“What sweeter music can we bring than a carol, for to sing the birth of this our heav’nly King?”

What sweeter music can we bring you than this Carol to begin our Advent calendar this year?

The carol is a setting of words by Robert Herrick (1591-1674) although the text has been slightly abridged and altered for this carol setting.

It was written for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Cambridge for Stephen Cleobury and the King’s College Choir in 1987 and first published in that SATB version in 1988. The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is broadcast every year at Christmas and as such is possibly the world’s most widely transmitted Christian service.

Rutter said it was ‘‘… the first opportunity I had to put pen to paper for the choir in my long and friendly association with King’s College. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to write for the slot in the service immediately after the reading about the journey of the Wise Men—the chance to highlight in the text the idea of the gifts that we can bring.”

The carol  has become deservedly well loved and exists now also in SSA or SSS, German translation SATB and piano solo versions all made by the composer himself. There are string parts to accompany the song though many perform this with either piano or organ accompaniment.

Some of the melody and harmonies in this carol are to me reminiscent of part of Vaughan William’s  Six Studies in English Folksong, though I am sure the resemblance is unintentional. However, it shows a common mutedly radiant Englishness about the style.

You can hear the carol with the words in all their glory on YouTube in many different performances conducted by John Rutter and others. You can also, of course, purchase the recording! I have given links to versions with organ accompaniment and also with string accompaniment.

As for John Rutter himself, I thought that I could do no better than let him speak for himself from his own website:

“I’ve known I wanted to be a musician ever since I could walk and talk, and the story is true that I first discovered music at home when I lifted the lid of the old upright piano in my parents’ London apartment and started to prod the keys, while at nursery school I sang along loudly with all the other kids at morning assembly each day. 

My bewildered parents, probably driven crazy by the hours of piano improvisation and piping treble singing they endured, thought that if you can’t stop it at least get him to do it better, so they sent me at age seven for piano lessons where my piano teacher told me to be a composer, or singer (or anything but please not a pianist). 

Fortunately the boys’ school my parents sent me to had a strong musical tradition, with daily choral worship led by the choir (I needed no second bidding to join) – and the director of music, Edward Chapman, was himself a gifted composer, a pupil in his Cambridge days of Charles Wood (a name that church musicians will know). 

He encouraged all of us to think composition was normal, ran a fine school choir and orchestra, and pointed my footsteps in the direction of Cambridge University, where I met David Willcocks, the legendary director of King’s College Choir, who took an interest in my compositions, encouraged me to conduct, and recommended me to Oxford University Press, who signed me up while I was still a student and have been my publisher ever since. 

I’m not sure where the intervening years have all gone, but in a way I’m still that kid doodling at the piano with his inventions, only now I get paid for it. I compose, conduct, produce recordings, and try to cope with the flood of commitments that a musician’s life involves. Some day I’ll get round to some hobbies.”