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Holiday Music Festival
Overview:
Join Active Minds as we trace the history of the “Holiday Song.” We’ll explore how great holiday songs, both sacred and secular, have become so much a part of our culture regardless of religious affiliations. We’ll provide examples from carols to pops songs, written by such notables as Handel and Irving Berlin; sung by Ella, Bing, Elvis and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Bring your love of great holiday music and your singing voice. As always, no experience necessary.
Key Lecture Points:
The concentration of Holiday music played worldwide during December is unmatched in the world of music. No other idiom attracts our attention from late November to Christmas and not again the rest of the year. From early sacred music, classical, old and new carols, to newer pop, rock, folk and jazz songs, the sheer number of performances and recordings is staggering and grows annually.
The origins of holiday music can be traced to the 4th Century and were very solemn expressions of devotion. In the 9th Century, the words began to rhyme and there was a more outward celebration of joy using folk song melodies known to laymen.
St Francis of Assisi is credited for helping popularize the popular carol sung in native tongues, not just Latin. Songs of celebration for panting, harvest and Christmas were still restricted or forbidden inside the Church setting.
In 1647, Christmas celebration and music associated with it were declared offences by English Parliament for about 15 years. Citizens still sang the celebratory songs despite the nearly unenforceable ban.
Town musicians or 'waits' were licensed to collect money in the streets in the weeks preceding Christmas, the custom spread throughout the population by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up to the present day. Also from the seventeenth century, there was the English custom, predominantly involving women, of taking a 'wassail bowl' round their neighbors to solicit gifts, accompanied by carols. Despite this long history, almost all surviving Christmas carols date only from the nineteenth century onwards.
Puritans generally disapproved of the celebration of Christmas — a trend which has continually resurfaced in Europe and the USA through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Originally, carols were dances and not songs. The accompanying tune would have been used as a setting for any verses of appropriate metre. Singers would compete with each other, verse for verse. The church actively opposed these folk dances. Consequently, tunes originally used to accompany carols became separated from the original dances, but were still referred to as "carols".
Reformers like Martin Luther (1483 –1546) authored hymns and carols (“A Mighty Fortress is Our God”) and encouraged their use in worship. The Lutheran reformation warmly welcomed celebratory music.
Songs such as "The First Noel" and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" were printed in 1833 in a book titled Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern, by William B. Sandys. The majority of the Christmas carols we sing today were written between 1940 and 1965.
Exploration Questions:
• Why did Saint Francis promote carol singing?
• Did Martin Luther write holiday music we still hear today?
• What is the phenomenon called Christmas Creep?
Reflective Questions:
• What is your family’s favorite Holiday Music tradition?
• When you think about the phase, “Christmas Music,” what song comes immediately to mind?
• When do you think Christmas music should begin on radio and at shopping malls?
More to Explore:
• History of some Christmas Carols: www.whychristmas.com
• More Christmas Carol History: www.worldofchristmas.net
• Handel's Messiah: www.smithsonianmag.com
Books For Further Reading:
• Collins, Ace. Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas. Hardcover. Zondervan (2001). 192 pages. Collins writes an impressive compendium of Holiday song backstories. He tells how a song came to be written and popularized, with a snippet about its commercial track record. Click here to order.
• Clancy, Robert M. Best-Loved Christmas Carols: The Stories Behind Twenty-five Yuletide Favorites. Hardcover. Sterling (2006). 112 pages. Ronald Clancy's "Best-Loved Christmas Carols" should banish your yuletide humbug blues. Every page fairly glistens with the sparkle of the Yuletide treasures that carols have become. Curl up with this engrossing history of some of the world's most cherished tunes and pop the CD in. Click here to order.
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