For years, I have heralded the arrival of Christmas season by listening through the King’s Singers album, A Little Christmas Music.
It’s hands-down my favorite collection of songs I want to listen to; I’ll make sure it gets played a few times before the holiday is over, even though in general I’m tired of a lot of holiday music. (You can even find used copies of the CD still on Amazon.)
And for years, I skipped track 11, The Coventry Carol, because the harmonization hit my ears as too dissonant. On an album full of bouncy happy celebration, what is up with this??
The brash brass opens with clanging chords that immediately disturb the listener., followed by a ponderous walk through tragic lyrics and a haunting melody.
I got to the point that I skipped it as a physical habit before the first note even struck. Placed as it was between “A little Christmas music” (very silly) and “The Boar’s Head Carol” (very celebratory), their version of the Coventry Carol (which has a lovely tune) stuck out too far for me to handle when listening through the record.
Now this track is one of my favorite tracks on the album. I listened to it three times while writing this post. What changed?
Why love such a sad carol?
I did some research on the carol itself, mostly to find the lyrics; doing so led me down a rabbit hole of medieval passion plays and pageant which told the story of the world “from Creation to Doomsday” for an illiterate populace throughout the Middle Ages. The Coventry area had a robust pageant dating at least back to the late 1300s.
A man named Robert Croo is mentioned as having organized music and “scripts” (my term, if you will) of these ancient plays in his area while helping with costumes and playing some bit roles. Bless this man: he saved a full copy of the lyrics to the Coventry Carol back in the 1500s along with his other production ephemera and apparently some badly-written new material. (lol)
Someone in the late 1500’s added a copy of the music, which matches the tune we know today, then everything was buried when England became much more fiercely Protestant in the 1600s — hostile to Catholic traditions.
Thus, we owe all of our modern knowledge of the Coventry Carol to Thomas Sharp, an English historian of music and pageant plays who translated the lyrics and preserved the tune in his 1800s writings; without his works, the original would have been lost forever when the library that housed it burned down (after Sharp had published his works).
Fittingly, the carol gained renewed exposure when it was performed inside the bombed-out ruins of the Coventry Cathedral in 1940. (The Coventry Cathedral stands hollowed-out to this day as an appeal for peace over war.)
As a much more seasoned musician and music-listener, my tastes are far wider (one of my favorite music genres is progressive metal) and I appreciate compositions that use the music to paint a sound-picture of the events. Long ago I acquired a taste for dissonance, learning to appreciate the “tastiness” of chords which might come as a surprise or even a jab to the listener.
So I returned to The Coventry Carol track on A Little Christmas Music several years ago for another listen, and discovered that I finally “get” what they’re trying to do — and I like it.
A human cost of Christ’s birth
I have a bad habit of ignoring lyrics. My brain is all into rhythms and harmonies and melody lines; I know the words to songs I’ve sung but if you ask me about the words to any song on the radio, I can hardly tell you any of them. They just flow by my brain as part of the texture (unless the words introduce a grating grammar error; then I’ll be yelling subjunctive verb tenses out loud in my car like a crazy woman).
I have learned to soak in the sad tones of The Coventry Carol as performed by the King Singer’s, to appreciate the meaning they infuse into the notes as they are sung.
The richness of the bass line anchors a thoughtful and melancholy stroll through the lyrics which honor the dead children whom King Herod massacred after hearing a rival to his throne had been born in Israel:
Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Lullay, thou little tiny Child,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.O sisters too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we do sing
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.Herod, the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young to slay.That woe is me, poor Child for Thee!
And ever mourn and sigh,
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
How heart-rending this carol is! Yet how beautiful that the pageant players memorialized the women who wailed in grief at the unfair murder of their babies in the wake of Jesus’ birth.
Could you imagine?
I’m not here to make some weird application of this part of the Nativity narrative.
I’m not suggesting that Mary or Joseph or the Wise Men were somehow responsible for Herod’s actions, though I do find this incident to be a notable example of how we cannot escape the inherent paradox of “the problem of evil” in a theistic system (why awful things happen in a universe overseen by an omnipotent God).
A particularly elegant exploration of the human cost of Jesus’ birth is also imagined in sci-fi writer Arthur Clarke’s short story “The Star” from 1956. Full text here
His story made me very uncomfortable when I first encountered it many years ago, but I have grown accustomed to ideas being uncomfortable if I’m being honest about myself and the questions I have about our universe and why things happen as they do. (I recommend that you take a few minutes to read it; it’s not long.)
I simply find it fascinating that, in our modern world, most retellings of the Christmas story skip this moment, “Rachel weeping for her children,” as Matthew says in chapter 2:
The Visit of the Wise Men
2 Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men[a] from the east came to Jerusalem, 2 saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” 3 When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; 4 and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. 5 They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet:
6 “‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
who will shepherd my people Israel.’”7 Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. 8 And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” 9 After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.11 And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. 12 And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.
The Flight to Egypt
13 Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14 And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
Herod Kills the Children
16 Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. 17 Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
18 “A voice was heard in Ramah,
ESV
weeping and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”
Incidentally, there is a truly fascinating study to make here of how Matthew uses his Old Testament sources (Hosea for “Out of Egypt I called my son” and the Septuagint version of Jeremiah’s sermon) to establish this prophecy and fulfillment. Anyone who tries to give you a simplistic explanation for “how would anyone back then have known those were messianic prophecies” can get wrecked, because there’s no clear answer to what’s happening here, textually, if you are a hardcore bible literalist. But that’s for another day.
Take a moment this season to really listen to the Coventry Carol, particularly the King’s Singers version. As we watch in horror at the violence and death stalking historic Palestine at this very moment, perhaps we need to revisit the bloody end of the Nativity story rather than leaving it out.
Read more:
This article gives a good brief history of the carol. I also highly recommend reading the carol’s Wikipedia article; it’s quite interesting from a music history perspective. | For a summary of Arthur Clarke’s story, you can check the Wikipedia entry for it, but it’s a very short story – you will read the actual thing in 10 minutes, which I would recommend doing before hitting Wiki.
just:words 
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