Some rambling ruminations re Christmas music

A few years ago, my husband and I became fans of shape-note hymnody, a genre of religious music popular in the Mid-Atlantic and Appalachia (and elsewhere) in the 19th century. Its haunting, almost eerie sound entranced us. 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note 

http://fasola.org/ 

http://www.his.com/~sabol/SHhistory.html 

Since then, we’ve discovered that shape-note hymnody is undergoing a sort of renaissance. This holiday season, in fact, it’s everywhere – on the radio, on the Web, and on new CDs by Anonymous 4 and the Boston Camerata, among many others. 

In the past, my favorite shape-note hymns were the old standbys “Brightest and Best” and “Wondrous Love.” But this season I discovered a new one, with an utterly haunting melody and lyrics filled with all the yearning of Advent: 

Bright morning stars are rising!

Bright morning stars are rising!

Bright morning stars are rising!

Day is a-breakin’ in my soul. 

For my money, Joel Cohen’s Boston Camerata provides the best introduction to shape-note hymnody via its CDs An American Christmas and The American Vocalist. Some people consider Cohen’s approach too slick and “produced”-sounding, but, if you’ve never heard shape-note hymns before, you may not be ready for the raw, primitive sound of more “authentic” recordings. That was certainly true for us! We’re still not quite ready for those 1940s-vintage Library of Congress recordings made in teeny backwoods Southern churches. But we can handle Word of Mouth’s Rivers of Delight CD, which (I’ve been told) is somewhere between “authentic backwoods” and “slick professional.” 

We Kamers have always been big fans of Celtic music — the more haunting the better! — which may partly explain our attraction to the distinctive shape-note sound. After all, shape-note music originated among the Scots-Irish settlers of Pennsylvania and Appalachia, who still retained their Celtic musical traditions. It’s all connected.  

I’ve always been a big fan of early music, too, which is how I first discovered the Boston Camerata. (Back during my Boston days, I saw the Camerata in a concert performance of Purcell’s early opera, Dido and Aeneas.) But, while I still consider Renaissance polyphony “the music of the spheres,” I have to say that shape-note hymns run a close second…especially at Christmastide. 

ON ANOTHER NOTE…

Recently I’ve been listening to the Baltimore Consort’s wonderful Christmas recording Bright Daystar (“old carols and dance tunes from the British Isles, Germany & Appalachia”). We bought it mainly for the title tune, an utterly beautiful hymn written by a Scottish Franciscan on the eve of the Reformation and set to a plangent Scottish melody by the editors of The Oxford Book of Carols: 

Rorate coeli desuper!

Heavens, distil your balmy showers.

For now is risen the bright Day-star

From the rose Mary, flower of flowers.

The clear Sun, whom no cloud devours,

Surmounting Phoebus in the East,

Is comen of His heav’nly towers,

Et nobis puer natus est! 

But it’s always the way:  I buy a CD for one song and then end up discovering and falling in love with a completely different song on the same recording. True to form, when I was listening to the Bright Daystar CD, I came across a song I hadn’t heard before, a broadside ballad from early 17th-century England: “Christmas Is My Name.” Apparentlly it dates from around 1605, just two years after the death of Elizabeth I. The “speaker,” the voice, of the ballad is Christmas himself (herself?), who laments the neglect of Christmas festivities in dour Protestant England: 

Christmas is my name;

Farre have I gone.

Have I gone,

Have I gone

Without regarde!

…

Houses where musicke was wonted to ringe,

Nothing but Batts and Ouls now do singe.

Wellay daie, wellay daie, wellay daie, where should I stay? … 

Places where Christmas revels did keepe

Now have become habitations for Sheepe,

Wellay daie, wellay daie, wellay daie, where should I stay? 

 Apparently early capitalism is partly responsible for this sad state of affairs—and especially for the neglect of the poor. According to William Chappell, editor of the broadside version of the ballad, “So long as landlords received their rents in kind, their barns and stores were full, and they were lavish of hospitality [to the country folk] at Christmas. When rents began to be paid in less bulky form of money, luxury increased and ladies began to spend more on their dress….” As the ballad itself puts it, on “madam’s” back “were that for her weede / That woulde both me and manie other feede.” (from the CD’s liner notes) 

But was Christmas neglected by everyone in early Jacobean England? According to the ballad’s anonymous author, there was one shining exception. (Here, for the convenience of my readers, I am mostly updating the spelling): 

Go to the Protestant, he’ll protest,

He’ll protest,

He’ll protest,

He’ll protest and boldly boast.

And to the Puritan,

He is so hot,

He’s so hot,

He’s so hot he will burn the roast!

[But] the Catholic good deeds will not scorn,

Nor will he see poor Christmas forlorne.

Wellay day!

Since “holiness” no good deeds will do,

Protestants had best turn Papists, too!

Wellay daie, wellay daie, wellay daie, where should I stay? 

LOL!! How much do you want to bet that the ballad’s author was a crypto-Catholic? Or at least a Catholic sympathizer! 

I find this very interesting, as it confirms the evidence provided by Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars and by Christopher Haigh in English Reformations –viz.,  that Protestantism was forcibly imposed on the English countryfolk, who resisted it for decades, clung to their Catholic customs and festivals, and submitted to the new, starker religion only with great reluctance and after much systematic brainwashing. 

How very sad! And yet what a testimony to Catholic Truth, that even a Jacobean balladeer could recognize the “true spirit of Christmas” in his fellow Catholics’ works of mercy. May we testify to our Faith through our works of mercy throughout the coming year! And may we keep our frolics and festivals in honor of the Babe of Bethlehem, Who came as a helpless child, in poverty and nakedness, to redeem us all. Amen.