Well, we didn’t pull out the hundreds of votive candles this year, but I do hope that our choir’s recorded offerings of our traditional Advent Lessons and Carols nevertheless find you and take your spirit to those same settings of glowing warmth. Recording these pieces in individual tracks in our individual home closet studios provided a new challenge for us, but singing our familiar repertoire kept this year soothingly connected to last year – and to next year when we all will hopefully be singing these songs together by real candlelight again. I hope that you’ll let your world slow down enough to take some time out for yourself and listen to the service. Advent only gets more powerful with letting its music steep in your heart.
If you’d like to steep more, I’d like to steer your attention towards a piece from the service, and then invite you down a really cool rabbit hole. The journey begins with There is no Rose by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), sung by our Sopranos and Altos and scored for harp accompaniment. First, isn’t it gorgeous? Ethereal but with drive, harmonically exciting. I find it has three main structural ingredients: the steady beat, the sweet lullaby, and the angel forces rending through the tissues of Earth. Listen to the piece and you’ll hear those three things, in that order. It’s thrilling to hear, as well as to sing.
This movement is from a larger work of Britten’s called A Ceremony of Carols (1942), an eleven-movement concert song cycle originally scored for treble voices and harp. It’s only about twenty-five minutes long, and it’s a brilliant collection of joyful and contemplative holiday music. Britten takes English medieval texts, Christian sacred texts, and devotional poetry about Advent, Christmas, and Winter, and weaves them into melody and harmonies that feel like soothing Renaissance chamber pieces until he surprises you with reminders that oh, yes, this is 20th century music. There’s a taste of magic in the combined sound of voice and harp, and this whole work charms the ear. I can testify from several experiences of singing this cycle that it is nowhere near easy to learn, but once the acrobatic negotiations are made with our instruments it is one of those large works that sound effortless because the line becomes one with the performer. I recommend this recording by a group called The Singers which perfectly captures the whole work: https://youtu.be/hGYGQc4OXY0 Although there are some wonderful recordings of this work by children’s choirs and it has also been scored for mixed choirs, I tend to be drawn most to the performances by women. The structural beams of strong, mature female voices sound like bold and headstrong Christmas angels to me more than any other human sound.
If you have time to listen to this whole work once, please do and enjoy it for all the beauty it contains from its first note to its last. If you have time to listen to the whole work twice, take a trip down this little rabbit hole with me before you replay. I do have to warn that I cannot now listen to the whole work without also being mentally consumed by the circumstances in which it was written, so...spoilers ahead!
At the time A Ceremony of Carols was written, Britten was a 28-year-old Briton who had spent the first years of World War II in the United States hobnobbing with American composers and being influenced by them. Though not a soldier himself, as the war intensified, he felt a patriotic draw to come home. In 1942 transatlantic passages into the war zone were not easy for a civilian to acquire, but Britten was lucky to snag a tiny, stinking hot locker of a cabin on the kitchen deck of a Swedish cargo ship for the longest leg. He was required to stay in his room the whole four weeks, so a Princess Cruise this was not. The trip was plagued with horrible weather and rancid smells, not to mention that the path went through known U-boat torpedo sites. Interestingly, Britten claimed to have been less put out by his physical confinement or threat to his life than by the intolerable noise. The ship itself had a constant industrial din that couldn’t be avoided, but to make matters worse, his room was next door to the cold storage, so he endured high traffic noise at all hours, as well as off-key Swedish singing, nonstop whistling, and raucous kitchen conversations. The cacophony was constant and unrelenting for the whole passage. And did I mention the route was to and through a literal war zone?
And yet, despite this physical madness, he wrote A Ceremony of Carols on this voyage. He brought forth tranquil lullabies for light voices to sweetly sing, angular but flowing solo lines that seem to trace constellation-like trajectories, harmonies that seamlessly flip from major to minor and back. He wrote entire accompaniments for harp without an actual harp. He wrote tones and lines and rhythms of such precise order among such chaotic surroundings. How did he do that? How did he achieve the calm of mind to overcome the sensorially oppressive box he was in and put such beauty down on paper? I don’t know the answers to these questions, I’m just amazed at the products of the miracle I’m witnessing secondhand. He did it somehow. Right now we’re all stuck in half a cabin on the high mad sea, whether that’s pandemic related or in the spiritual preparation of Christ’s birth or just getting through Tuesday. It is so easy to be consumed by the multiple obstacles, but there’s something underneath all that noise that is worth seeking. Britten found it. We can, too.
Now listen again to A Ceremony of Carols – or listen for the first time if you’re a rebel and kept reading! Britten’s journey across treacherous waters is echoed throughout this work, and I hope it gives you the same hope it gives me: that even in confinement when we don’t know if our only-choice vessel will hold, if we focus, we can still find beautiful moments in passage through the cranky torpedo-threatening sea. Every movement to me feels like a different rank of angels either rising from or battling the waters on God’s behalf. The steady ocean lulls beat patterns of comfort in There is no Rose and Balulalow, the canon of angelic hordes comes to fight the devil like a crashing storm against a ship in This Little Babe, the intensifying swells suddenly change direction and dart around each other in Deo Gracias – all are set in tempestuous waters but have a clear statement of order, of where God’s peace is, and they all resolve. There's a depth of beauty to behold while we ride this leg of the journey and the first step to witnessing it is to be open to looking for it. Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols is a solid source of that kind of beauty for a meaningful sensory experience of Advent, and I hope that you will partake.
Katie Beyers
Assistant Choirmaster
Alto in CSMSG Choir
