewhere in this. Ave Maria isn’t, of course, really an Advent Carol, but once again I’m claiming all Mary music as Advent appropriate.
Besides, it’s Natalie Dessay sounding absolutely angelic. Do I really need to justify that?
(and now I’d better go and practice sounding angelic myself, since we have our carol service tonight…)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_zm0pNifWI&w=560&h=315]
Another slightly better-known carol, this one with lyrics by Christina Rosetti, who certainly never intended for it to be sung, since it scans differently in every verse. I love this carol for the words, which I find very evocative – of, as it happens, entirely the wrong season for us. This sort of carol reminds me of the Christmas we spent in England when I was a child – though less the Christmas, which was in London, and more the months leading up to it which were spent living at York University, in very storybook English surrounds – icy ponds, stepping stones, red squirrels, proper autumn trees and conkers and medieval and roman ruins. I still love York and undoubtedly view it through the rose-tinted glasses of someone who hasn’t been there for about 17 years, and these words and the clearness of the song remind me of it.
This is not the arrangement which I know well, and which we are singing on Sunday (that would be the Holst arrangement) and which I know better, nor is it the arrangement that I heard sung once when I was at school and am clearly never going to find because I have no idea who the composer was and YouTube just keeps offering me Holst and Darke. I can never decide whether I like this arrangement more than the other, but in the end, I loved the singing of this one, and the soprano and then tenor solo.
Also, the Darke arrangement is really strange if you are are accustomed to Holst – it’s similar enough that it *almost* sounds like it might be a harmony or descant to it (it isn’t – I’ve tried singing one over the other, and they don’t quite work. But it’s very close).
And now I’ve just realised that Darke skips my favourite verse, which is the one about angels and archangels worshiping Jesus night and day while, Mary worships her son with a kiss. There’s a lovely domesticity and humanity about it which I love. So you are going to have to have *both* versions, even though I don’t really love the singing on the second one, and I’m going to give you the lyrics too, and then you can decide which you like best.
I think I love all of them.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRjruAlijnA&w=560&h=315]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE0aIQp9V4s&w=560&h=315]
Edited to add: Chanticleer did a magnificent arrangement of the Holst, which is too good not to include, but not at all traditional. And they skipped the breastful of milk verse, which is also not acceptable. You have to sing all the verses, people!
Lyrics:
You knew I’d sneak some Ian Bostridge in here somewhere, right? And what could be better than a little more Messiah?
The text of this piece is read at every Advent Carol service I’ve been to – it’s another prepare ye the way of the Lord text (and now I have the Godspell version in my head), though I think it’s actually from Isaiah and not from the New Testament at all.
Look, in all honesty, I feel silly talking about the significance of this piece of music here – it really is, I think, a piece that needs no introduction, except, perhaps, to say that it is one of those pieces of music that really makes Advent for me, and is in my head during most of December. Indeed, I believe it was the inspiration for last year’s Advent Calendar, because we missed out on hearing it at last year’s service. And then my friend Lea pointed me at this recording by Ian Bostridge, and I loved it, and thus my first big opera crush was born. He truly has one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard. I hope you love this recording as much as I do.
(NB: You need to listen to both parts of it together – they are part of the same piece, but some obnoxious person has put an ad at the start of Ev’ry Valley, which is a terrible shame. I wish I could find a version where they didn’t, but I can’t.)
Edited December: Alas, Ian Bostridge’s ‘Comfort Ye’ can no longer be found on YouTube. But his Ev’ry Valley is still magnificent.
My little work choir had its first performance today (I’m so very proud of them!), so I’m beginning to feel as though Christmas can’t be far away… time to sneak in a Christmas carol or two, albeit a fairly Adventy one.
The school I went to for late primary had a daily assembly with hymns. If you had been good, you got to pick the hymn for the day. In retrospect, some of the choices were a little odd – one friend always picked ‘Glad that I live am I’, because it was really short. I liked ‘I Vow To Thee, My Country’, because I was really into Rosemary Sutcliff and then the English Civil War, and the whole romantic patriotism thing. We would have Christmas Carols in September or April, and Easter songs in November. We especially liked the one about Mary Magdalene washing the feet of the Lord with her hair. And another very popular choice at any time was Gabriel’s Message, also known as ‘The Angel Gabriel From Heaven Came’. Why? Because you could sing ‘most highly flavoured lady’ at the end of each verse and the teachers wouldn’t notice and we thought this was hilarious. It just got funnier with every verse, I tell you.
(in retrospect, it seems likely that the teachers did notice and just didn’t feel it was worth the argument. Given all the giggling going on, they must surely have known we were up to something.)
(in later years, we liked to sing ‘who knows the swell of the glamourous belle’ instead of the clamorous bell in our school song, because we thought this was terribly risqué. Trust me, the song had it coming.)
So this is a bit of a nostalgia piece for me, though now I’m not ten any more I actually like it because it has a pretty tune. The group performing are just lovely – I hadn’t heard them before, and I hadn’t heard this arrangement, but I am very fond of close harmonies, and they execute them perfectly. Also, they look like they are having fun, which is always a bonus.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHuokdjT4UY&w=560&h=315]
I promised yesterday that I would show you today some of what happens when people go to church every week but aren’t allowed to sing and don’t understand the language. The short version is, they make things up! In fact, as our choir director is fond of telling us, most Christmas carols were made up by non-clerical types, which is why their theology is occasionally a little on the dodgy side.
Today’s carol, then, is a version of The Cherry Tree Carol, which originated in the Middle Ages, and has dozens of different versions, some of which can be found in Child’s Ballads and others in the Oxford Carol book. They all have different words, some of which go all the way from Mary’s pregnancy to the child Jesus predicting his life and his death on the cross, and they have different tunes. None of them are very flattering to Joseph (except for the Willcocks version, and that is because he cheated and changed the words).
I remember being told when I was in Europe a few years ago that there are very few churches of St Joseph around the place, because he is seen (rather unfairly) as a cuckold. This carol clearly springs from the same kind of thinking, as Joesph is much older than Mary, and when she asks him to pick her some cherries he retorts that she should get the person who got her pregnant to pick cherries for her. The cherry tree then spontaneously bows down – sometimes at the command of Jesus in Mary’s womb – so that she can pluck the cherries for herself, and Mary is vindicated.
It’s really hard to find the right version for this calendar (by rights there should be a Mediaeval Baebes version – this is just their style, I should think – but no such luck yet). The Willcocks has more of the sound I want, but the whitewashing of Joseph irritates me (I hasten to say that I have nothing against Joseph himself, but I do think one should preserve the meaning of the carol). And while I love folk songs, they don’t seem to quite fit, here. On the other hand… the whole point of including this carol is that it was a story and song made up and passed along by the general public, no church involved. So I’m going to just link to the churchy Willcocks version and instead share the traditional folk song version, which I do think is sung very beautifully here.
Enjoy.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lhnNmVQ0VQ&w=560&h=315]