Voices of Connection: 12/22 Away in a Manger / O Come All Ye Faithful
For the month of December, Voices’ Artistic Administrator, Wesley Chinn will be curating a selection of Holiday music from recent Candlelight Christmas and Family Holiday Concerts. Read more about Wesley here.
As careful readers have probably divined, despite a mostly secular and somewhat Jewish upbringing, 20-odd years of professional choral singing—much of it in church—have turned me into someone with strong opinions about what kind of music is appropriate for which part of the Christmas season. Even by that standard, though—and as much as I personally can’t quite wrap my head around it being so close to Christmas in this ever-so-strange year—I think it’s now close enough to Christmas to delve into what one of my colleagues refers to as the “Baby Jesus” carols.
So, today we present two carol arrangements by David Willcocks. Willcocks was the director of the choir of King’s College Cambridge, and the editor of 100 Carols for Choirs, a mainstay of Christmas-time choral programming. The first, “Away in a Manger” exists in two different tunes—this one is probably less familiar to American audiences, but actually a slightly later composition (this tune dates from 1894). “O Come All Ye Faithful,” with it’s soaring last-verse descant (here presented as the second of two verses, with the intervening 4 skipped), is also familiar; note the skip in the melody on the second syllable of the word “Angels”—this is the way it is written in almost all notated sources, but probably not the way almost any of us first learned it. Speaking as a lover of singing in general and group singing in particular, I’ll say only that to me, outside of a professional recording, either way is perfectly correct—the only wrong way to sing it is not to join in at all! — Wesley Chinn
Join us for our Candlelight Holiday Concert
Now available on-demand!
TRADITIONAL CHRISTMAS CAROLS (arr. David Willcocks)
Away in a Manger
O Come All Ye Faithful
Voices of Ascension
Dennis Keene, Artistic Director
David Enlow, Organ
Recorded live at the Voices of Ascension CANDLELIGHT CHRISTMAS CONCERT
December 12, 2018, The Church of the Ascension, New York City
The singers in this performance are represented by the
American Guild of Musical Artists, AFL-CIO.