The Singing Well-Diggers and Other Entertainments
CD Review: Sing We Noel: Christmas Music from England and Early America. Nonesuch, 1991.

Remember Schroeder in A Charlie Brown Christmas when he plays some alleged "Beethoven Christmas music"? That's me about now. Well, almost. Maybe not Beethoven, but Praetorius and Heinrich Schutze, at least.

Christmas music, for me, isn't Jingle Bells and endless supermarket repetitions of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but rather I take the opportunity during the sacred season to enjoy plenty of early music CDs. There's my two faves, the Gabrieli Consort's two Lutheran Christmas albums. Rather a surprising admission coming from me, Mr. Chauvinist Catholic Triumphalist, but these aren't the work of the Lake Wobegon Church Choir.

The two CDs are dedicated to liturgical reconstructions of a Christmas celebration at the Saxon ducal court in 1660 (including a seventeenth-century oratorio faintly reminiscent of Handel's Messiah) as well as of the morning service at a hypothetical north German cathedral from 1620. They're astounding in their outrageous--almost medieval--joyfulness, a hyperactive collision of Venetian polychoral singing, kettledrums and Ein feste burg ist unser Gott. The fact that the ensemble includes all those weird instruments like sackbutts, shawms, harpsichords, and the beer-bottle-shaped great bass rackett, it's hard to resist.

They've also done an impressive if slightly ponderous two-CD set of Epiphany at Bach's home parish, but we'll get back to that on January 6. Say what you will about that gloomy Teuton Marty Luther, but he could certainly write a mean hymn. Also, ironically enough, there's more Latin in the Lutheran hymns showcased than in the average Catholic parish today. Hmmm?

Okay, I'll get off my high-church hobbyhorse. If you're looking for something a little more general and perhaps user-friendly, the Boston Camerata's lovely Sing We Noel does the trick nicely. The Boston Camerata has put out a plethora of themed Christmas albums, A Medieval Christmas, A Renaissance Christmas, An American Christmas, and so on and so forth. However, Sing We Noel brings together the best of each album, I believe, and reveals an unjustly-forgotten slice of American musical history to boot. It's a favorite around the Alderman household every December.

There's a remarkable vigor to the pieces, such Nowell, out of your slepe with its ear-catching combination of semi-chant and tambours, and also Exultemus et Letemus. The latter was sung by boisterous choirboys on St. Nicholas's day and punctuated by medieval French exclamations of "am I loud enough!" and "can you hear me?" Another delight is Nova, nova, Aue fitt ex Eva, which indulges in some Latinate worldplay about the relationship between the name of Eve and the Ave of the Virgin, punctuated by some charmingly-sung verses in archaic English.

Perhaps the deliberate, archaelogical ye-olde-ness of the lyrics of many of the pieces may put off some listeners. I used to think the accent pronouncing the toast Make We as Mere as We May which immediately precedes the singing of Wassail sounded a bit too close to the Muppets' Swedish Chef character for comfort. Now, however, I appreciate it a bit more keenly and love the exotic bittersweet syllables of the semi-Chaucerian English in the track Gabriel from Evene Kin which transposes a sweet boy-soprano carol with a reading on the Annunciation from the Wycliffe Bible. Wycliffe's Englishing of Scripture was, admittedly, idiosyncratic, but here, we still can glimpse the gauzy figures of the angel and the annunciate Virgin through that verdigrissed haze of Medieval words.

Also, when you puzzle out the translations, some of it is actually pretty darn funny: Make We as Mere as We May instructs that wet blankets should be thrown in ditches, for example, while some of the Latin texts have a humorously shocking lack of political correctness.

And then there's the singing well-diggers. That's a family inside joke, as the final track, Gloustershire Wassail which is an arrangement of Wassail, Wassail All Over the Town, has some peculiar accoustic quirks to it. For some reason it sounds like the singers are processing down a long corridor or perhaps digging a well. It'sa striking conceit, if a little bizarre, but another one of the album's peculiar and sometimes uexpected charms. You have to get used to it, really; medieval music doesn't always sit on the ear the same way modern tunes do, but when you come to know them, you will love them.

Besides that, though, there is plenty to entertain the untrained modern ear. There's a pleasant set of variations on Greensleeves I could listen to for hours, as well as a tantalizing sampling of shape-note singing from Early America in the form of While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night. Shape-note singing might be described, perhaps uncharitably, as Palestrina for Dummies, a simplified system of notation from Colonial days that was designed for people without music-reading skills. The result is remarkably harmonic, almost polyphonic but without the sometimes troubling polish of more academic compositions.

It's wonderfully unvarnished. That's part of the attraction of many Christmas carols, isn't it? Most are anonymous, naive, sometimes even silly. But they've endured, and even come to be admired by the greatest of composers. They're humble music enclosing a sacred mystery, just as a humble stable housed, for one night, Something bigger than the whole world.