Your Daily Dose of CHRISTMAS!!!

So, what is a “carol”, anyway?

In our time, the only “carols” we think about in the musical sense are Christmas carols, which seem to be a subset of “Christmas songs” in general: the carols are the traditional ones that we might have heard in Victorian England. We picture small groups of people in tall hats and heavy clothing standing outside gaslit buildings and singing old Christmas tunes: “Good King Wenceslas”, “Silent Night”, and so on. We wouldn’t envision carolers singing, say, “All I Want For Christmas”. But the fact that we have Christmas carols seems to offer two possibilities: carols are only Christmas-related, or our use of the carol form has withered to the point where the only carols that survive are the Christmas ones.

The latter seems to be the truth of the matter.

From A History of Western Music, Grout and Palisca:

Another form of English composition that flourished in the fifteenth century was the carol. Like the rondeau and the ballata, it was originally a monophonic dance song with alternating solo and choral portions. By the fifteenth century if had become stylized as a setting, in two or three (sometimes four) parts, of a religious poem in popular style, often on a subject of the Incarnation, and sometimes written in a mixture of English and Latin rhyming verses. In form the carol consisted of a number of stanzas all sung to the same music, and a burden or refrain with its own musical phrase, which was sung at the beginning and then repeated after every stanza. The carols were not folksongs, but their fresh, angular melodies and lively triple rhythms give them a distinctly popular character and unmistakably English quality.

That’s interesting…but it’s incomplete. The “carol” didn’t arrive, fully-formed, in the 1400s; like all music forms, the carol emerged over centuries of development of previous forms. In the case of Christmas carols specifically, the tradition of singing special seasonal hymns goes back almost to the very beginning of the church itself, and eventually the carol proved to be a particularly useful form for this tradition that had previously also drawn inspiration from pagan winter rituals. The tradition of carol-singing in England faded from view for several centuries, starting with Oliver Cromwell’s banning of the practice because I suppose it wasn’t a pious-enough thing for him to approve. Carol singing did not resurge in England until the Victorian era in the 1800s, at which time old tunes were paired with new lyrics. The words we have now for “Good King Wenceslas” date from the 1800s, but the tune is at least half-a-millennium older than that.

I have to note that as much as I love Christmas and its music, I wish it wasn’t the only time of year that was this overtly musical…but if you find yourself singing Christmas carols at some point, take a second to reflect on the fact that you are participating in musical traditions that date back nearly two thousand years.

And now, courtesy English composer Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols. 

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