“Who cares about a traffic jam
While herald angels sing?
Each year the moment does arrive
In spite of everything.”
This is the final stanza of Wendy Cope’s Motorway Music. As far as I know, no composer has set this to music, but as the bleak mid-winter approaches perhaps there is one at this very moment seeking inspiration for next year’s commission in Allie Esiri’s 2024 anthology A poem for every day of Christmas that contains two poems by Cope alongside traditional carols (The Holly and the Ivy, I Saw Three Ships, etc.) and verses from the Victorian era when Christmas, as we know it, was invented. The anthology is likely to be a best-seller, re-telling the Christmas story In familiar and unfamiliar ways. For we all love sticky growth!
When you reach your eighth decade as a singer, you can reckon on having sung most Christmas carols more than enough times. As the Christmas season returns, remarkably similar in sights and sounds to all that have gone before, I am ready to embrace any novelty. Fortunately for singers and their audiences, composers continue to be inspired by the Christmas story. Annual carol competitions and choir commissions ensure a steady stream of new music of high quality within the capabilities of most choirs and Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s Music for Advent and Christmas at Havant features a fair few. This posting takes a close look at carols we’re performing by three in particular: Sir Philip Ledger (1937-2012), Ian Schofield and John Merrick, both born in 1949.
Carol anthologies usually start with A: A is for Adam and Adam lay ybounden, the medieval story of Adam’s 4000 winters in limbo for the sake of a stolen apple (a story that must be true, as clerks wrote it down) and the prospect of escape from limbo through Christ’s intervention, has inspired many composers writing since 1900 – there are no known earlier settings. The best-known is by Boris Ord, largely on account of its regular inclusion in the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College where Ord was organist for nearly thirty years. Other interpretations, surprisingly diverse, have been made by Peter Warlock, John Ireland, Benjamin Britten (‘Deo Gratias’ from Ceremony of Carols) and Giles Swayne. Last year the Choir sang Howard Skempton’s Lennon and McCartney-esque setting (no. 1 in Carols for Choirs 5) and this year we are singing Philip Ledger’s (no. 1 in Advent for Choirs), which, like Ord’s, was written for King’s College while he was Director of Music there from 1974-1982. Typical for its time, solo calls in the manner of a folk song tell the story and are followed by fanfare-like responses (‘Deo gracias!’). The melody and harmony remain bound in the Dorian mode on E (for epoch or era?) until ‘unbound’ into E major in the final line.
Pride of place in our programme goes to four carols by the Choir’s President, Ian Schofield, one of which, There is no rose will be a first performance in its revised setting for SATB.The composer writes:
“It’s one of a collection of four carols with the overall title Of A Rose written during the first of the Covid lockdowns for the choir of Sherborne Girls’ School. There is no Rose was written first, though it comes second in the collection. Portsmouth Choral Union is doing them all the week after the Baroque Choir concert. The four weren’t written particularly to be performed as a sequence, they’re each slightly different stylistically, though they do seem to work well together”.
It is beautifully written and challenging for the voice, the melody extending up through an eleventh in the key of E major that is usually associated with joy and brilliance. There is no rose, like Adam lay ybounden, is an anonymous 15th-century carol, comparing the Mother of Christ to a rose. Ian evolves the rose image musically, each verse adding another voice like a layer of petals – three for “God in persons three, four for when the angel joins in for a brief modulation to G major, returning to E major, with an harmonic twist reminiscent of Copland, at the word ‘Gaudeamus’. A short coda beginning on the first inversion of the subdominant cleverly suggest that there is no real end to this carol: “Transeamus” – we travel on.
Our programme will conclude joyfully with Ian’s Benedicamus Domino, a sequence of three carols for mixed voices and organ written in 1997 for Portsmouth Choral Union. The first carol is ‘Novo profuse gaudio’ (News of great joy), Ian’s setting pre-dating the well-known setting by Matthew Martin by more than ten years. The carol draws upon medieval texts in English, Latin and French and Ian’s vigorous setting in irregular meter captures the excitement of the Nativity. The second carol, ’That yongë Child’, is an a cappella lullaby built over a pedal E in the bass line. It’s a rare setting of exquisite delicacy. I can only find two others: by Francis Pott and by Britten in A Ceremony of Carols. The set ends with ‘Verbum Caro factum est’, perhaps a nod, in terms of vocal agility, to Walton’s 1970 setting found in Carols for Choirs 2, although Schofield is more convincing, in my view, about why “all this time this song is best”. It is also a better sing than the Walton and a brilliant way to close a Christmas concert, provided everyone avoids singing in that crafty rest before the last note!
Ledger and Schofield opted to stick with the tradition of setting overtly religious texts. Merrick chose to follow a different trend, turning to poetry with only a loose connection to scripture. Precedents include Britten’s fourth Canticle (1971) that sets T S Eliot’s Journey of the Magi and John Woolrich’s Spring in Winter that sets Christopher Smart’s Hymn 32. Merrick chose Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bee Carol (2011), in which the hibernation of bees, represented by the recurrent line “winter cluster of the bees”, is associated in turn with wonder on Christmas Eve, the veneration of essential motherhood, gifting and charity, and belief witnessed by “trembling stars”. Merrick’s gentle and intimate setting clarifies the text, building from frozen isolation to the universal gift of honey. I think it must have won the BBC’s 2018 Christmas Carol competition by some margin so I find it odd that the only recording of this exquisite carol, other than the BBC Singers’ original, is to be found sixteen minutes into a YouTube capture of Carols from King’s in 2023, when, for me, it stole the show. I’m delighted that Malcolm chose it for our Christmas concert in Havant.
Transeamus. Each year as November turns to December, in spite of everything, we conjure up those herald angels from their realms of glory and deck the halls with stuff kept for most of the year in the attic (perhaps adding a bauble or two), while choirs diligently rehearse the finer details of music in their Christmas concert folders: folders that are like anthologies of Old Faithfuls and New Hopefuls, some abiding with shepherds and wise men, others celebrating the seasonal cheer and biodiversity that surrounds us and keeps us going for another year. Those folders may in future contain carols about last-minute shopping, Christmas specials and M25 traffic queues. For now, Gaudeamus – the layering of medieval imagery on top of that homely, Victorian design provides ample scope.