British composers and the new craze for Christmas carols
The idea of a new-minted Christmas carol seems like a contradiction in terms. Surely the essence of Christmas carols is that they’re comfortingly old. Some emerged in medieval times, when friars danced in church and the Christian message was entwined with ancient pagan rites celebrating the turning of the year – or the simple joys of eating and drinking, as in the numerous variants of the Boar’s Head carol.
Some of these have survived, albeit in a bowdlerised version so the original rumbustiousness barely peeps through, such as The Holly and the Ivy. But most of the stalwarts that make up the typical carol service date from the later 19th century, when the cheerful anarchy of the church bands celebrated in Thomas Hardy’s novels had been cleaned up, an organ installed in every church, and a dignified respectability had descended on the scene. It is this period that gave us Once in Royal David’s City, See Amid the Winter’s Snow and all those other favourites. So is the Victorian high-watermark of the carol also its end? Do modern times have nothing to offer in the way of Christmas music except cringeworthy pop songs from Bing Crosby’s White Christmas to Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody? Not a bit of it. The rich tradition of the carol, with its intertwining of boisterous round dance and gently awestruck piety at the miracle of Christ’s birth, has kept its fascination for English composers.
The earlier 20th century produced some gems, such as Herbert Howells’s A Spotless Rose, and several more appeared in the Twenties, thanks partly to this newspaper, which ran a Christmas carol competition. Peter Warlock, composer of the much-loved Capriol Suite, was down on his uppers in 1927, and entered the competition in the hope of raising funds for “an immortal carouse”, ie, a pub crawl. His wish was granted, and his winning carol Bethlehem Down was published in The Telegraph on Christmas Eve. The peak of the tradition in the 20th century has to be Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, composed in the e depths of war in 1942. After the war, the rich stream of carols abated somewhat, though there are some fine carols from the Fifties and Sixties such as Anthony Milner’s Out of Your Sleep Arise and William Mathias’s Sir Christèmas. The real surprise, though, has been the upsurge of carol writing in the past 30 years. This is partly due to the efforts of some far-sighted choirmasters who’ve actually commissioned new carols, such as Andrew Nethsingha at St John’s College Choir Cambridge, and the late and much missed Stephen Cleobury of King’s College Choir. Cleobury commissioned a new carol for the famous Nine Lessons and Carols every year from 1983 onwards, and persuaded some unlikely people to contribute, including the young Thomas Adès. The plaintive, haunted sideslipping harmonies of Adès’s Fayrfax Carol is absolutely typical of him, proving that composers don’t have to repress their natural musicality to write something appropriately festive or (in this case) rapt and mystical.
Even more striking is Judith Weir’s Illuminare Jerusalem, also commissioned by King’s College Choir. She sets a medieval Scottish poem exhorting Jerusalem to be “illuminated” by the wondrous events happening within its walls, in a way that captures the magic of the scene while obeying the ancient verse form. Unbelief is no barrier – as that doughty atheist and religionhater Peter Maxwell Davies proved, when he composed his beautifully simple and austere Five Carols for threepart women’s or boy’s chorus. My favourite among this astonishing outpouring of new carols is the one Michael Finnissy composed for St John’s College Choir in 2014. Entitled John the Baptist, it tells the story of Christ’s baptism in a pungent and vivid idiom. The wild, swirling organ interludes are directly lifted from Moroccan Berber recordings, while the rumbustious choral sections evoke the songs of 16th-century Spanish pilgrims.
This terrific piece, and others like it, show that the carol tradition is like the Green Man of folk legend: when it seems to have died, you can be sure it’s about to spring back, more vigorous than ever.