Shepherds, roses and winter’s chill

Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s Christmas Concert ends this year with John Gardner’s rambunctious setting of Tomorrow shall be my dancing day. The anonymous text, possibly derived from a medieval mystery play, recounts episodes from Christ’s life told in the first person, almost like a riddle, characterised as a dance. It’s a finale that effectively summarises the music in the rest of the programme, a selection of individual musical takes on the seasonal focus with its promise of lighter days, freeing our imagination to roam back through centuries of Christmastime customs that were not tied to screens and shopping. While the first half is mostly liturgical, the contemporary composers featured in the second half – including John Tavener, Bob Chilcott, Ian Schofield, Philip Drew and Joanna Marsh – have drawn on modern poetry or medieval texts, presenting us with images that expand the usual festive menu. As Sarah Clegg reminds us:

“We may spend midwinter surrounded by warmth, good food, and companionship, but Christmas coincides with the darkest time of the year, and the legends we have repeated and adapted over the centuries remind us that beyond the glow of firelight, the shadows are waiting.” ¹

Few carols venture into those shadows: Christina Rosetti’s A Christmas Carol (aka ’In the bleak midwinter’) gives an inkling, In freezing winter night from Britten’s Ceremony of Carols induces shivers while Birtwistle’s Plaice setting The Gleam (2003) is definitely unsettling. But scary is not the only colour. When composers set aside biblical narratives and opt for poetry, each ‘carol’ becomes a unique musical experience, an escape from convention, a discovery for singers and audiences alike. Writing new music for Christmas seems to be a peculiarly British thing not only because of the BBC and university colleges. There is a deeper vein of tradition to hand, as varied as it is mysterious, and it is something to be celebrated. And one thing is certain about all this wonderful new music: it’s not just about good tunes with a regular beat.

In Winter’s House by Joanna Marsh has rapidly established itself in the seasonal repertoire since it first appeared in 2019. Commissioned by Tenebrae as a low-voiced companion piece to Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, an SATBarB version soon followed, likewise an arrangement for string orchestra. Britten’s influence shows in the use of bite-sized motives that are thoroughly worked and which characterise the piece, in the manner of a Schubert song: “Similarly in my piece”, said Joanna Marsh, “I have taken quite a condensed musical idea which appears straight away in the piece and gradually becomes fundamental in the structure over time”. As text, she chose a poem from The Occupant by Jane Draycott:

The poem Winter’s House sprang out at me when I read it. Jane paints with the language of fairy tales the imagery of darkness and light, sin and redemption. Her expression is very allusive and there is room for one’s imagination to take flight with the words. In fact when she talked to me about the poem I was surprised that at the time she wrote it she was feeling quite dark about society generally and the pickle the world was in. I really hadn’t picked that up from reading it. I had rather assumed that the shadows were there as a foil for contrast, to make the light brighter when it arrived. But on reflection the opening verse is slightly gloomy although this is soon dispelled with mention of feathers, gleaming, pearls and torches etc. The child and the dream of light definitely imply hope and the text overall has a dappled feel throughout; intermingling light and dark. ²

In Winter’s House presents a world of dreamlike clarity alongside our waking lives, where dead lanes keep their silence, gates are shut firm and also left open by the light of a child’s dream. Not a dance, but dance-like in that there is an implied choreography in the music glides towards the light of the final bar. ³

 

Bob Chilcott’s A Shepherd’s Carol also quickly became a favourite with choirs and audiences after its première at Carols from King’s in 2000. The theme of the service focused on the shepherds and Chilcott chose an eponymous poem by Clive Sansom who resided since 1949 in Tasmania following his marriage to the Tasmanian poet Ruth Large. Chilcott likens the words to the lyric of a Leonard Cohen song. As with the Marsh, triple and duple rhythms alternate in a fluid pattern where the Gospel shepherds from the fields around Bethlehem become metaphors for all labourers worn out by winter’s chill but inspired by renewed hope. Its composition, which took a fortnight, was shaped as much by the acoustic of King’s College as by the text: “King’s College Chapel is surely one of the biggest theatre sets in the world! It has a huge acoustic, so I thought about how I make the sounds move in that building. It should not move too fast. What also works well in that building is when the lower part of the texture has a lot of substance; it gives wings to the top of the sound. But the piece begins and ends with boys’ voices on their own; I wanted to build that into a big texture and bring it down again to show off the space we were in.’ ⁴

John Tavener’s Today the Virgin (1989) dispenses with a time signature altogether, plotting the regular syllabic quavers of Mother Thekla’s abbreviated Christmas story over a sonorous drone that evokes an early Christian sound world complete with a loud and infectiously memorable refrain.

Carols by local composers Philip Drew and Ian Schofield draw on medieval texts including There is no Rose of such virtue from the earliest extant record of carols, the Trinity Carol Roll compiled in the early 15th century. They have approached this carol in subtly different ways. Drew, like Tavener, opts for a drone that is harmonically ambiguous, reminiscent of Kodály or Britten, while Schofield wrote a wide-ranging melody in the manner of Elizabeth Poston’s Jesus Christ The Apple Tree. Both emphasise the Latin tags – Res Miranda, Pari Forma, Transeamus – that are taken from the pre-11th-century Sequence for Christmas, Laetabundus. There is, according to one commentator, verbal ambiguity to match the harmony:

the virtue of the rose/Mary in the first line is not just ‘goodness, purity’, as I had always assumed, but a particular kind of power, the special healing power of a plant. The Middle English Dictionary entry for vertu makes interesting reading in conjunction with this carol; the sense here blends several of the word’s potential meanings, ‘the quickening power of a flower or root; the life-sustaining force within a plant; the vegetative power of nature’, ‘divine power, divine might’, and ‘moral excellence, goodness’. ‘There is no rose of such power’ would really be a better translation. ⁵

None of these carols is in any way suitable for audience participation – you need the regularity of I saw three ships for that. The value in Christmas Concerts like these, happening every year throughout the nation across the whole Advent and Christmas period, is to lead the audience into a deeper contemplation of a special time of the year. For this to happen the music, especially any that is new or unfamiliar, must have integrity:  in these pieces we find it in abundance. As Bob Chilcott says: You want to do your best work, show yourself, be yourself. The piece must communicate something that’s honest.’

We can all do with honesty at this shadowy time.