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Sinden.org maintains two carol service spreadsheets, one for the famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Christmas at King's College, Cambridge, and one for the slightly less famous Advent Carol Service at St. John's College, Cambridge.

The spreadsheet the St. John's Advent Carol Service has just been updated with the music and lessons for this year's service.

After a couple years with rather radical changes, it was nice to see the service settle back to a more familiar rhythm. In the last two years, the first and final hymns have been changed from their usual pattern ("O come, O come, Emmanuel" and "Lo! he comes with clouds descending").

The traditional four pairs of lessons (Hebrew Bible and New Testament in each section) were mostly changed in 2023, but were restored the following year and remain in place for this year's service.

Many of us will be familiar with "Zion, at thy shining gates" arranged by George Guest, as found in the Oxford Advent for Choirs book. It has not previously been sung at this service, but this year, it makes an appearance before the first lesson.

Also new to this service this year: "I waited for the Lord" by Felix Mendelssohn, and A hymn of St. Columba by Edward Picton-Turbervill (a former organ scholar at St. John's). The commissioned carol, sung at the end of the service, is Nolo mortem peccatoris by Errollyn Wallen.

Two pieces that have made a long-expected (see what I did there?) return to this service are Benjamin Britten's A hymn to the Virgin (last sung in 2004) and the Magnificat from the Herbert Howells "St. John's" Service (last sung in 2006).

Now, the only question is how to actually listen to the service. Listeners outside the UK will be very unhappy with this link from the BBC.

Labels: Advent, Britten, Guest, Howells, Picton-Turbervill, Wallen

A happy, quiet alternative to the boisterous William Mathias treatment is Gustav Holst’s "A babe is born."

It is especially good, I think, to draw attention to this carol in the waning days of Holst's 150th anniversary year.

From a set of Four Old English Carols (1907), this one, scored for SATB with piano accompaniment, can also be rendered very effectively on harp. Heard this way, it brings to mind Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, written in 1942. One wonders whether Britten considered this old text for that famous suite with harp.

If you're in need of another treatment of "A babe is born", this text also appears elsewhere.

Labels: 12 Carols for Christmas, Britten, Christmas, Holst, Mathias

Until last month most people had never heard of Belleville, Ill, the home of the man who aimed a rifle at Republican members of Congress on a baseball field on Wednesday, June 14.

Belleville is a little town east of St. Louis. They have an Episcopal church there, St. George's.

And while I've never been to Belleville, I have been to Toddhall Retreat Center, which is run as a ministry of St. George's.

Toddhall is the location of the Royal School of Church Music (RSCM) St. Louis Course, which I attended last year.

This is a very tenuous association with political violence. My spouse, on the other hand, had a frightening experience in Washington, DC last year: she was under lockdown in Politics and Prose Bookstore as "pizzagate" came to its ignominious and dangerous end.

Last year, in what seemed to be a particularly violent summer, I wrote a bit about church music in a violent world. And since learning the shooter was from Belleville, my thoughts naturally turned to the music that I will make near there this week, and what liturgy and music generally have to say in this era of continual mass shootings and seemingly incessant police shootings of black people.

I'm on my way toward Belleville again this morning. At the 2017 RSCM St. Louis Course, which begins today, we will be singing Rejoice in the Lamb by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976).

In the midst of the 18-minute cantata, these words of Christopher Smart (1722-1771) are sung by the full choir:

For I am under the same accusation
With my Savior,
For they said,
He is besides himself.
For the officers of the peace
Are at variance with me,
And the watchman smites me
With his staff.
For the silly fellow, silly fellow,
Is against me,
And belongeth neither to me
Nor to my family.

Being struck by the night watchman was serious. His job was to keep order, and his weapon was a staff.

The blow was often powerful enough to kill, and it is in this way that composer Michael Wise (1648-1687) met his end.

"He is besides himself."

Who in their right mind opens fire at a baseball game, we might ask? Or fires a shot in a pizza parlor?

But then there are the "officers of the peace" who are at variance with the crazies.

NBC News: Darren Wilson Described Michael Brown as ‘Crazy,’ Intent on Killing Him (25 November 2014)

Woe betide anyone who is at variance with the officers of the peace these days. Many of them smite first and ask questions later. They work under a system that has not found them culpable – not once.

Today is the Feast of William White (1748–1836), the Bishop of Pennsylvania who served as the first and fourth presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. The Collect of the Day begins "O Lord, in a time of turmoil and confusion..."

How much has changed since the times of Smart, Bishop White, and Britten. And yet we find ourselves in another time of turmoil and confusion.

Thank God for the blessing of words, music, and liturgy like this in a place like this.

And for the opportunity to come together to sing "with the spirit, and with the understanding also."

Labels: Britten, Michael Wise, RSCM, violence, William White

The tune: sawtooth. Up and down and back up again. And then down again. And then up.

We're talking here of that wonderful hymn tune LONDON NEW. Have a listen if you don't know it:

The first appearance of this tune was in John Playord's Psalms & Hymns in Solemn Musick of Foure Parts (London, 1671).

The Hymnal 1982 Companion informs us that the "English form of the tune has remained enormously popular since Playford's time". It first appeared on American shores in 1721 and was reprinted in 52 different sources before 1811. The tune was even more popular in England.

In the Hymnal 1982, you can find it at Hymn 50, to the words "This is the day the Lord has made". But it is perhaps best known as the tune for the hymn "God moves in a mysterious way," the words of William Cowper, found at Hymn 677.

The word of "God moves" first appeared in the American Episcopal Church in the 1826 Hymnal, but they were not paired with the tune LONDON NEW until the publication of Hymns Ancient and Modern.

It was this pairing that Benjamin Britten firmly fixed with the composition of his cantata St. Nicolas in 1948. The cantata concludes with the hymn sung by all, including the audience.

Imogen Holst said of the premiere of St. Nicolas “the crowning glory of the work came at the end, when the listeners were drawn into the singing of 'God Moves In a Mysterious Way,' and the frozen hearts in the audience-congregation became unfrozen.”

Perhaps the tune does have a gentle warming effect. It's regular rise and fall like the pumping of a bellows on a warm fireplace in winter.

It is not the only tune to have this contour. See also YORK (Hymn 462).

Labels: Britten, Hymn 462, Hymn 50, Hymn 677, London New, York

Christmastide has just come to end. And what better time to complete our look at the Christmas hymns in The Hymnal 1982? In particular, we will be looking at the less commonly sung hymns in the Christmas section. You may wish to start back at the beginning with part 1 of this series. There is also part 2 (hymns that score a 9 or a 10), part 3 (hymns that score a 6, 7, or 8), part 4 (hymns that score a 4 or a 5), or part 5 (hymns that score a 2 or a 3).

We're using a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the least popular and 10 being the most popular. Here, in this last installment, we discuss those hymns that are truly the most uncommon in American Episcopal services: hymns that score only a 1 on the popularity scale.

Area 1: The most uncommon

I truly have never sung these, and I do not yet know of any parishes that have sung them.

• Hymn 77: "From east to west, from shore to shore". This hymn represents a gradual modification, both in words and tune, of the plainchant hymn "A solis ortus cardine". This is its first appearance in an Episcopal hymnal.
• Hymn 97: "Dost thou in a manger lie". A fifteenth century hymn matched with a fifteenth century tune. The second stanza is written from the point of view of Christ. The editors of The Hymnal 1940 recommended that this stanza be sung by a baritone soloist. This seems a bit suspect given that the infant Christ would presumably not have his voice change until puberty. This hymn was first included in the 1916 Episcopal hymnal.
• Hymn 103: "A child is born in Bethlehem". The oldest hymn to be awarded the lowest score for popularity, this text comes from the thirteenth century. It is probably best known in the a capella choral setting by Benjamin Britten ("A boy is born"), and not in this hymn setting.
• Hymn 108: "Now yield we thanks and praise". This hymn, by Howard Chandler Robbins, probably could be a little bit better known than it is. Robbins was a great hymn writer, his words naturally imbued with a sense of dignity and purpose, usually seem to me as if they should have already been written. They fill some gap which the church didn't realize had existed. There is a distinctive agelessness to his work, which includes the translation "Most High, omnipotent, good Lord" (Hymns 406/7), the somewhat paleo-futuristic composition "And have the bright immensities" (Hymn 459), and "Put forth, O God, thy Spirit's might" (Hymn 521, to which he also wrote the tune CHELSEA SQUARE). The chorale tune to which it is set, WAS FRAG' ICH NACH DER WELT, suits the words perfectly.
• Hymn 113: "Duérmete, Niño lindo"/"Oh, sleep now, holy baby" is the only fully bilingual hymn in The Hymnal 1982. It could very well be sung in congregations that draw more heavily on a Spanish-language repertory, but that may not necessarily be the case. Syllabification and visual underlay issues present problems (at least to my eye) for congregations who might attempt this hymn in English.

Conclusions

As is true of any slice of hymnody the full history of all these hymns is very rich. I'm more interested here in a reception history, which is a difficult thing to know without more data. I can only really speak to my personal experience with and impressions I have gained about this repertoire working as an Episcopal church musician for about a decade or so.

As someone who grew up outside of the Episcopal Church, I have surely missed some classic usages of these hymns. I am grateful for parishioners at a parish I served previously who alerted me to their fondness for "The snow lay on the ground". And since beginning this serial, I have learned more about historic usages of "Christians, awake, salute the happy morn", and "Sing, O sing, that blessed morn" on Christmas Day in various places. I still believe that these latter two hymns are falling out of favor -- and part of this may be the declining attendance at Christmas Day liturgies in many parishes.

There is a certain cultural weight with many of these hymns, some of them dating back for several centuries or more. Their inclusion in The Hymnal 1982 speaks to their worth, whether they are currently in rotation in a particular parish or not.

As with any portion of any hymnal, there are some hymns in this section that are not destined for a long life. And if certain of these hymns remain very uncommon in our liturgies for a long time it would be expected that they drop out of the next Episcopal hymnal -- if there even is such a thing, but that is another conversation for another time.

But we must be grateful to the '82 Hymnal committee for taking risks alongside those hymns that "must" be included. Our sacred musical life is much enriched, in my opinion, by the inclusion of "A stable lamp is lighted."

We must also thank them for including what we should know but have forgotten, like the simple joys of singing "Christians, awake, salute the happy morn" on Christmas Day, which I will seriously consider for the next 11 months as I work to plan music for Christmas 2014.

There are two interesting shifts that occurred in moving the Episcopal Christmas hymnody from The Hymnal 1940 to The Hymnal 1982:

Firstly, I wonder what psychological impact the "First Tune" and "Second Tune" distinction has in terms of a Christmas hymn's reception history. With the previous hymnal hymn singers could say regarding "It came upon the midnight clear", "Oh yes, I do like to sing Hymn 19. We use the Second Tune in my parish." In the present hymnal there is a dividing line between the two tunes. Today's Episcopalian might say, "Hymn 89 is a favorite of mine," and have no idea that the subsequent hymn in the book is very intimately related, and in fact, might be a pleasing alternative!

Secondly, it seems that the distinction between "Christmas" and "Christmas Carols" made in The Hymnal 1940 is of interest. In this study, I have referred to everything in the Christmas portion of the 1982 hymnal as a "hymn", but we could still make the same distinction that the 1940 makes. This may be of some limited value, but it may also be irrelevant. Still, there are certain portions of the liturgy that clearly call for a "hymn", and others where "carols" would be more welcome.

Finally, it is very interesting to note, from a somewhat longer view provided by this study, the increasing calcification surrounding our Christmas hymnody.

This trend is not surprising given three factors: a precipitous decline in music education, the loss of recreational singing in our culture, and steadily declining numbers in the Episcopal church, both adherents and more so at the Average Sunday Morning. As musical knowledge and ability decreases in our culture, so does the ability to differentiate specific repertories: the shopping mall, the Christian denomination, the local parish church. Where "While shepherds watched their flocks by night" used to be sung to any number of tunes, circumstances have conspired to limit it to one (rather bland) tune.

Tradition speaks out with much greater force at the Church's principal feast days, and Christmas is no exception. The tradition of our Christmas hymnody, however, has been much more fluid than I think many people realize. With the advent of recorded music and a force-fed "secular soundtrack" to a "Christmas season" which begins the week after Halloween and terminates some time around 11:30 a.m. on Christmas Day, it is harder to create the kind of sonic and theological space that our Christmas hymnody used to enjoy.

Anyways, I'd love to chat more about this. Please do weigh in if you have thoughts. I'm going to think a lot more about these uncommon hymns, and this proposed ranking of hymn popularity as a whole. It probably all deserves a second look, sometime around Christmas 2023, perhaps.

Labels: Britten, Christmas, Howard Chandler Robbins, Hymnal 1940, Hymnal 1982, hymns, less familiar hymns

It is time, as it so often is this time of year, to "prepare ourselves to hear again" the annual Preview of the service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge.

This service is, surely, the most famous regular church service in the world. It is heard live on the radio by a global audience numbering some 30 million. And nowadays it's heard by even more people in the days afterward through streaming audio from the BBC.

Keep in mind that we also made some very vague predictions for this service. First, let's check in on how we did.

• The first carol will be "Once in Royal David's city" - It is!

  Points: +1

• Rutter's "What sweeter music" seems a bit overdue - It still is! It is not a part of this year's service. We thought it might be heard as the Invitatory Carol after the Bidding Prayer, but no dice. That honor goes to a Malcolm Williamson (1931-2003) arrangement of "Ding! dong! merrily on high". This is the first time it will be sung at the service.

  -1 Point. Score: 0

  This is not one that we are familiar with. A bit of digging shows that it's a little "notey", but not in an altogether unpleasant way. It's certainly more reserved than that blasted Wilberg thing, about which we have very mixed feelings.

• We haven't heard the Warlock "Adam lay" in a while - and we still haven't. It was last performed in 2006. We missed our guess on this too.

  -1 Point. Score: -1

  There is no "Adam lay" carol at this year's service; a version by Brown was sung last year. Instead we get that happy "apple" alternative by Elizabeth Poston (1905-1987), last sung in 2009, and the premiere of the Thea Musgrave (b. 1928) carol commissioned for this year's service. If we had read that text a little more closely we could have predicted this too. Bad form on our part.

  -1 Point. Score: -2

• The second carol after the Third Lesson will be "God rest ye merry, gentlemen" - Nope. It's "Unto us a Son is born". Phooey.

  -1 Point. Score: -3

• A work by John Tavener will be heard either after the fourth or fifth lessons. We believe it will be either "A Hymn to the Mother", last heard in 1997 or "The Lamb". Actually, it will probably be "The Lamb", which was commissioned for the service in 1982. In that case it would be after the Fourth Lesson. - And it is indeed "The Lamb" after the Fourth Lesson. Well done, us.

  +2 Points. Score: -1

  However, a slight correction: this carol was not commissioned for this service. We got that wrong.

  Tavener said:

  I wrote The Lamb in 1982 while being driven by my mother from South Devon to London. It came to me fully grown so to speak, so all I had to do was to write it down. It was inspired by Blake and by my three-year-old nephew, Simon.

  (source)

• Cleobury will put down his own "Joys Seven" after the Fifth Lesson - unless he surprises us with a new carol of his, that is. - Well, I think we have two surprises. Two new (to us, anyway) Cleobury carols.

  +2 Points. Score: 1

  The first is "Love came down at Christmas", a Cleobury setting of the Rosetti poem and existing tune by R. O. Morris. (First page of this carol [PDF]). This is in fact a new new carol, having been written for last year's "Carols from King's", a made-for-TV version of the Christmas Eve service with largely different music.

  The second Cleobury carol arrangement is "Angelus ad virginem", which is heard immediately after the Fifth Lesson. It occupies the same position in the service held in 2006 by the original medieval version of this carol. And, hey! It's after the Fifth Lesson, just like we predicted!

  +1 Point. Score: 2

• "While shepherds watched their flocks by night" will be the second carol sung after the Seventh Lesson. - Huzzah!

  +1 Point. Score: 3

• And might we hear some Britten? We haven't. And this certainly seems like a good year for it. - It is a very good year indeed.

  Look, there's a Britten carol after the "The Lamb". It's "Here we bring new water", a simple ditty from his collection Friday Afternoons for trebles alone.

  +1 Point. Score: 4

  Oh, wait, there's another one! After the very next Lesson we get his famous A Hymn to the Virgin. I wonder if they'll utilize a different space in the chapel for the second choir?

  +2 Points. Score: 6

  Holy cow! There's a third Britten carol! It's "A boy was born", the opening section of the larger a capella work A Boy was Born, one of the earliest pieces to really put Britten on the map.

  +3 Points. Score: 9, as in Nine Lessons and Carols.

  See? Who needs Nate Silver when you have our totally intuitive ability to predict this stuff and a completely unbiased and scientific scoring system? It was a little rough there for a while, but in the end we come up smelling like a rose. Smell a rose, indeed!

There are quite a few things our predictions didn't touch on.

There's the "Joy the the world" after the Second Lesson which the choir will sing straight out of The New Oxford Book of Carols.

The wonderful Judith Weir (b. 1954) carol Illuminare, Jerusalem which is a true favorite of ours. Commissioned for this service in 1985, it's a piece that uses the choir very well and exploits the effect of the organ in that acoustic in the most remarkable way.

The David Willcocks (b. 1919) arrangement of "Away in a manger" is a literal repeat from last year's service. Same carol in the same spot. While Willcocks is, we think, always represented by at least a descant, the choir do not always sing one of his carols. This year, however, will be the third consecutive year that the choir have sung a Willcocks carol arrangement.

The hauntingly beautiful Bob Chilcott (b. 1955) "The Shepherd's Carol" is becoming more regular at this service. It has been sung three times since it's composition. It was originally written for the "Carols from King's" broadcast in 2000. It was sung at this service the very next year, and again in 2011.

Richard Rodney Bennet's (1936-2012) Susani is sung after the Eighth Lesson. This is fitting honor for a composer who died on Christmas Eve last year.

Finally, the sails are raised for Simon Preston's (b. 1938) "I saw three ships" in the year of the composer's 75^th birthday.

Labels: Bennett, Britten, Christmas, Cleobury, King's College (Cambridge), liturgy, Musgrave, Poston, Tavener, Williamson

There is surely no blog on the internet that geeks out as much about the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King's College, Cambridge as this one.

Last year, we even reported that the King's website's claim that the service booklet would be available in the beginning of December was a little bit hasty. It wasn't available until slightly later.

This year, King's only goes so far as to say that the service booklet will be available "in December".

Thankfully, this once again gives Sinden.org the opportunity to make semi-educated guesses about what long-time music director Stephen Cleobury has put down for this year's service.

Open Source Liturgy Information: By the way, you may view a spreadsheet of music at previous years' services that we at Sinden.org have maintained. And see below about how you can earn your VERY OWN HOMEMADE FRUITCAKE.

• The first carol will be "Once in Royal David's city" - this will not surprise anyone.
• Rutter's "What sweeter music" seems a bit overdue - We bet we'll hear it as the Invitatory Carol after the Bidding Prayer.
• We haven't heard the Warlock "Adam lay" in a while - but maybe that's just us.
• The second carol after the Third Lesson will be "God rest ye merry, gentlemen"
• A work by John Tavener will be heard either after the fourth or fifth lessons. We believe it will be either "A Hymn to the Mother", last heard in 1997 or "The Lamb". Actually, it will probably be "The Lamb", which was commissioned for the service in 1982. In that case it would be after the Fourth Lesson.
• Cleobury will put down his own "Joys Seven" after the Fifth Lesson - unless he surprises us with a new carol of his, that is.
• "While shepherds watched their flocks by night" will be the second carol sung after the Seventh Lesson.
• And might we hear some Britten? We haven't. And this certainly seems like a good year for it.

There's so much music to think about.

We haven't even mentioned the commissioned carol by Thea Musgrave. We're not sure where that will go. Probably later in the service.

In some ways the service is more unpredictable than it has been in years past. This is, in our judgement, a good thing.

Also, let it be stated that if you can email service information from earlier than 1997 we will gladly bake and send you a fruitcake ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.

Labels: Britten, Christmas, Cleobury, John Rutter, King's College (Cambridge), Musgrave, Tavener, Warlock

GROSS: Wes Anderson, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Now, I've read that the first germ of the idea for "Moonrise Kingdom" was in the recording of Benjamin Britten's "Noye's Fludde," which translates to "Noah's Flood." What's the connection between this music and the concept of "Moonrise Kingdom"?

WES ANDERSON: Well, I don't know Benjamin Britten's work that well, but I have always had a particular affection for it, because this play, "Noye's Fludde," or however you say it, he wrote to be performed by mostly amateur church groups, with a couple of professionals thrown into the mix. And it's meant to be performed in churches, rather than auditoriums or opera houses or anything else. So anyway, I was in a production of it, along with my older brother, when I was 10 or 11 years old.

So many of the - I've been sort of humming these, you know, these hymns and things from that play/opera all my life, and I had a thought that I wanted to incorporate somehow into this, which I didn't know how I was going to do for quite a long time. But somewhere early on I sort of thought the movie should be set to Britten, and we use not only the "Noah's Flood" pieces, but also we kind of tapped into his - into the whole body of work.

Wes Anderson, Creating A Singular 'Kingdom', NPR's Fresh Air

Update 6 June 2012 11:45 a.m. via Twitter:

@sinden And those scenes, plus many others, were filmed at Trinity Church, Newport! Wes and the whole crew were fantastic to work with.

— Anne Marie (@girlierev) June 6, 2012

@sinden Yep! Filmed for 2 weeks in June 2011. Built the ark around our center aisle pulpit. Additional scenes in parish house basement. Fun!

— Anne Marie (@girlierev) June 6, 2012

Labels: Britten, film, Wes Anderson

Editor's note: Someone accidentally put this article in the refrigerator, and we forgot about all about it. But that's the beauty of the refrigerator (and lots of preservatives), you can let stuff sit, and it doesn't really go bad. These events happened three months ago, but they're still fit for your "consumption". They're just not so fresh any more: Earlier this evening I heard Britten's Double Concerto as part of the San Francisco Symphony's weekly radio broadcast.

San Francisco: This is the second thing of interest I have received from San Francisco this week. The first was a set of vocal scores that were first mistakenly sent to Grace Cathedral. But, no, they weren't by Britten.

I really enjoyed listening to the work but I was also surprised by it. I didn't remember hearing anything about it during my graduate-level course on Britten, and I couldn't find any mention of the piece in Michael Kennedy's Britten biography.

It seems that Colin Matthews completed the work from Britten's rather complete sketches some time before 1997. This is an early work from the composer, and I think it is certainly worth hearing.

Matthews's program note explains more.

Labels: Britten