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December 19, 2010

Christmas music is a staple of the radio and
shops this time of year. In addition to the typical crooning about
winter wonderlands, red-nosed reindeer or jingling bells, there are
always some interesting covers of carols and hymns.

Originally, the traditional tunes of the Christmas season had
nothing to do with the time of year, says Philip Brunelle, the founder
and artistic director of the Minneapolis-based choral group
VocalEssence.

“In the medieval ages there were Gregorian
chants that were sung, yet at the same time all these carols were
outside the church,” he tells Weekend Edition host Liane
Hansen. “Gradually, actually about the time of Reformation, is when we
started seeing some changes. Carols were sung rather than singing
Gregorian chant.”

Brunelle says that carols
and hymns are not one and the same. Carols were originally thought of as
a circle dance that was accompanied by singing, whereas a hymn had more
theological implications and was not made for dancing. These songs have
changed a great deal over the years, he says. For example, the hymn
“Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” originally had nothing at all to do with
Christmas, and certainly was not sung with Charles Wesley’s familiar
lyrics.

“The music by Felix Mendelssohn was
composed for male chorus in 1840 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of
Gutenberg’s printing press,” Brunelle says. “After the ceremony was
done, people said, ‘Oh, that’s just a wonderful tune, and it could be
something sacred’ and Mendelssohn said, ‘It will never work with a
sacred text.’ Well, how wrong he was, because 20 years later, the
combination of Wesley’s words and his music came together, and we got
‘Hark The Herald.'”

The endurance of
Christmas carols has to do with the structure of their melodies,
Brunelle says.

“You will find that you can
remember melodies that are step-wise, or [melodies] that go up and down
the scale, like ‘The First Noel’ or ‘Joy to The World,'” he says.

“For every popular Christmas song that we know,
there are about a hundred that never made it.”