The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols fills King’s College Chapel at Cambridge University every year on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. The service is broadcast by the BBC and heard, according to some estimates, by 400 million worldwide listeners. Expats, Anglophiles, far-flung members of the so-called Commonwealth and countless others tune in to hear Christmasy words and music delivered with superlative English diction, immaculate intonation, seriousness of purpose, and carefully packaged joy and wonder. The sleek, precisely staged solidity of the performance is like a giant log pitched onto the yuletide fire, the heft and crackle of its warming morality stoking belief in a timeless tradition that, in turn, conjures an ordered world.
During the service, favorite Christmas carols are sung by the famous college choir and the packed congregation in arrangements that culminate in ecstatic final-verse descants from the boy choristers, their arcing melodies lofted up towards the exquisite fanned vaulting on harmonic feints undertaken by King’s Chapel organ. The fun for the amateur singers beyond the rood screen comes in cleaving to the beloved melodies against this glorious sonic assault.
The carols alternate with the choir’s motets ranging across the many centuries of Anglican church music. These musical numbers are interleaved with nine readings running from Genesis to the Gospel of John that predict, chronicle and, finally, take metaphysical stock of the Christian Savior’s birth.
Many, perhaps most, of the millions who listen, might well believe that the Festival of Lessons and Carols, at least in some form, is as old as King’s Chapel itself, which, along with the choir, was founded in the 15th century under the aegis of Henry VI. But like so much else in the Olde Country and among its New World epigones, this “ancient” tradition was invented relatively recently. The first Lessons and Carols service was held a few weeks after the armistice that ended the First World War. This year marks the festival’s 105th edition at Kings’ College.
The impetus for the Kings’ College service, as musicologist Jacob Sagrans demonstrates in a chapter entitled “’What England Has Done for a Thousand Years’: Medievalism in Christmas Lessons and Carols Services” in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, came during World War I. British army chaplain and King’s alumnus, Eric Milner-White, wrote from France to the provost of the college:
“At the present moment of utter chaos … we have a chance which, boldly taken, might make King’s one of the most important churches in the land. … It is my passionate conviction that if we could catch and crystallize the wisest principles of liturgical reform in the worship of our Chapel, we should be doing a great work, not only for the college and university, but also for the Church and the Empire. … Colour, warmth and delight can be added to our yearly round in many ways.”
A century on, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is the foundation of the King’s brand—a sonic equivalent of the Nike Swoosh. It is not just the classy English vibe that appeals, but also the echoes of the geo-political glories of a bygone Britain. The Empire is dead, but Lessons and Carols endure. That the service is especially popular in the USA and Canada speaks to the enduring myths of Anglo-American hegemony. Christmas Eve from King’s marks an especially special moment in the Special Relationship, though you can bet Donald Trump won’t be listening through his earbuds on his mid-morning round of Christmas Eve golf at Mar-a-Lago.
The King’s service has been taken up by many American churches, including those at elite universities and colleges, which have long sought to emulate the rituals practiced back on the Mother Ship. Christian liturgical chronologies have to be shoehorned into the American academic calendar. God goes on holiday over Winter Break; He doesn’t hang around for Christmas on campus.
As a result, these Lessons and Carols typically happen, as at the outpost of the Ivy League where I joined in the service, in the midst of Advent, a season of expectation and penitence, rather than celebration.
The readings mostly follow the order of service laid out by Milner-White a century ago. But some concessions and adjustments have to be made, as in the frequent inclusion of British-American poet Denise Levertov’s “Annunciation,” which extols the courage of Mary’s consent to accept God’s child in her womb. Likewise, the choral offerings proceed from the solemnity of Elizabethan master William Byrd to a potpourri of cosmopolitan styles that this year included a folksy arrangement of “Go Tell It On the Mountain.” This number added requisite American flavoring to complement the traditional English fare.
At the beginning of this year’s service at Cornell University in Upstate New York, the director of what was previously called United Religious Work but a few years ago was repackaged as the Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making reads an acknowledgment that we are on the land of the indigenous peoples of the region. He then tells us that the Nativity narrative about to be retailed took place in what were then occupied lands. The statement comes in the past tense and refers to the Roman occupation.
It seems clear that the congregation is being prompted— if gingerly and implicitly—to reflect on the present horrors in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The sixth, seventh, and eighth readings (the first two of these from Luke, the last from Matthew) take us to Bethlehem in the Occupied Territories. One can’t help but think of the ongoing violence, death, displacement, and destruction. The ninth and last lesson comes from the Gospel of John and echoes the opening of Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word.” Of Palestine in our time not a single word is heard.
The indigenous land acknowledgement is delivered from the stone pulpit at which Martin Luther King, Jr. had preached in 1964, as did his father fifteen years later. Would King have been silent on the matter that hung over everything during these Lessons and Carols?
The sixth reading describes Emperor Augustus’s imposition of a tax and his requirement that all the world’s residents be “registered,” as it is put in the New Revised Standard Version used in many American college chapels (in contrast to the King James text heard at King’s). This imperial dictate sends Joseph and the pregnant Mary back to Bethlehem. Listening to that reading, one thinks of safe zones and the modern technologies of the IDF’s “population management” as far more advanced and lethal than the Roman census-taking of yore.
This reading is followed by “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and then “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” in which the choir sings of shepherds who “feared and trembled.” The shepherds of today fear and tremble not because of angels singing above and at the sight of a miraculous star in the night sky, but because of tanks, snipers, bombs, vigilantes, drone strikes, and famine.
The Roman client-king in Judea, Herod, learns of the Savior’s birth in the penultimate lesson and dispatches the Wise Men to Bethlehem to bring back intelligence of this potential threat to his regime. Conscientious objectors, the Wise Men, don’t report back. Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents will come after Christmas. Hear Herod’s name and think of the slaughter of children now.
Cornell’s nineteenth-century chapel could be in England. It draws architectural inspiration from the same Victorian medievalisms cataloged in Sagrans’ essay on Lessons and Carols. Come Christmas, it is far easier to live in the past.
Sagrans begins his article by directing us towards a propaganda film from World War II called Christmas Under Fire. It begins with the sounds of the King’s College choir singing “Ding Dong Merrily on High.” The narrator tells us that he’s bringing the canister of a film chronicling Britain’s Christmas of 1940 back to America. As the German Blitz continues, this Christmas will be celebrated “underground” in subway shelters. The adults do all they can for the kids at Christmas. The British upper lip has never been stiffer. Eager to have America join the war in Europe, FDR must have watched this movie in the White House.
For his part, Biden won’t be viewing Al Jazeera’s new documentary All That Remains this Christmas. The film tells the story of thirteen-year-old Leyan Abu al-Atta, who lost a leg to an Israeli airstrike.
Near the close of Christmas Under Fire, the narrator proclaims the island nation’s Christian resolve: “On Christmas Eve, England does what England has done for a thousand years: she worships the prince of peace.” We see a silhouette of the spires of King’s College Chapel and are ushered inside as a lone chorister intones, “O Come All Ye Faithful.” The choir and organ join in, invincible. That Christmas, like this one, was not about peace but about war.
One evergreen carol that isn’t heard at this year’s service at Cornell is “Silent Night.” The omission is unwittingly telling. The hush from the moral vacuum of these Lessons and Carols is louder than the massed forces of organ and choir Hark-ing and Hosanna-ing at full tilt.
This Christmas silence is deafening.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
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