Playlist:
* Winter 1868 in Williams Creek, BC Edd Wright :46
* Luke II: 17-19 from the Tyndale Bible Edmund Brownless :14
* Hand by Hand – 14th century poem Nicholas Linfield :39
* Marcellus’ lines from Hamlet Robert J. Lurtsema :30
* The Oxen, by Thomas Hardy Aled Jones :43
* The entrance of Father Christmas Tom Everleigh :59
* Emily Carr’s childhood Christmases Molly Raher Newman 7:47
* The Shortest Day, by Susan Cooper Robert J. Lurtsema 1:24
Selection notes
Winter 1868 in Williams Creek, BC This passage is from a letter written in 1868 by an Anglican minister in the gold rush town of Barkerville to Bishop Hills here in Victoria. Barkerville was in its heyday, making it briefly the largest West Coast settlement north of San Francisco. This is from a CD of songs that were popular there at that time, performed in a manner that is authentic to that era. The passage is recited by Edd Wright and the 2000 CD is called Rough But Honest Miner.Luke II: 17-19 from the Tyndale Bible The Tyndale Bible was the first publication of the Bible in the English language, printed in 1535. While studying at Oxford scripture scholar William Tyndale had become dedicated to the principles of the Reformation, and especially to the view that the Gospels should be accessible to everyone. At the time, the Bible was only available in Latin or Greek (and in a new German translation) and could therefore only be read by Church leaders, scholars, and Lutherans. In 1522 he began the process of translation from the original Greek into English, and sought patronage from the court of King Henry VIII. This was before Henry’s split with the Catholic church.
Tyndale was rebuffed – leaders of the English Church well-recognized the authority they derived from their monopoly over access to what people believed was the word of God. In 1524 he left England and settled in the free city of Hamburg, where Lutheran thought was much more supportive of a vernacular Bible. The next year he used the still-new technology of the printing press to begin publishing books of the New Testament and began shipping them to England.
His translations were denounced by Thomas More and Cardinal Woolsey as heresy and "Lutheranism." King Henry ordered that all copies be burnt, and in 1534 Tyndale himself was abducted to a duchy that was friendly to England, tried for heresy, and burnt at the stake.
So effective was the suppression of the Tyndale Bible that of the 3000 copies of the consolidated posthumous edition that was printed in 1535 only two remain in existence today. However, its suppression unleashed an irrepressible public demand in England for a Bible that they could read for themselves. Various other translations of parts of the Bible began to appear, which led King Henry in 1539 to sponsor an authorized version (quickly translated from the Latin Vulgate, not from the older Greek sources.)
This reading of the passages about the Nativity in the Tyndale translation in the Book of Luke are read by Edmund Brownless and are from the Boston Camerata’s 1986 CD A Renaissance Christmas.
Hand by Hand – 14th century poem This is from another Boston Camerata CD; A Medieval Christmas released in 1975. They produced six early-music Christmas albums but their liner notes for this one leave a lot to be desired. No author, source or other information is given about this poem other than "English, 14th century".
Marcellus’ lines from HamletThis passage from Act 1, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is performed by the late National Public Radio broadcaster Robert J. Lurtsema and is from one of the annual Christmas Revels productions. It is on the Revels’ 1987 album The Christmas Revels.
The Oxen, by Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy was born in rural Dorsetshire England in 1840, the son of a stonemason. This poem was written by him in 1915 and refers to a folk belief that cows, cattle and oxen would kneel at midnight on Christmas Eve in remembrance of the Nativity. It was included in a "puny MSS" that Hardy's wife donated to a Red Cross auction to raise money for war relief in January 1916. Hardy had heard this folklore legend from his mother as a child. The concept for the poem must have been percolating in his mind for some time, since he refers to the folk tale in a letter to a friend written in 1898.
The poem is read here by Aled Jones, who achieved considerable fame in the early 1980s as a boy soprano. He sold 6 million albums and is still considered by many to be the best boy soprano that has ever been recorded. After his voice broke at the age of 16 his adult career languished, and he moved on to host a classical-music radio show. This is from an attempted comeback album recorded in 1991 called Celebration: Christmas Fanfares and Carols.
The brief hammer dulcimer musical interlude that precedes is an excerpt from The Friendly Beasts, played by Rosemary Beland on her 1994 Winterbourne album.
The entrance of Father Christmas Mummers' plays are a variation of the wassailing luck-visit, in which groups of performers would appear at the homes of the village's gentry, pubs and other venues to offer entertainment, wish good fortune, and seek gifts of money, drink and food. In past centuries in each English village people (often the local Morris dance team) would performed their own version of such a play, which were usually humourous and featured heroic combat, death, and a miraculous resurrection to provide a happy ending.
The plays are believed to date back to pre-Christian solstice ritual enactments representing the new year as being the resurrection of the old one. In the villages the orally-transmitted scripts constantly evolved, both accidentally and to maintain their entertainment value with new humour in changing times. Some were performed by silent masked players, while others like this one were recited by costumed men standing in a semicircle. In the West Dorset village of Symondsbury, as in many English villages, the ancient tradition had died out in late Victorian times.
This performance is from the first year of its revival in 1951 under the leadership of Tom Everleigh. The revival was based upon remembrances of village elders, and was aided by an 1880 article published in the Folk Lore Record in which J.S. Udal gave a transcript of the previous year's performance in that town. This is from a field recording of that 1951 revival performance, made by folklorist Peter Kennedy for the BBC. It is from Rounder’s 1988 compilation album Songs of Christmas from the Alan Lomax Collection.
Emily Carr’s childhood Christmases Emily Carr was born and lived almost all of her life in three buildings that are in a one-block radius in the James Bay neighbourhood of Victoria, BC. When I compiled the 2003 sampler I lived within that same radius – in fact I lived literally next door to the famous House of All Sorts that she had operated as a rooming house during most of her adult years.
This is a chapter from The Book of Small, written in 1942, which contained 36 short stories about her childhood in our neighbourhood. Carr was born in 1871, so the scenes and customs that she describes here would represent about 1880. Emily is now recognised primarily as having been one of Canada's finest post-impressionist painters, but she first came to widespread national recognition for the reminiscences such as this one that she wrote in her later years.
Actor, artist and musician Molly Raher Newman frequently portrays Emily, with her mannerisms and patterns of speech informed by interviewing Victoria elders who had known her before she died in 1945. Reading in character, Molly has recorded a number of Emily's books, but this reading is from one of her self-published albums called Emily Carr’s Victorian Christmas (2001).
The Shortest Day, by Susan Cooper This piece was especially written for The Christmas Revels by the poet, novelist and playwright Susan Cooper. She is perhaps best known for her The Dark Is Rising series of novels set in the world of Celtic and Arthurian myth and legend. This is also recited by Robert L. Lurtsema, and is from the same CD, The Christmas Revels. It is preceded by a brief musical interlude played by Carolyn Anderson Surrick of Ensemble Galelei and is from their 1993 album Ancient Noëls.
Sampler-making recollections
Many of the Christmas albums in my collection include rather interesting spoken word selections. I didn’t consider any spoken word pieces for inclusion in my Christmas music samplers but I did begin collecting the ones I liked in my computer files of candidates, and in 2003 I assembled this spoken word Christmas sampler.
By that time, my music samplers had developed a style that is not at all typical of Christmas music compilations: They each include a wide variety of musical styles from different eras, they tend to feature less-common songs rather than the familiar Christmas classics, and they are carefully organized to be an emotional journey. It occurred to me that I could follow that same formula for this spoken word compilation.
The spoken word Sampler included a variety of writing and oratorical styles and structurally I returned to the format that I had used in 1998 and 1999; three “movements” plus a prelude and epilogue. In this case, the three parts were historical interest and reminiscences, the Nativity story, and Christmas fiction. I did music it up a bit by including brief instrumental passages to provide transition between most of the spoken word selections.
[Note: Whenever I talk about the structure of my samplers please remember that I am not necessarily following that same structure in these abridged versions of them. I am finding that I cannot always replicate them within a 15 minute time budget and a the resultant limited number of selections. This year I am picking selections that are my personal favourites or which I think represent the overall mood that I achieved on the samplers, and just put them in an order where they sound good together. They probably do have a conscious or unconscious structure, but really I’m just winging it.]
I found the cover image that year and had to use it right away but I quickly regretted my impetuousness. It doesn’t reflect the spoken word aspect of that year’s sampler and would have been much more suitable for a music compilation.
I have collected more good spoken-word tracks over the years in my candidates file but this is the only spoken-word one that I made back in days when I was issuing CDs. I really like the way that it turned out, but truth-be-told, I make these samplers for my own entertainment as much as for others’ enjoyment. While I still listen to all of my others every year I relatively rarely listen to this one. I guess I’m more of a music person.
