It is cold outside in Tenleytown, with a brisk wind blowing piles of leaves down the quiet streets and alleyways. A few streetlamps puddle light onto the sidewalks, but not enough to illuminate the houses. It’s a perfect night for pulling up an easy chair and hunkering down before a well-tended fire, right?
Wrong. A door swings open, and a group of 35 to 40 bundled-up souls ventures out behind a swinging lantern — yes, an authentic old-fashioned lantern, with an honest-to-goodness flickering flame. After a tentative start or two, the strains of “Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful” soon fill the air. Lights on porches and over front doors begin to snap on.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that folks are still caroling on Grant Road NW in the District, an anachronism of a street with Victorian gingerbread architecture and a bend in the middle, which stubbornly refuses to conform to the grid. In a few neighborhoods, town squares and area churches, the caroling tradition is making a comeback. Even if you can conjure up Christmas with the flick of a switch at home, there’s something about delivering the message in person that reveals the holiday spirit in a way that no miracle of technology ever could.
“People stop me on the street all the time to ask when we’ll be caroling,” says Diane Cornell, who will be conducting her 15th caroling session this year. “I’m always surprised at how enthusiastic they are.”
What makes a Christmas carol so special? Musically speaking, at least, its compelling quality has to do with the structure of the song itself, says Norman Scribner, who, as director of the Choral Arts Society, is more than a little acquainted with the genre.
“It’s so clear you don’t think of it as structure,” says Mr. Scribner, who grew up singing carols in a Methodist parsonage in Baltimore. “It’s really folk music in the simplest possible folk-song form.”
Take “Silent Night,” a carol composed for a church service near Salzburg, Austria, in 1818. The church’s organ had failed, so organist Franz Gruber composed a melody that could be sung with guitar accompaniment to a poem by pastor Joseph Mohr.
“It’s probably the simplest and certainly the most beautiful carol,” Mr. Scribner says, “and it’s one that everyone remembers and anyone can sing.”
Regardless of land or language, carols, with their easily improvised harmonies and folkish roots, practically beg observers to sing them.
Carols are important on a number of levels, notes the Rev. Nolan Williams Jr., minister of music at the District’s Metropolitan Baptist Church (whose congregation will be visiting the sick and homeless and singing carols from around the world this holiday season).
“The bottom line is that they are just wonderfully written,” he says. “They are a great combination of melodies that are singable [with] messages that are meaningful.”
As the music editor of the African American Heritage Hymnal, Mr. Williams compiled carols popular in black churches throughout the country. He also contributed a few of his own, such as “Messiah Now Has Come,” as well as those of other composers, such as “Heaven’s Christmas Tree” by Charles Tindley.
Mr. Williams notes that a number of early Negro spirituals have entered the standard repertoire of carolers everywhere. These include John J. Work’s setting of “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” and Joseph Joubert’s arrangement of “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow.”
His hymnal also includes carols by Europeans and other Americans.
“One of the exciting things about Christmas and Easter is that there is a lot that unifies us all,” Mr. Williams says. “’Silent Night,’ ’Joy to the World,’ ’Away in a Manger,’ and ’Angels We Have Heard on High’ — these are pieces that we all embrace.”
Carols have a universal appeal that binds families, neighbors, and communities. Singers in neighborhood carol groups often exhibit quite an age range, diversity of background and holiday tradition preferences. (Children, by the way, are quite useful for running up ahead and ringing doorbells, to ensure carolers literally don’t waste their breath singing before an empty home.)
Nostalgia for a bygone time is also a part of the carol experience. Things seemed simpler, somehow, when caroling was common.
Or were they? According to Penne L. Restad, author of “Christmas in America: A History” (Oxford University Press, 1995), the practice of caroling in America became popular just over 100 years ago, when the nation was confronting challenges of rapid industrialization and population growth.
According to her book, the practice of caroling was introduced in this country by Frederick W. Briggs of Newtonville, Mass., in the 1890s, after a visit to an English town. By 1895, there were 150,000 carolers in Boston alone, and by 1920 there were more than 2,000 American cities with community carolers.
Not only were the Victorians responsible for present caroling concepts, they’ve also contributed some of our best-known and best-loved Christmas choral works.
Edmund Sears’ “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” were both written in America in the mid-19th century. So was Phillips Brooks ’ “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” written after the composer’s 1868 trip to the Holy Land.
“The Victorians made caroling and Christmas celebrations a bigger thing,” says Graham Elliott, director of music at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in the District. “A lot of German traditions, like Christmas trees, were introduced to England by [Prince] Albert,” Queen Victoria’s husband.
The popular Festival of Lessons and Carols service, which began at King’s College, Cambridge, England, as the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols has done much to popularize the more formal use of the carol as part of religious services. It brings together nine lessons and associated carols for a music-and-words experience that has become a mainstay in Episcopal churches throughout the world.
“Everyone thinks that it’s some ancient liturgy that goes back for an enormously long time,” Mr. Elliott says, “but it actually dates from the early 20th century.”
Although you are unlikely to hear “Jingle Bells,” which was written in 1854, as part of this service, the Festival of Lessons and Carols is an opportunity to hear pieces that have been around, in one form or another, long before the Victorians. This year, Mr. Elliott, who is Welsh himself, will be including an old carol from Wales, “Suo Gan,” as part of St. Paul’s Lessons and Carols service.
“We try to match the music to the reading,” Mr. Elliott says. “So, after the first lesson, for example, which is the story of Adam’s fall, the choir sings ’Adam Lay Y’bounden,’ which is an old medieval piece.”
Such early carols are part of a secular/sacred tradition whose roots date to the pre-Christian era, when people used to gather to celebrate the winter solstice. (The term “yule,” by the way, is a Celtic word for the midwinter celebration; the tradition of wassailing hails from early agrarian rites when groups traveled from farm to farm to bring luck to the owner and begging a treat in return.) During the early Christian era, the sacred and the secular formed a musical continuum. Church spectacles and plays regularly included singing and dancing, often to popular tunes, as well as prayer.
The origins of the word “carol” can be traced to a French dance called a carole, which was performed in the round by dancers who also sang the tune.
Verses were usually sung by soloists and the refrain sung by the group. This had the practical benefit of giving the singers and dancers a rest between rounds. It also helped showcase the simple refrain to encourage participation from onlookers.
By the mid-17th-century Puritan era, however, the old practices had fallen out of favor in England. In 1652, Parliament banned the observance of Christmas entirely. In America, however, some of the old traditions persisted, particularly in areas with large non-English populations.
Regardless of when they were written, American carols differed markedly from their European counterparts. Miss Restad notes that the former were less concerned with history and social condition than they were with providing an immediate, emotional message about Jesus and His birth.
Today, of course, music directors such as Mr. Scribner or Mr. Elliott are likely to program older carols and contemporary creations along with the more familiar versions.
“There has been an explosion of carol writing recently,” says Mr. Elliott, who credits the work of contemporary composer John Rutter as well as the King’s College service and others like it in helping to spark the new interest.
If you’re part of a caroling group, however, you might be better off sticking with the old chestnuts.
“It’s easiest to learn songs that are not so intricate,” says Kevin Collar, who will be leading his own group of carolers in Poolesville this year. A Grammy-award-winning orchestrator/arranger who has composed several carols himself, Mr. Collar notes that most folks tend to prefer the familiar.
He organizes the caroling for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Poolesville, where they’ve been singing Christmas songs down the town’s main street for the last 15 years. But this is caroling with a bit of a twist; the revelers ride instead of walk and are accompanied by musical instruments.
“We did it as a way of getting together,” says Mr. Collar, who totes his own soprano saxophone on the hay wagon.
What began as a treat for homebound members of the church has grown to include the entire community, says Mr. Collar, who arranges each carol so both instrumentalists and singers can deliver the message in four-part harmony.
“We don’t rehearse all that much,” Mr. Collar notes. “If it looks like people are having trouble, I can always play the lead melody. But usually there is not a problem. These are melodies that people have remembered forever.”
In addition to spreading the Christmas spirit, Mr. Collar’s group will be collecting donations for a local charity that helps indigent residents with their utility bills.
The Poolesville carol ride ends with a potluck supper at the church. Miss Cornell’s neighbors come for potluck in her home. In the long run, though, many carolers find their beneficence returned, sometimes in some unexpected ways.
“People do tend to run and get the cookies,” Miss Cornell confides. “One of our neighbors even makes us homemade baklava every year.”
Tips before setting off to sing
Looking to start your own neighborhood caroling tradition? Here are a few pointers, courtesy of veteran caroling organizer Diane Cornell:
Make a songbook for each caroler. Be sure the print is large.
Advise everyone to bundle up and wear comfortable walking shoes.
Warm up with a carol or two before you head out.
Bring lights or candles for everyone.
Plan your route. You may want to avoid streets with steep stairs or hills.
Do it on a Friday or a Sunday. More people tend to be home.
Let the children run ahead and ring the doorbell. They get to work off energy and you don’t end up singing in front of an empty house.
Try to get a few choir singers in the group. It will make a real difference in the sound.
Sing one or two verses only. Nobody knows the words to the later ones anyway.
Don’t spend more than an hour or an hour and a quarter. Even in the best weather, people tend to flag.
Lisa Rauschart
Residents from the Grant Road area in Northwest Washington have been caroling in their neighborhood for years, a tradition that was photographed on Friday, December 17, 2004. (Bert V. Goulait/The Washington Times)
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