Program Notes
Anonymous 4
Saturday, November 29, 2003

“Wolcum Yule:  Celtic and British Songs and Carols”

Many of the symbols and practices of the Celtic midwinter celebration known as Yule (probably several thousand years older than the festival of Christmas) have come down to us in a curious amalgamation of mythologies, pagan and Christian.  Yule marks the time of the winter solstice, around 21 December -- the longest and darkest night of the year, when the coming of spring seems a faint hope.  To fortify that hope, the ancient Celts, who dwelt throughout Britain, held a celebration of lights, to give power to the returning sun.  They brought evergreens into their homes to symbolize life at the time when most of nature seemed dead and dark, and they gave and received gifts to represent wisdom gained from looking inward during the long winter nights.  These symbols, and many other elements of ancient pagan ceremonies, were absorbed into the early Christian festivals, blending into a multi-layered expression of the universal cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

The traditional music associated with the midwinter festival is also interwoven with threads of pre-Christian ritual and folk-customs.  The concerns of an ancient people dependent upon the whims of nature for food and shelter are expressed not only in imagery of the natural world, but even in the form of the songs themselves.  The word “carol” (from Old French “carole”) originally meant a dance performed in a circle, the dancers also singing a verse with a recurring refrain.  This was probably derived from ancient ritual dances with call-and-response chanting, used at magical ceremonies throughout the cycle of the year.  Even by the Middle Ages, the carol was not limited to the winter season; only much later did the term take on its present meaning of a song for the Christmas season.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, collectors began to rescue from obscurity many folk tunes, songs and carols.  In Edinburgh, poet Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) collected and published Scottish tunes, and Edward Bunting (1773-1843), a classically-trained musician in Belfast, produced three volumes of Irish airs.  Crucial figures in the folk song revival were Davies Gilbert (1767-1839) and William Sandys (1792-1874), both gentleman scholars from Cornwall, an area of Britain that had remained comparatively isolated until the shift from an agricultural society to an industrial one, and whose folk customs and songs remained more intact than in other areas of the country.  Although the carols published by Gilbert and Sandys were relatively few in number, these collections were seminal because they were the first to include both tunes and words.  Some of our best-loved Christmas carols were preserved through their efforts, and their momentum was carried forward by the early twentieth-century collectors of folk song, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, as well as later collectors working throughout the British Isles.

For this program, we have interwoven traditional Christmas songs with contemporary carols (ranging from the early twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first), showing that the need never dies to express the most basic human fears and joys, and to keep that expression always fresh with the turning of each year.

-- Program Note by Johanna Maria Rose of Anonymous 4

Additional program notes, following, by Jay Weitz, Consulting Database Specialist for music, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio.  He is a contributing performing arts critic for the weekly alternative newspaper “Alive:  Music, Art, and Culture in Columbus” (http://www.columbusalive.com).

John Tavener (born 1944)

The Lamb (composed 1982)

Few modern composers have devoted as much of their efforts to religious music as Sir John Tavener and been so publicly revered in the process.  Born in London in 1944, Tavener was appointed organist of Saint John’s Presbyterian Church in Kensington in 1961.  The next year he entered the Royal Academy of Music, studying piano with the one-named pianist Solomon and composition with Lennox Berkeley.  Many of his early works bore the influence of late Stravinsky, but Tavener also began in the mid-1960s to experiment with drones and other non-developmental techniques.”  Several works caught the attention of The Beatles, on whose Apple label his 1969 “Celtic Requiem” was released.  By the time Tavener joined the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977, he was heavily into musical stasis and ruminations on mortality.

Richard Rodney Bennett (born 1936)

Balulalow (composed 1963)

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett is a child prodigy with a range of influences that is as wide as that of his eclectic output.  Supposedly, he was writing music almost before he was able to read.  By the time he was eighteen years old, he had already written his first three string quartets.  He studied briefly with Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music, and then between 1957 and 1959 with Pierre Boulez in Paris, absorbing both the traditional and the modern.  Also in the 1950s, he began a relationship with the world of jazz that, during the 1990s, blossomed into a parallel career as a cabaret-style singer-pianist.  Through it all, however, he remains probably best known for his more than fifty film scores, including “Far from the Madding Crowd” (1967), “Nicholas and Alexandra” (1971), the Academy Award-nominated “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974), “Enchanted April” (1992), and “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994).

“Balulalow” is the second of the “Two Lullabies” Bennett wrote in 1963 for three unaccompanied women’s voices.  Using the same two verses of John Wedderburn’s old Scots poem from 1578 that Benjamin Britten immortalized in his “Ceremony of Carols,” Bennett offers a tantalizingly chromatic setting of the classic Scottish tune.

Peter Maxwell Davies (born 1934)

A Calendar of Kings (composed 2002)

Regardless of the genre in which he is writing, Peter Maxwell Davies displays a consistency both of refined technique and of historical reference in his musical works.  The composer, conductor, and educator often appropriates pre-existing material, especially plainchant, that has both compositional and symbolic significance.  In the past three decades, however, two factors in particular have shaped Davies’ music:  the Orkney Islands of Northern Scotland, where he settled in 1971; and the fiction, poems, and reportage of that region’s George Mackay Brown.

It is Mackay Brown’s poetic account of the three Magi traveling to the birth of Christ that provides the text for Davies’ “A Calendar of Kings.”  It was commissioned by Anonymous 4 with funds from Abendmusik:  Lincoln Fine Arts Series, and was premiered by Anonymous 4 on 2002 November 30 at the First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Transplanting the story from the sands of the Middle East to the rugged terrain of Orkney, Mackay Brown employs images that suggest a months-long journey from winter into spring.  Davies parallels this with a tonal journey that begins and ends in F minor but arrives at several unexpected landmarks along the way.  Working with four female voices, Davies also varies the texture of the voices together as well as the range of each individual voice.

Geoffrey Burgon (born 1941)

A God, and Yet a Man? (composed 1984)

Becoming a jazz trumpeter was Geoffrey Burgon’s initial musical dream, but after he began studies at the Guildhall School of Music in London in 1960, he caught the composing bug.  Studying composition first with Peter Wishart and later with Lennox Berkeley, Burgon eventually abandoned the trumpet and settled into a successful career writing for television and film, including “Doctor Who” (1975), Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” (1979), “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1979), “Brideshead Revisited” (1981), and “Turtle Diary” (1985).  He also contributed numerous scores for such dance companies as London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert.  Most prolific, however, is Burgon’s output for voices, including by some accounts, more song cycles than any other composer of recent memory.

Burgon’s “A God, and Yet a Man?” was composed in 1984 for mixed chorus and first appeared in the “Chester Music Carol Book.”

Henry VIII (1491-1547)

Grene growith the holy (compiled circa 1518)

Yes, THAT Henry VIII, King of England; he of the legendary six wives.  In his time, Henry was known not only for his dubious spousal skills and his disrespect for church authority, but also for his profound interest in music.  During Hnery’s long reign from 1509 to 1547, music played a huge part in court life, with performances of one kind or another as part of virtually every important royal ceremony.  By the time of his death, Henry had gathered together an ensemble of some 58 musicians and owned a sizable collection of instruments.  The king himself is known to have been quite the singer and played lute, various keyboards, and a variety of winds.

Much of the music Henry wrote is lost, including two masses that are documented in contemporary accounts.  The vast majority of the surviving music (including “Grene growith the holy”) appeared in the so-called “Henry VIII Manuscript,” a collection compiled around 1518.  Its name derives from the presence in it of many of his works (twenty vocal and thirteen instrumental pieces), and he is not believed to have actually owned the book.  Works by several other English (John Lloyd, Robert Fayrfax, and Henry’s court musician William Cornysh) and continental composers (Heinrich Isaac, Hayne van Ghizeghem, Jacques Barbireau, and Loyset Compère) also appear.  It has often been pointed out that the survival of Henry’s music has more to do with his celebrity than with his skill, but “Grene growith the holy” is widely recognized as an achievement in its own right.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

A New Year Carol (composed 1933-1935)

Considered by many to be the most important English composer since Henry Purcell, Benjamin Britten is best remembered for his operas (“Peter Grimes,” “Albert Herring,” “Billy Budd”), choral pieces (“A Ceremony of Carols,” “War Requiem”), and works for children (“Noye’s Fludde,” “Children’s Crusade”).  But in the 1930s, none of these were even twinkles in Britten’s eye.  By the time he was twelve, Britten was studying with Frank Bridge, but it was in 1930 that he received a scholarship to attend the Royal College of Music in London.  Studying piano with Arthur Benjamin and Harold Samuel and composition with John Ireland, Britten was earning a living through music within a few years.

Life changed significantly in May 1935 when Britten began working in the General Post Office Film Unit, scoring documentaries.  This work brought him into the intellectual circle of W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and London’s Group Theatre, for which Britten wrote much incidental music.  It also inspired his political and sexual awakening, immersed as he was in the leftist, pacifist, agnostic, and (for its time) almost openly gay world of the arts.

It was right around this time (1933-1935) that Britten was writing a series of little choral pieces for his brother Robert and the boys choir of Clive House School, Prestatyn.  As a tribute to the choir’s regular rehearsal schedule, Britten called the collection “Friday Afternoons, op. 7.”  His career is peppered with major works that include children’s choruses, from the “Spring Symphony” (1949) to “Children’s Crusade” (1969), but this is among the earliest for treble voices.  “A New Year Carol” is Britten’s gentle setting of Walter de la Mare’s poem.

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