Dan Snow's History Hit - Christmas Carols: A Musical History

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

Traditionally sung at Christmas itself or during the surrounding Christmas holiday season, it is thought that carols existed to keep up people’s spirits, along with dances, plays and feasts since before the fourteenth century. Whether religious or not, the singing of Christmas carols is a tradition enjoyed by many every year, but do we know why?Author of ‘Christmas Carols: From Village Green to Church Choir,’ composer and choirmaster Andrew Gant joins Dan for this carol-filled episode of the podcast. Andrew and Dan discuss why we sing Christmas carols and how they came to hold the magic enjoyed by so many. Accompany Dan and Andrew in the festive spirit as delve into the history of one of our best-loved musical traditions and the surprising stories behind a handful of well-known seasonal songs.Audio courtesy of Signum Records.This episode was first broadcast on 24 December 2021.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hello folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Christmas week, we're talking about Christmas carols. Those Christmassy songs that we still love singing, even if like me you don't really believe in the words you're actually singing, but they are wonderful nonetheless. There comes a time in every festive season when we jettison some of the popular music and we put the carols on. In our family that's when Christmas goes up a gear. When you hear Hark the Herald Angels Sing, when you hear the Christmas carols wafting through the house, it means that you've put aside work for the year. You've even put aside the wild Christmas parties. It's time to double down on family and getting the food going. That's the tradition in my family. It's a calming presence in us. It's a centering of the Christmas spirit. I love it. And now in this episode, we're going to be talking all about the history of Christmas carols.

We're talking to Andrew Gant. He was an organist, choir master and composer at Her Majesty's Chapel Royal for more than a decade from 2000 to 2013. He's a composer. He's written several books on musical subjects. We're going to open this episode with his arrangement of 12 Days of Christmas. One of my favourites. We used to sing this. My mum and dad used to talk about it as a carol party in our neighbourhood.

People around the neighbours used to come by. And the highlight was always 12 Days of Christmas. It's very, very special indeed. Here's Andrew Gant, some of his music, and the history of carols. Enjoy. On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love sent for me. Eight cranes of milk and seven to split, six be so late. Five whole weeks, four morning birds, three French hens, two dogs and a party in a bed.

Andrew, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Sure, it's a great pleasure to be with you, Dan. The Christian calendar has music appropriate for every time of year. What's exceptional about this time of year we're in now? The carol tradition has become so much a part of how we do Christmas. It's like the smell of the turkey in the Christmas pud and the weather outside, although that's going a bit down the tubes at the moment. When you start looking at the history of these Christmas carols,

we tend to assume that it's always been like that. And this set of words have always gone with that tune. But actually, they come from so many different traditions and so many different places. Most of them, nothing whatever to do with church, at least to begin with. And it's a really fascinating story about how they have got to where they are. Take us how far back do we need to go? Well, that's an impossible question. It starts before written history, that's for sure. But, you know, Christmas has been a liturgical feast, of course, since, well, since the birth of the Christian church and, you know, the birth of Christ, of course. But it has varied in significance over that time.

of course. But it has varied in significance over that time. And certainly as a kind of midwinter celebration, Twelfth Night would have been much more of a sort of party knees up to the Tudor court, for example, with plays and mummery and disguisings and things like that than Christmas Day itself, which was a liturgical feast, but similar in importance to many others. But what was sung in church was church music. So that was plain song. It was words from the Bible and from the Book of Common Prayer. But carols were things that were sung outside, things to be sung in the home, at work, in the fields, and in the pub. And many of them are very secular in their content. If you think about the words of the holly and the ivy, for example, or something of that kind, it's a song about the

renewal of life. It's about winter and the coming of spring and the renewal of life on earth. Not really much to do with Christianity at all. Holy and they are they, when they are both a grove, of olive trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown. O the rising of the sun and the running of the deer, CHOIR SINGS So are Christmas carols a body of folk music that has endured where the rest of folk music, sadly, whether it's around fishing or shipbuilding or harvests or spring, has fallen into obscurity? Well, some of them are. And this is one of the things that makes carols so fascinating, that some of the songs that we sing are folk songs, but in many cases, not associated with original folk texts. For example, you will no doubt already have sung,

or will shortly sing, A Little Town of Bethlehem. Well, the tune that you sing to that was actually collected and written down by Ralph Vaughan Williams, great English composer and folk song collector, right at the beginning of the 20th century, sung to him by an elderly gentleman in a pub in Surrey, not far from where he lived, to a completely different set of words. It's called The Ploughboy's Dream. And you can find Vaughan Williams' original wax cylinder recording of this on the archive of the British Library. It's a sort of secular song about a ploughboy who mistreats his oxen and gets carried off to hell by a genie who appears from under the frozen ground in a puff of blue smoke. And it has this tune. Now, Vaughan Williams was then asked to be the musical editor

for the English Hymnal, which is a new hymn book. And he was given this poem by an American bishop, Phillips Brooks, and he happened to notice that it fitted quite nicely with this tune. So he put the two things together. And that's how our tradition works. It's full of bits from all sorts of different places. There's such a dynamic culture of singing around Christmas that endures. What's exceptional about this time of year? Well, again, that's where different traditions feed in. And the tradition of the wassail, for example, you know, a very ancient tradition, which is very closely bound up with the social life and the hierarchy of the village, so that the village people would go and knock on the door of the squire's house and demand something nice to eat. And it was all to do with the hierarchy and the social hierarchy

of the village. And there are many, many different different war sailing songs from all over the place so you know that's one of the traditions that feeds into it O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine Läder. Du trimmst nicht nur zur Sonnenzeit, nein, auch im Winter, wenn es schneit. And what about the Christian element? Was there a particular time when caroling became more mainstream? Yes, it goes in phases, I think. I mean, first of all, caroling in the sense of singing, you know, more or less secular songs in the wintertime has always been part of the folk tradition. Let's not forget that the word carol, it means a celebratory song or dance. And in the earliest sources, it's not by any means restricted to Christmas. So you get Easter carols and carols for all seasons of the year.

And indeed, some which cover the entire Christian worldview. A song like Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day, for example, has verses which cover the creation of the world and the birth and the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, not just the nativity story. So that's always been part of it. But the moment when these songs from outside the church start to be allowed in, as it were, is in the middle of the 19th century, with the growth of the Oxford movement and the high church movement, with its emphasis on ritual and display and a sort of theatrical immersive experience. And musically, what that meant was allowing in musical traditions from everywhere, investigating the music of the past,

of church traditions from other countries, of folk song, of plain song, and composers like Thomas Helmore, who arranged and found many of our familiar Christmas carols with his colleague, John Mason Neill, who wrote the words, you know, Good King Wenceslas, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, many of our favourites date from this time. And what he did was he brought in tunes from anywhere he could find them, from schoolbooks and songbooks and folk songs and anything he could lay his hands on. It's very much a 19th century tradition. Like nearly everything else in this country, it pretends to be very old, but it's rooted in the 19th century. I love that. That's right. That was a conscious decision on their part. A lot of 19th century art is about

a sort of pretend version of medieval. If you think about the architecture of Gilbert Scott and Pugin and people like this, and the Idols of the King, that sort of thing, you know, they were pretending that they were back in the Middle Ages. But what were they hoping to achieve? These are people now with a little bit more time and money, it's a consumer market, those people want to gather around the piano and sing songs. Is it evangelical-led or a consumer-led thing? No, I don't think it was principally consumer-led, although it did prove enormously popular, you know, alongside this, the hymns Ancient and Modern,

which was the first really sort of comprehensive hymn book, sold in its millions of copies. I think it was about an approach to churchmanship, to ecclesiology. It was inclusive and it was celebratory. And it was a move away from the old, rather sort of formal, distanced version of Anglicanism that you find in the pages of Jane Austen, for example, you know, where the parson does his sermon and then goes off to have

his lunch, but doesn't really bother too much about communicating with his congregation. But also alongside that is the tradition of non-conformism, which is a separate tradition with a huge emphasis on hymn singing. And that's where you get songs like Hark the Herald Angels Sing, for example, the original words by Charles Wesley, although they've been changed a good deal by editors over time. Of course, one of the principal contributors to the Methodist tradition of hymn singing. You listen to Dan Snow's history at There's More Coming Up. and sinners red and sad. Joyful all ye nations rise,

join the triumph of the skies. With the angelic host proclaim, Christ is born in Bethlehem.

Hark the herald angels sing. Glory to the newborn King. To be continued... the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So yeah, during the 19th century, you get the non-performing, quote-unquote, I guess, low church Protestantism, Baptist, Methodist. So hymn singing's a bigger part of their religiosity. Yes, absolutely, yes. And, you know, I mean, Charles Wesley himself is estimated to have written anything between 600 and 900 hymns and devotional poems. It's very difficult to count them.

Clearly, many of them were intended to be sung, but some of them he specified a tune to go with them and some of them he didn't. So they're sung to all kinds of different tunes. So, you know, when Wesley himself sang Hark How All the Welkin Rings, which is his original version of that poem, it might well have been to a tune that we now sing to completely different words. And yet caroling has endured. Why do you think that is, as religion and folk music and singing has retreated from so many different parts of our lives? What is it about this time of year? That's a very interesting question, isn't it? Yeah, there is something about this combination of words and music and harmony and the setting that is special. It's a kind of a magic. And maybe because it's a kind of magic, it defies rational explanation. I mean,

I think it is the case that some of the words that we stand up and sing without thinking about them are actually quite odd. You know, if you actually read the words of I saw three ships come sailing in, you know, here are three ships sailing into Bethlehem, which is nowhere near the coast and has no river. You know, how many passengers are there? Two. So there are three ships and two passengers. And it kind of doesn't make sense at all. And when you start to sort of peer into the traditions that go behind it, it becomes associated with all sorts of folk tales, like the idea that the bodies of the three kings were taken by ship up the Rhine to Cologne Cathedral. And this is apparently somehow linked with this idea of three ships sailing in.

I'm a card-carrying stasist, and yet I sneak into churches to listen to carols. Only on Sunday, we were walking around. I took my kids on an exciting walking tour around the city of London, which they enjoyed enormously. Anyway, and we stopped off at church. We went in, and we stood at the back, and they were singing carols. A packed church, and we joined in the singing. It could be the memories of my own childhood in a kind of Proustian way. But there is something just incredibly special about that time of year.

Now, maybe regular churchgoers would tell me that it's that good every time that you gather in a church to sing. Well, you've partly answered your own question there, haven't you? And, you know, you have embedded that memory in your own children's minds and they will carry on doing it. Why? You know, you say you're a card-carrying atheist, but you still did it, you know, so you've answered your own question. The silent stars go by Yet in thy dark streets

Shines the everlasting light The hopes and fears Of all thy years Why do we fill the Albert Hall today? Why do we fill the Royal Festival Hall? Why do we still go out on the streets and sing carols? I sit in my local village. How did it spill over into the secular space? Well, cultural traditions don't always move in a logical way.

I mean, you know, you're a historian, you know, you try and sort of draw a straight line between one thing and the next. And you often find that there isn't one because it's people, you know, and people just behave in ways which are a combination of habit and emotion and tradition and all sorts of different things, you know, so who can say? Who can say? But I'm delighted to hear that your village still has a tradition of carol singing on the streets because, you know, that was a really key part of this tradition until relatively recently, I think.

You know, certainly the 1950s still find many accounts of it, which kind of tailed away. But I get the feeling that it's coming back a bit. It would be very shoreditch if all the kids in East London started caroling. I think that, you know, the beards came back, various things have come back, ukuleles, surely caroling is next. Absolutely. Well, why not? You know, and it's so easy to do. Just get half a dozen people out on the street, if they're singing in a sort of ragged unison, it doesn't matter. You know, I mean,

where I live, we have a little annual community carol singing event. Very lucky to be able to call on an excellent brass band from a local school who always come along. And it's just a lot of fun, you know, and people stop and join in as they're passing by. And it's dark and it's cold and you get the lights shining off the instruments. And it's just, it sort of takes you back in historical time to the idea of carols as being something that's a celebration of life in the middle of darkness now tell me about some of the particular carols because obviously you've done all sort of amazing research tell me about some well actually can we start with the famous carol story that fans of history will love which is the haunting impromptu carol services, concerts, however you want to call them, of the Western Front in December

1914. There is something about stille Nacht, isn't there? Both sides realising that they were singing different words in different languages to the same music. Yes, well, and that's a famous story, of course, and a wonderful example. You know, it sounds like a cliche to say it, but the power of music to reach across boundaries and borders, and in that case, across the front line of an active battlefield. And it remains an immensely powerful and moving story. And yes, as you say, it was a Christmas song that achieved that. So they were cross-border even then.

We're not the first generation to have experienced globalisation, but this was a pan-Protestant tradition, was it, some of these songs? Oh, absolutely, yes. And I mean, you know, we think of our English Christmas carol tradition. Very many of them have at least one foot in the traditions of another country, in Stelenacht, of course, you know, O Tannenbaum, O Little Town of Bethlehem, the most English carol you could think of. The words are written by an American, Bishop Phillips Brooks, a wonderful poet, actually. He wrote some other very fine lyrics, who was the Bishop of Boston, gave the funeral oration for Abraham Lincoln, lived through the Civil War, and after the war went on a pilgrimage to Bethlehem. after the war went on a pilgrimage to Bethlehem and was so moved by the experience after the horrors of the Civil War that he came over the brow of the hill and saw Bethlehem in the distance and wrote the poem, A Little Town of Bethlehem, How Still We See Thee Lie, there and then on the spot and took it back home to America, where his own church organist set it to music to the tune

that you will still hear sung in American churches, which is not the one that Vaughan Williams then used in the English hymnal. So it's one of several carols that's actually sung to different tunes on different sides of the Atlantic. Away in a Manger is another one. Away, thou angel, no creeper on end, The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head. The stars in the bright sky looked out where he lay A little Lord Jesus as he bore my head There's a different tune over there. I did not know that.

Yeah, and a way in a manger tune over there. I did not know that. Yeah, and A Way in a Manger is also American. Again, we think of that as being an extremely English carol, but it was actually published relatively recently in about 1880. So it's quite a new entry to the carol tradition. And it was published in an American newspaper as part of the celebrations of the anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther. But they got the date wrong, so it wasn't actually the right anniversary. And they said in this newspaper that this poem, they printed just two verses of it, was written by Martin Luther as a

lullaby for his own children, which was completely made up. It wasn't at all. It was an English poem and it had been written by somebody who worked for the newspaper, but nobody knows who it was. And that again was put to a tune in America. Then it made its way over to Europe, to England, found its way into a book of poems without a tune, had a third verse bolted onto it, and then got another tune put to it. So the tradition is very sort of piecemeal. These songs that we sing are often put together from lots of different sources, many of them not English at all. Before you go, give me another story about an Amos and well-loved carol. Let's go back to Hark the Herald Angels Sing. So we talked a little bit about the words, which were originally by Charles Wesley and much changed. Now the tune,

if you look up that tune in a hymn book, you'll find it ascribed to Felix Mendelssohn. And indeed it is by Mendelssohn, but he of course had nothing whatever to do with putting it to Wesley's words. In fact, it is a chorus from a cantata that Mendelssohn was commissioned to write to celebrate another anniversary, this time of the printer, Johannes Gutenberg. So if you ever find yourself listening to that piece, you'll suddenly hear the tune of Hark the Herald, Angel Sing, sung to this German text about what a wonderful chap Gutenberg was, which is quite an interesting experience. The other one that always ends our carol services, of course, is O Camus Les Faithful, originally Adeste Fideles, which was written, or at least written down, by an Englishman who was a Catholic and who fled Catholic persecution around the time of the 45 in the middle of the 18th century, ended up working in a monastery in France as the musical scribe.

And he wrote down this tune, which was then sent all around Europe to the various branches of this order. But it was originally in three-four time rather than in four-four time. A deste fidelis, Lady Triumphantis. It sounds quite different.

It sounds very different. It sounds very different. It also sounds very different to when the Snow Family are singing that. I'll tell you that. We're shouters, we're not singers. What is your favourite new carol? My kids obviously quite like the newer Christmas songs. But in fact, are we allowed to call those things carols? I mean, is there a...

I think so, yes. I mean, you get a lot of, you know, quite often people say, well, that's not a proper carol. But the word itself has, you know, like so many words in English, it's changed over the years. As I said earlier, in medieval times and before, it was associated with a celebratory party song or dance for any season, really, sacred or secular. So I think in the sense that a carol is a sort of celebratory song for the middle of winter, then something like Jingle Bells, for example, which is about a man showing off to his girlfriend and falling out of his sleigh, you know, nothing to do with Christmas. I think that counts as a

carol. Absolutely. Why not? Well, I'll tell my kids, you heard it here first. The mighty Andrew Gant says that Elsa's song in Frozen is a carol. That's very exciting. Okay, so I'm glad we're allowed to sing the new songs as well. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Pleasure, Dan. Thank you. Tell me the name of your book. Christmas Carols, Village Green to Church Choir.

Go and get it, everybody. Thank you. Ding dong, better be a party, hang the bells away. Ding dong, verily the sky Is rid with angels singing Gloria Gloria Hosanna in excelsis Gloria

Gloria Thank you. you you