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I’ve barely scratched the surface of the history of Christmas Carols because I’ve allowed myself to be diverted into a few interesting side-channels, so in this penultimate post of the series let me rapidly fill in some of the major historical points and give you all the occasional link to some lovely recordings of a Carol or two. I’m going to concentrate on the period from about AD1300 to the present day since I’ve already speculated quite enough about the many, many centuries of singing before that early date and about how many musicologists and text analysers link our Carols back into our ancient ages.


Xmasfan, Thank-you for your comment and question - keep reading for I do give you some starting points after I make the following general observations. I've drawn my ideas from many disparate sources - and from that which I was taught as child and teenager - but the Christian tradition is that much of what we use is ancient and if one follows, step be step, the words and the musics back into history (tiny step by tiny step) then one can trace the unbroken links into the furthest reaches of our past. This process is part of what is called the Archaeology of Music - more below, keep reading. That idea is not only true for Christmas Carols but is true for most of what we do today. We do not live, today, cut off from the past, divorced from it simply because we live today and our ancestors lived in the past. We are the product of that past and everything we have, and everything we do, and everything we say (and the ways in which we say and sing them) are born from our past. Our science and our technology, our art and our literature, our language and our music, and our morality and our beliefs are exclusively ours but all born from the past actions and discoveries of our ancestors. In this day and age it seems to us that the pace of change is very fast and we assume that it was always so: that's not true. Up until two-hundred and fifty years ago the pace of change in all the fields of human activity and culture was very slow indeed - and music was no exception to that rule. It is by no means inconceivable that many of our older tunes are very old indeed and musicologists are hard at work uncovering our ancient musical history. Start by reading: Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn, Journal of Cuneiform Studies, xxxviii (1986), 94-98 and follow that with: West, M. L., The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts, Music & Letters, Vol. 75, No. 2. (May, 1994), pp. 161–179. Now, for a recording of some 2,500 years old ancient Greek music you need to get hold of Musiques de l'Antiquité Grecque by the Ensemble Kérilos. I have a copy but I don't think that it is currently available excepting through your Library service. Try using a well-known search engine and see what that throws up at you. For the Archaeology of Music you should also follow the Proceedings of the ISGMA, their website is over at http://www.musicarchaeology.org/. Do email me at [email protected] if you would like to know more or want to chat about this subject or want or need further references or starting points for your own researches. The CD by Daimonia Nymphe - Evi Stergiou and Spyros Giasafakis (aka Daimonia Nymphe) - although fanciful and not in any sense to be trusted as historically accurate, does, for me, convey something of the excitement and, perhaps, the sound of ancient music. They use the ancient instruments and are therefore constrained by those intruments' capabilities. They are human and play them: those who originally played them three thousand years ago were also human. That's all that can be said. Reconstructing the music of our ancient past is turning out to be a lot easier - but still very difficult - than we originally thought. So many written records have been left that all we have to do today is decipher them. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Actually it's d***ed difficult - but not impossible!
xmasfan
Mr Joyce I've greatly enjoyed your posts. Where can one turn for additional reading on this topic? I'm especially fascinated by the suggestion some carols go back thousands of years -- I've never heard this posited anywhere before,