Christmas carols are a joyful part of the Christmas season every year as we sing these songs at church, with family, and maybe caroling in your neighborhood. Music is a powerful way to praise and rejoice in God's glorious gift of Jesus to save mankind from sin and death. Let us rejoice and celebrate the Christmas story of Jesus' birth with carols old and new! Learn more about the popularity of Christmas carols below with traditional and modern songs.
The distribution of Christmas music books in the 19th century helped to increase the popular interest in carols. William Sandys' 1833 compilation Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern featured the first publication in print of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen", "The First Noel", and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." The publication in 1871 of Christmas Carols, New and Old by Henry Ramsden Bramley and Sir John Stainer was also a notable contribution to a revival of carols in Victorian Britain.
christmas carols church music
When we think about the Christmas season, music plays a big part in our memories, experiences, and celebrations of the holiday. After all, what is a Christmas church service without Christmas songs being joyfully sung? What is a Christmas party without Christmas tunes playing away in the background? Some holiday songs can tend to distract us from the true meaning of Christmas, but thankfully there are a wide array of Christmas carols that give worship to Jesus and direct our hearts toward gratitude for His coming to dwell among us as Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14).
During the Christmas season, most people can agree on the music they love, whether they are Christians or not. While the world continues to sing Christmas carols, many Christian musicians are still writing songs that tell the story of Christmas in a fresh new way. This is not a list of Christmas carols. Rather, this is a list of contemporary Christian worship songs that follow the theme of Christmas.
This is not his first Christmas away from home. He grew up in the mainly Russian-speaking Ukrainian province of Luhansk, he said through a translator at the church after the rehearsal. He was about three years into his music studies, envisioning becoming a teacher, when the war there broke out in 2014.
A Christmas carol is a carol (a song or hymn) on the theme of Christmas, traditionally sung at Christmas itself or during the surrounding Christmas holiday season. The term noel has sometimes been used, especially for carols of French origin.[1] Christmas carols may be regarded as a subset of the broader category of Christmas music.
In the 13th century, in France, Germany, and particularly, Italy, under the influence of Francis of Assisi, a strong tradition of popular Christmas songs in regional native languages developed.[3] Christmas carols in English first appear in a 1426 work of John Awdlay, a Shropshire chaplain, who lists twenty five "caroles of Cristemas", probably sung by groups of 'wassailers', who went from house to house.[4] The songs now known specifically as carols were originally communal songs sung during celebrations like harvest tide as well as Christmas. It was only later that carols began to be sung in church, and to be specifically associated with Christmas.
Carols gained in popularity after the Reformation in the countries where Protestant churches gained prominence (as well-known Reformers like Martin Luther authored carols and encouraged their use in worship). This was a consequence of the fact that the Lutheran reformation warmly welcomed music.[6] During the years that the Puritan ban on Christmas was in place in England, semi-clandestine religious services marking Christ's birth continued to be held, and people sang carols in secret.[7]
The publication of Christmas music books in the 19th century helped to widen the popular appeal of carols. "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen", "The First Noel", "I Saw Three Ships" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" appear in English antiquarian William Sandys' 1833 collection Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern.[8] Composers such as Arthur Sullivan helped to repopularise the carol, and it is this period that gave rise to such favourites as "Good King Wenceslas" and "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear", a New England carol written by Edmund H. Sears and Richard S. Willis. The publication in 1871 of Christmas Carols, New and Old by Henry Ramsden Bramley and Sir John Stainer was a significant contribution to a revival of carols in Victorian Britain. In 1916, Charles Lewis Hutchins published Carols Old and Carols New, a scholarly collection which suffered from a short print run and is consequently rarely available today. The Oxford Book of Carols, first published in 1928 by Oxford University Press (OUP), was a notably successful collection; edited by the British composers Martin Shaw and Ralph Vaughan Williams, along with clergyman and author Percy Dearmer, it became a widely used source of carols in among choirs and church congregations in Britain and remains in print today.[9][10]
Traditionally, carols have often been based on medieval chord patterns, and it is this that gives them their uniquely characteristic musical sound. Some carols like "Personent hodie", "Good King Wenceslas", and "The Holly and the Ivy" can be traced directly back to the Middle Ages, and are among the oldest musical compositions still regularly sung.
Singing carols in church was instituted on Christmas Eve 1880 in Truro Cathedral, Cornwall, (see article on Nine Lessons and Carols), and now seen in churches all over the world.[19] The songs that were chosen for singing in church omitted the wassailing carols, and the words "hymn" and "carol" were used almost interchangeably. Shortly before, in 1878, the Salvation Army, under Charles Fry, instituted the idea of playing carols at Christmas, using a brass band. Carols can be sung by individual singers, but are also often sung by larger groups, including professionally trained choirs. Most churches have special services at which carols are sung, generally combined with readings from scripture about the birth of Christ; this is often based on the famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King's College, Cambridge.
In Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, where it is the middle of summer at Christmas, there is a tradition of Carols by Candlelight concerts held outdoors at night in cities and towns across the country, during the weeks leading up to Christmas. First held in Melbourne, "Carols by Candlelight" is held each Christmas Eve in capital cities and many smaller cities and towns around Australia. Performers at the concerts include opera singers, musical theatre performers and popular music singers. People in the audience hold lit candles and join in singing some of the carols in accompaniment with the celebrities. Similar events are now held all over Australia, usually arranged by churches, municipal councils, or other community groups. They are normally held on Christmas Eve or the Sunday or weekend before Christmas. A similar recent trend in South Africa and New Zealand are for smaller towns to host their own Carols by Candlelight concerts.
Most carols follow a more or less standard format: they begin by exalting the relevant religious feast, then proceed to offer praises for the lord and lady of the house, their children, the household and its personnel, and usually conclude with a polite request for a treat, and a promise to come back next year for more well-wishing. Almost all the various carols are in the common dekapentasyllabos (15-syllable iamb with a caesura after the 8th syllable) verse, which means that their wording and tunes are easily interchangeable. This has given rise to a great number of local variants, parts of which often overlap or resemble one another in verse, tune, or both. Nevertheless, their musical variety remains very wide overall: for example carols from Epirus are strictly pentatonic, in the kind of drone polyphony practised in the Balkans, and accompanied by C-clarinets and fiddles; just across the straits, on Corfu Island, the style is tempered harmonic polyphony, accompanied by mandolins and guitars. Generally speaking, the musical style of each carol closely follows the secular music tradition of each region.
Christmas carols in predominantly Catholic Philippines exhibit the influence of indigenous, Hispanic and American musical traditions, reflecting the country's complex history. Carollers (Tagalog: Namamaskô) begin wassailing in November, with mostly children and young adults participating in the custom.
Christmas music performed in the United States ranges from popular songs, such as "Jingle Bells", to Christmas carols, such as "Away in a Manger", "O Little Town of Bethlehem", and numerous others of varying genres. Church and college choirs celebrate with special programs and online recordings.
But the joy of singing carols was infectious and unstoppable. Bands of traveling singers and musicians, or carolers, as they would come to be known, performed on street corners, in taverns and in homes in village after village.
During this time, the distinction between Christmas carols (popular songs for informal singing) and Christmas hymns (composed by skilled churchmen for formal use in worship) began to be blurred. Carols came to be sung in church, and hymns outside of liturgical settings.
When the English Queen Victoria married her cousin Prince Albert of Germany in 1840, it became known that the royal couple was quite fond of Christmas carols. In an attempt to gain royal favor, numerous families and church groups came to the royal palace to sing for them.
In the United States, it was Lutheran and Methodist congregations, especially, who made carols popular both in worship and in the culture at large. By the end of the Civil War, caroling had become a way for many denominations to evangelize beyond their four church walls. Caroling groups brought joy to the sick and the homebound with their musical visits. 2ff7e9595c
Comments