Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Where Have All the Carols Gone?Author(s): Mark StoreySource: Fortnight, No. 74 (Dec. 14, 1973), pp. 24-25Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25544834 .

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24 FRIDAY 14th DECEMBER 1973

Christmas Fare

fi Surprisingly after all thetalkaboutthe

8 Queen's Festival in a cultural desert,

|j therearesomethingstogotooverthe

|| holidays.

|> On the musical side there is the

|| usual Messiah in the Ulster Hall by the

ft Belfast Philharmonic Society and the

|| Ulster Orchestra on 14th and 15th

I Dcember. Janet Price by popular

(< demand leads the soloists. Among a the long list of carol services and the

| like, the first visit of the King's Singers

>| to Ireland stands out. They are per

il forming in St. Anne'son 18th Decem >> ber.

|| The Lyric's holiday production this

|| year is Moliere's School for Wives in a

|| translation by Richard Wilbur. But

a with the Opera House still closed 8 there is no pantomime for the chil

li dren. For lighter relief you will have to

|| make do with the Christmas Circus at

|| the Grove Theatre.

|| For those in search of the less usual

the BBC and the Ulster Museum are

laying on a series of (free) public

recordings in the new wing of the Museum. Following the previous suc cesses in this line of promotion tickets are going quickly?the first two ses

sions with Harvey Adams and Gra ham Cooper (English Folk) and Juli ette Greco are already sold out. But there is still space (as we go to press) for Calchakis' South American Folk on 20th December, for Shusha's Per sia Songs on 28th December, and John Silvo and David Moses' Songs of the West Indies on 30th December.

Application in writing please to the BBCticketunit.

If you are still short of ideas for a

present or two, the Arts Council

might provide the answer with its latest series of Poster Poems. Each is

a team effort by an artist and a poet: James Simmons paired with Graham

Gingles, Derek Mahon with Basil

Blackshaw, Stewart Parker with Mai- l\ colm Bennett, and two others. For a 8 province reputedly renowned for its ft poets the word play is less than ft

exciting. None of the team products || matchestheeffectof Anthony Weir's || Onion Poem (on sale from Fortnight). |j But the overall effect is pleasing ss

enough for 50 pence a time. ||

Finally, if you just want something ? artistic for yourself, you might try 8

going along to the Arts Council Gal- ft

lery next week (18th-21st) for the ft annual share-out of the national col-

|| lection. So far this has been limited >> more or less to public buildings, but

|j there may be scope for the enthusias- |s tic amateur who is prepared to meet || the official rule that the picture shall 8

be displayed in a place where it is 8 open to the public gaze. And in any ft case this is the only chance to see ft

what the national collection really || adds up to. ||

Mark Storey

Where Have All The Carols Gone?

Since this is apparently the season of

good cheer (although in Belfast that is

sickening nonsense), I shall cast aside the critic's weeds, forget that I could be

sitting behind 'Rathcor at my 96th concert of the year, and regale you with sweet and pleasant nothings. One of the sad things about living in a town is the loss of the art of carol-singing. In my experience you either have endless

groups of two or three at a time, knock

ing on your door from October onwards,

running Hallowe'en and Christmas into one continuous chance to get something for worse than nothing, or you have the Salvation Army band, strategically placed in the middle of the street, play ing inaudibly and with some haste,

whilst their phalanxes go with ruthless determination from door to door, chal

flenging your charitable instincts to freeze at the roots. Allow me, then, a

nostalgic glance at the ways of the country folk. When I was a lad in the wilds of East Anglia we did things differ

For as long as I could remember the

anticipatory highlight of Christmas was the carol-singing. Before I was consid ered old enough to take part I was at least allowed to stay up until the singers

had been. Af r their caterwauling on

inside, consume a prodigous number of

mincepies, washed back with the home made ginger wine, still warm from the pan, and laugh and chat inconsequently. Then, in the privacy of our home, sitting on the arms of chairs, they would launch into any number of maudlin versions of the nativity and its implications. And the vocal implications were pretty dire. I remember, even in my childish inno cence, wondering what could cause a

man who sang to look so pained in the treble clef. And yet to me these people

were gods, the glorious flowering of the local squirearchy, bringing their gifts of frankincense and mirth to our fireside.

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FORTNIGHT 25

It is a curious fact that carol-singing, as a pleasurable and undying art, does

not depend on a love, knowledge, or tra

dition of music. The local schoolmas

ter's elite band of choristers, hand

picked and trained each lunch hour, were a pain in the neck. By the same

token, we might sit around in the kit

chen on Christmas Eve, listening to the

little angels from King's College (and

only 30 miles away at that?they be

longed to us!) as we wrapped parcels and

stirred things, but we knew that our

particular glory that evening would be of a different order. Of course, by the time I

was old enough to go the rounds, there were fewer gods and goddesses about, as

is always the way. By the time we left the

village the breed was extinct. None the

less, there was glamour enough,

even in

carrying the collecting box, and knock

ing on doors that showed an under

standable reluctance to open. I remem

ber one particularly tricky spot, known

appropriately as The Drift, where it was

impossible in the dark to tell gardens from paths from cesspits; perhaps it

didn't matter, as the proud tenants, after our army's incursion, would find it

equally hard to distinguish as they drew

back their bright curtains on Christmas

morning.

Collecting the money also gave you a

share in counting it, which was pleasur able enough, even though we always had a Good Cause, and it absolved you from a lot of the unpleasantness of singing. That was always the biggest problem. And things weren't helped when the new

rector was seized with a democratic fit

and drafted in every villager under 20 for

miles around. It was bad enough in the

old days, with a small like-minded

bunch, to determine exactly what we

were to sing at the next house: under the

rector's regime, chaos blossomed with a

wild exuberance. The sheer arduousness

of the trek however?miles and miles on

foot beneath the immense Suffolk sky, often in a cold drizzle that damped our

few lanterns?shook off the surplus by the time we got back to the farmer's house at the bottom of the village, where the mincepies came straight out of the oven, and we actually got a choice of drinks.

There were years when we seemed to take it more seriously, when we had bizarre practices, when some of us

tackled the bass-line?even the tenor!? when the Welshman we called on was

moved to join in with his rich baritone, and when one or two girls knew all about the fashionable descants. Oh, what

heady days were those, when a tweak on

the tuning fork would determine the

pitch, when we were truly creative, when we felt we'd earned the hospitality we

knew we'd get at which house (you could taste the skin on the milky coffee, the crumbled chalk of the pies, before you

rang the bell), when we didn't all sit around feeling foolish on the vicar's

sofa, but were bubbling over with out next piece, and then out into the cold for the walk back. One year, a fellow tested the ice on the lake as we passed it, and fell in to his waist: but he wasn't our

strongest singer. We tended to have too

many male voices anyway: there was not much thought given to family planning

in those days. The general effect was of a

curiously manic growl far below the bass

staves, occasionally balanced by desper ate female acrobatics in the upper leger lines. This all depended on which note

we started on, a subtle point appreciated by few of our regulars until it was too late.

Perhaps the death knell of the tradi tion was tolled in the last year I went

back to the village. I arrived on Christ mas Eve to hear that the carol-singers, which meant me as well, volens nolens.

^^ByiTjFfHnfyTuTTO Hfeadl l'\em

had been roped in by the rector to be the

centrepiece of his Christmas Carol Ser vice in the neighbouring village. By then

we were a sorry, motley band?a handful

of dismal growlers, with not even the comfort of a stock repertoire to fall back on. There was no time for a rehearsal (let alone larynx transplants); we went into the church not knowing what we were to

sing, even less how we were to sing it. We'd been placed at the altar end, a real

choir. When our turn came, after end

less prayers and sermons and hymns and

carols (using up in the process anything we might have got through without too

much disgrace) we were so paralytic none of us quite knew what was happen ing. Our only relief was that, after our

endless moment of humiliation and

shame, we were able to slip out, osten

sibly to continue our singing back in the

village, and thereby avoid the rector's chilled disbelief. We hadn't the heart to

carry on, beyond a few duty calls, and a

lot of people found themselves with too

many mincepies on their hands that

year.

Letters Sir.

You are concerned, and rightly so,

with the plight of the Arab refugees. Where you are wrong, however, is in

attributing their plight to the creation of the Jewish State. The Arab states created the problem when they invaded Israel in

1948, and ever since, have as an act of

policy kept them inmisery in camps. On the day of Israel's Declaration of Inde

pendence, which was coupled with an

appeal for friendship with the Arab states, she was invaded by armies from

Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, all supported by contingents from Saudi Arabia and Yemen. There was fierce

fighting; villages were destroyed, many killed. The Secretary General of the Arab League had threatened "this will

be a war of extermination and a momen

tous massacre that will be spoken of like

the Mongolian massacre and the Cru

sades". Thousands of Arabs, encour

aged by Arab leaders, sough shelter in

Arab lands; the refugees were led to

believe that they.would return home

within a short time, that Israel would be

totally destroyed. Indeed Mr. Emile

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