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We wish you a merry Christmas...
Tonight, I took my Double Quartet around campus singing Christmas carols. Approximately a half hour after we began, we finished, tired in body and voice. But it was nice. They sounded, all in all, better than the group ever has (though last year's group would give them a run for their money). We sing carols out of a collection of carols arranged for four-part men's voices in the barbershop style, called "Yuletide Favorites." I realized tonight that I've been singing these exact same carols for 8 of the past 10 years.
This tradition of singing barbership Christmas carols started my freshman year of college, when I was somehow fortunate enough to be invited to join three other freshmen in a barbershop quartet. Our wonderful "lead," the heart and soul of our group, had among other ideas, that of going around to all the other freshmen dorms singing Christmas carols in the week before (or maybe it was the week of) exams. And so we did, and it was pretty cool. Unfortunately, our lead had his relationship with the school severed due to academic difficulties, but another guy and I got together a total of eight guys and we went around to all the dorms on campus singing carols. And in one form or another, this went on for the rest of my college career, getting together a group just to sing around the holidays.
During my two years of grad school, I sang nothing from the Yuletide Favorites. I did, however, perform in madrigal dinners, and as part of that we sang some carols as quartets. Really, it was quite a different thing.
And when I came to my current job back in 2001, having a group of eight male singers, I decided to start this as a tradition, and so it has been ever since. It's always been very popular--people just love carolers, especially when they're singing four-part harmony--and usually involves a certain amount of fattening us up with cookies and hot cocoa and such.
I think it's a nice thing on lots of different levels. On the one hand, I think it's nice to have traditions, both for the school and for us as a group. It's part of our identity that we do this every year, it's part of the place that this happens every year. It puts our music program in a certain spotlight, reminding everyone we're here, reaching out to students who aren't already involved.
And it's just plain nice. It taps into a broader cultural tradition. Even if you've never had the experience of hearing carolers go around singing at Christmas time, we all understand it, and we view it with a certain amount of nostalgia. It hearkens back to some idyllic time when we had strong communities, when everyone knew everyone, and some of those members of the community blessed with the gift of music would share that talent in the holiday spirit. The songs themselves are part of our culture, and the roving carolers are part of our culture (even if they're rather infrequent these days). In fact, such roving bands date back to Europe in something like the sixteenth century, though their character was rather less distinguished than it is now (they were essentially the lower classes given license to run amok for a day or so and go around to the houses of the wealthy singing and demanding favors which the wealthy denied at the risk of property and health). Be that little history lesson as it may, our carol-singing taps into the warm, gushy tradition, and it's a beautiful thing.