CD 1: The Holly and the Ivy
The Holly and the Ivy
VRS-499, original LP cover
This disc presents a historical Christmas document as authentic as its music is beautiful. The first half (tracks 1-11) comprises the carols most beloved in England and the United States today. The second half (tracks 12-24) gives a picture of Christmas as celebrated in song in England from medieval times through the age of the Stuarts, including the earliest known carols.
Most people think of a carol as a "hymn of praise, especially such as is sung at Christmas" (Encyclopedia Britannica). The carol has evolved as a generally happy song appealing to all kinds of people. Originally, in medieval and earlier times, most carols derived from the secular sung rhythms or chants which facilitated the business of living together. Carols developed ya specific structure: an alternation of chorus and solo lines, and as such, were often songs for dancing - during the group chorus, the dancers would move in a ring or chain. This early alternation pattern remains fundamental to all types of carols, even later religious adaptations. But of the English dance carols of the common people, only a few scraps remain.
The bulk of the nearly 500 extant ancient English carols (from before the Renaissance), however, are not for dancing: they are the old dancing songs turned' into religious hymns. Secular dance songs were seldom thought worth recording and continued a sort of back-stairs existence. When a new wave of religious fervor swept over Europe and England in the 13th century, its propagators, the Franciscans, seized on the familiar dance songs to popularize their doctrines. These friars (like the Methodists in the 18th century) made parodies, substituting religious messages for the words of profane love, while retaining the original melodies. This transfer was easy, for the carol form very closely resembled the Latin conductus, an antiphonal processional hymn.
Ty the 15th century, the English carol had become largely a processional hymn or litany, sung by the choir at the morning mass, at midday or evening prayers, or occasional) at ceremonies outside the church. In large churches, the carols were sung, just Tike their Latin counterparts, with the stanzas in two parts and the "chorus" in three. The Latin hymns were copied in a "processional," and one of the carols on this recording, the song of the Benedictine nuns at Chester, is preserved (with its music, about 1425) in such a service book. Although in Latin, the hymn has an English lullaby refrain, "By by, lully lu." Technically only extra-liturgical adornments, carols offer a surprisingly early example of English in church services.
A distinction must be made between "carol" as commonly used as any festive song and the "true carol," a medieval musical and literary forine fixe (like the rondeau, virelai, or ballade). Originally, the true carol was a song with a set stanza form (usually four lines, including a refrain) and a "burden," one or two lines sung as an opening "chorus" before the first stanza and repeated after each stanza. Lullay my liking, for example, illustrates the pattern. The presence of a burden, therefore, technically determines a carol; but many sons without a burden claim the title by courtesy and long use. I Saw Three Ships provides a good contrast to the carol form; with its internal refrains interspersed between the narrative lines, it illustrates the typical traditional folk ballad.
The banning of the processions by the reformers in 1547 killed the religious carol for many decades, and "anthems" were not allowed in the churches in England until the fifth revision of the Prayer Book in 1661. When carols ceased to be sung as processional hymns, the function of the burden as an opening passage to set the tone of the whole song faded; nor was it preserved by the secular ring dances which survived only in the provinces away from the main stream of cultural activity. Only fifty true carols, mostly secular, have been found since 1550. In nearly all later Christmas songs (and in those for other occasions), the burden is absent, and only the refrain is repeated.
True carols are typically English and typically medieval. While much of medieval English literature interests only the specialist, not so the best of the carols. Along with the popular religious drama cycles, the carol is the dynamic part of that literature; furthermore, it lays the groundwork and establishes the patterns for the 16th century. The greatest flowering of English literature - the age of Shakespeare - does not derive from the shoddy stuff of the self-styled successors of Chaucer: the "drivelling monk" Lydgate, "moral" Gower, Hoccleve. Instead, the glories of the Elizabethans, their drama and lyrics, grow out of the medieval mystery plays and the carols: the literature of the rising merchants, yeomen, townspeople, and new adventuring aristocrats.
So the English carols, and all the other songs on this recording - from the 14th century German In dulci jubilo to the mid-19th century American carol, We three kings - are a living form, one which played a major part in developing English poetry, and in providing the continuity that sparks the composition of new carols. When we sing or hear "Christmas carols" we become part of a tradition, documented for at least seven centuries, that continually revitalizes this most joyous festival of family and universal brotherhood.
– Rossell Hope Robbins
Originally released as Vanguard/The Bach Guild VRS-499