Last week, the exemplar of the modern English choral sound — Kings College Cambridge — reprised their 106th annual Christmas Eve service of Nine Lessons and Carols. The recording of the live BBC broadcast is available until January 23 and...

Last week, the exemplar of the modern English choral sound — Kings College Cambridge — reprised their 106th annual Christmas Eve service of Nine Lessons and Carols. The recording of the live BBC broadcast is available until January 23 and the bulletin is available at KCC’s Lessons & Carols website.

The service, created in 1918 and broadcast (almost) continuously since 1928, was central to defining and promoting the distinctive “English” choral sound after World War II.

Both the service and the sound were created by the legendary Arthur Henry Mann (1850-1929), the former Norwich chorister who was appointed to lead KCC in 1876. The transformation of KCC — and English choral music — was brilliantly described by Timothy Day in I Saw Eternity the Other Night, his 2019 book about the choir, which I was fortunate to review in 2021 for the Journal of Anglican Studies.

Changed and Now Different

Although I listen every year, the last time I published a systematic analysis was for 2020’s recorded Covidtide performance. Some things are different and some are not: as the French would say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

This year most noticeable change is the near absence of the work of Stephen Cleobury (1948-2019), who conducted more Christmas Eve broadcasts (37) than any other, with the longest tenure of any KCC music director since Mann.

In 2018 — the centennial of Lessons and Carols and Cleobury’s final Christmas Eve service — both Cleobury and KCC pulled out all the stops, with a major promotional push, a documentary and two CDs — one in anticipation of the centennial and one capturing the centennial service.

The December 2018 service included one piece arranged by Cleobury (“Seven Joys of Mary”), and one edited by him. It also (characteristically) featured three hymns with Cleobury descants: “Once in Royal David’s city,” “While shepherds watched their flocks,” and “Hark, the herald angels sing.” The first was the standard arrangement to open the KCC service for many years: it is listed as the opening descant in the oldest online program for KCC — the 1997 service recorded in the archives of KCC’s 2019 website (as well as 2000, 2010 and many services in between).

As every year since December 2019, the service was led by Daniel Hyde (1980- ), who succeeded Cleobury as music director in October 2019, less than two months before his death. A choral scholar at KCC under Cleobury in 2000, Hyde used the Cleobury opening descant in 2019 and 2020, but not any service since. In fact, none of the hymns sung by the choir since 2021 have included one of Cleobury’s familiar descants.

Changing but the Same

While the service is world-popular for the singing, the original point was the lessons. As the 2020 booklet summarized

Wherever the service is heard and however it is adapted, whether the music is provided by choir or congregation, the pattern and strength of the service, as [Eric] Milner-White pointed out, derive from the lessons. ‘The main theme is the development of the loving purposes of God ...’ seen ‘through the windows and the words of the Bible’.

Unlike the original 1918 service created by Mann and Rev. Milner-White — but like all services from 1997-2007 and since 2018 — the first reading censors God’s pronouncement from Genesis 3:16 as being offensive to modern sensibilities:

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

However, consistent with KCC’s official hymnal, the 1986 New English Hymnal — and unlike (say) Hymnal 1982 — the new-born King was “born that man no more may die” and “to raise the sons of earth.”

The service also continues to introduce new music, both the annual new commissioned carol (instituted by Cleobury in 1983) and another new work in memory of Cleobury.

Congregational Hymns

According to David Sniden’s KCC database, the first hymn and the last two are unchanged for all services since 1997, and were part of the original 1918 service (although in 1918 the choir performed a carol before the first hymn).

With Cleobury’s descants banished, #1 had a descant by Philip Ledger (who led KCC from 1974-1982) and #3, #4 and #5 descants by David Willcocks (1957-1973). For Adeste Fideleis, verse 6 uses the Willcocks descant while the refrain to verse 7 was reharmonized by Hyde.

A pleasant surprise was the descant by Thomas Armstrong to #2 (“O Little Town”), which seems quite traditional (if not retro) compared to the more flowery descants of the past two or three decades. This descant was previously sung by KCC (under Cleobury) in 2016 and captured on this KCC audio recording among several found on YouTube. 

Armstrong is a common name, but the liner from a 2015 Christmas CD from Queen’s College Oxford helpfully notes that the descant is by “Thomas Armstrong (1898 – 1994)”. Armstrong was the organist at Christ Church, Oxford from 1933-1955. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

[I]n 1923 he … pursue[d] composition studies at the Royal College of Music with Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and R. O. Morris. …As a composer, Armstrong belonged to the gentle English tradition of Parry, Vaughan Williams, Howells, and Finzi; …. His own compositions are unjustly neglected, many remaining unpublished. One aspect of his music, however, is more familiar than people realize, for some of the striking descants sung in Christmas carol services and concerts were written by him. He acknowledged Vaughan Williams to be the greatest influence of anybody on his life.

This Year’s Carols

Other “Carols”

The other is the 2006 setting of “Adam lay ybounden” by Matthew Martin, former music director of Keble College, Oxford. As with the YouTube Covidtide performance by Pembroke College Cambridge, it has an atmospheric feel to it rather the rigid stanzas of the more familiar carol by (former KCC music director) Boris Ord. But to me, that feel means that the sound and texture pre-empt the teaching value of the text — and thus (IMHO) the Ord rendition is more suitable for a services of Lessons & Carols, where historically the carols has taught as much (or more) than the lessons.

The remaining three, written in the last 40 years, feel out of place at a celebration of the birth of baby Jesus. They may be a triumph for modern music, but not something I would expect earn a lasting spot in the (vast) Christmas repertoire (but then I have a strong bias against modern tonality).

This Year’s Sung Service

References

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