Special memories of singing carols 50 years ago...
The little church choir in which I sang more than half a century ago had an unbreakable engagement every Christmas Eve: we would walk round the local cottage hospital singing carols. Some patients were clearly very ill, so the rules for us kids were ‘nothing louder than mezzo-piano, don’t stare and keep moving’. If patients did want to talk, our genial vicar walked just behind us – ‘fielding compliments, complaints, concerns and any choccies on offer’, as he put it.
But there was one moment when we did stand still and sing strongly. The hospital had a long corridor connecting its two wings, and its echo was astonishing. Our harmonies, which sounded so weedy as we moved through the wards, suddenly acquired extraordinary richness. And by some acoustical alchemy the result carried to the far corners of the hospital.
‘It sounds like a swimming pool,’ I exclaimed when I first encountered this magic corridor. ‘It sounds like King’s,’ an old bass retorted. I was completely baffled. Did monarchs have some sort of built-in echo when they sang four-part harmonies?
Angels from the Realms of Glory... a forgotten carol
In this corridor we always performed the same carol: Angels from the Realms of Glory. Why? Because its refrain, with the single word ‘gloria’ extended in a series of lush harmonic sequences, sounded absolutely fantastic in that acoustic. Years later I learnt that the carol’s author – a radical 19th-century Scot called James Montgomery – never intended ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ to be the refrain. He had written ‘Come and worship’. Later editors clearly decided this phrase was far too lowbrow and substituted the Latin instead. But as an awestruck nine year-old it was the sound of the carol echoing down the corridor that fascinated me, not the words.
These days you don’t hear Angels from the Realms so much. People prefer its zippier half-sister – Ding Dong! Merrily on high – which has an even longer melismatic ‘gloria’ but lacks Montgomery’s bleak assurance to sinners ‘doomed for guilt to endless pains’ that, if we behave ourselves, we might just escape hellfire. I guess warnings about hellfire are a little unfashionable nowadays too.
A narrowing choral repertoire
The sad thing is that Angels from the Realms isn’t the only carol in danger of disappearing. One problem is that thousands of schools have turned their back on fine old carols, opting instead for seasonal pop songs or trite modern ditties. But even in churches with serious choral traditions there has been, I think, a narrowing of the carol repertoire over my lifetime.
Case in point? The Christmas morning services in my youth invariably opened with a rousing hymn called Christians, awake, salute the happy morn. It relates the entire nativity saga in verses that unroll like majestic carpets of 18th-century rhetoric. I love the story of how it was created – as a poem titled ‘Christmas Day for Dolly’, written by a Manchester poet, John Byrom, as a gift for his teenage daughter Dorothy. It was then set to music by a local organist, John Wainwright, who was apparently so pleased with his tune that on Christmas Eve 1750 he brought his entire choir round to Byrom’s house to sing it to him.
Preserving our mysterious and beautiful carols
Yet today, I imagine, there is barely one church in 50 where Christians, awake is still sung. One cleric I questioned about this declared that the ‘language was too complex’ for congregations today. But isn’t one fascination of ancient carols their sometimes mystifying language and metaphors? How, for example, did three ships sail into Bethlehem, a landlocked city on top of a hill? What are we to make of the bizarre horticultural miracles in The Cherry Tree Carol, an ancient fable so dark and enigmatic that the editors of the New Oxford Book of Carols detect a ‘Jungian shadow’ in its verses. And on the subject of trees, why do so many medieval carols use the metaphor of the holly bush to mirror Christ’s birth, life and death? Were they borrowing ideas from pagan tree worship rituals many centuries older than Christianity itself?
These mysterious and beautiful carols should be pondered anew by each generation. Preserving them is as vital as preserving ancient buildings or paintings – and a lot cheaper. All we have to do is be a little more adventurous about what we sing every Christmas. O Little Town of Bethlehem won’t wither away if you give it a miss this year. But other wonderful carols are already slipping from obscurity to oblivion, and Christmas becomes that little bit blander with each disappearance.
