Every year my holiday season starts off officially with The Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols. Holiday music before this point causes me to hunch my shoulders protectively up around my ears and mutter in curmudgeonly tones, “It’s not even December yet! Why can’t they wait until after Halloween?”
Singing in, or attending, this concert has been my tradition since December of 1994, which was my first year in choir. At that time “Nine lessons” was held in the Old Arts Building of our university, more commonly known as Convocation Hall, or Con Hall. It’s a beautiful old building and the main hall features a pipe organ and balconies for we “choirs of angels” to sit on high in and sing to the audience below. In short, it is an awesome place to sing, although challenging, due to the distance between the tenor and bass sections and the conductor up on stage.
Unfortunately Con Hall does not feature much in the way of seating space for the audience. We spent years of jamming too many people into too small a hall (often breaking fire codes) and there was that one dreadful year when we sang three concerts in one night after a long day of school and, for some of us poor science students, lab exams (which, incidentally, left us pretty much unable to function for the next couple of days.) (As yet another of my endless aside (aside what, you may ask, since many of my entries are just a long series of asides) my husband and I met in this choir and had our wedding photos taken in the entrance to Con Hall.)
In 1999 we (meaning the concert and all involved) moved to the Winspear centre downtown, a stunning new facility with both an amazing pipe organ that is purely a wonder to behold and acoustics that were to die for. Since leaving the choir, I have made sure to continue my tradition from the audience’s side. Attending the Nine Lessons concert without fail, I start off my Christmas season by singing pretty alto harmonies for ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, belting out ‘Joy to the World’ with as much enthusiasm as I can muster, mouthing the words to the gentle ‘God be with you’ and listing with rapt attention to the Toccata played masterfully on the pipe organ.
You would think that not being particularly religious would detract from my enjoyment of the concert, and from my enjoyment of Christmas carols in general, but this is not the case at all. I love the old traditional Christmas carols, particularly ones with good alto parts. My favorite is What Child Is This?” which I enjoy for many reasons including, but not limited to:
1) the gorgeous alto part tha t never fails to give me goose bumps and
2) the line “Nail! Spear! Shall pierce him through…” being sung in such a cheery manner cracks me up. I know, I’m a terrible heathen and will burn in hell, but at least I’ll be warm.
My least favorite is the ever repetitive “I Saw Three Ships” because the alto line sucks; you sing the same note over and over for half the song and then the rest is an annoyingly difficult harmony. By the above I mean my least favorite traditional carol. I have reserved special levels of hate for "Jingle Bell Rock" and anything performed by the Jingle Cats (which I just this moment realized was probably a play on Jungle Cats). I won't move on to other hated performers and recorders of bad carols for fear of a brawl breaking out in my blog.
There are also three relatively obscure carols that I not only know the lyrics for, but can sing Soprano, Alto and Tenor lines for are:
- ‘Coventry Carol’ (which contains the line ‘By By Lully, Lullay” and I have no clue what that means.),
- ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ (oddest line: “in the bleak midwinter, a stable place sufficed, the Lord God incarnate, Jesus Christ” with the reference to the manger rhymed with the son of God), and finally
- the 'Huron Carol', which confused our Kenyan assistant conductor to no end with its reference to the “mighty Gitchi Manitou” (On first read he thought it had something to do with underpants. It is officially the first Canadian Christmas carol, written in the mid-1600’s and most people take it as further proof that Canadians are weird. )
It’s Christmas time. Go celebrate or something, eh?
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1 comment:
So. I can apparently never resist using Google to find the answer to things. Here Karen, is what lully means, at least according to one website.
M
The Coventry Carol, with its well-known 'Lully, lullay' refrain, correctly speaking, is not a Christmas carol because the words refer to Jesus as an infant, and are not concerned with the birth itself. This Renaissance carol is named after the city of Coventry, England.
Lullay: I saw - one of the very earliest extant polyphonic carols - describes in old English what Mary sang to her child. "Lully, lullay, lully, lullay," are not common words in the English language today. In the 1400's and into the 1500's, however, lully and lullay were common slang words meaning " I saw, I saw!". If they seem strange to you, think of some of the strange slang words that we have today.
(taken from http://www.cvc.org/christmas/coventry.htm)
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