Wolcom Yole!

I think it was in Brussels, in 1967, or a few years earlier at the American Cathedral of Paris, that I was first introduced to Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols. The church choir sang it, and I had the solo in That Yongë Childe. It was tricky. The harmonies were not the usual hymnbook chords, and I remember being thrilled by the dissonances, by the way some of the pieces rocked back and forth between minor and major tonalities, by the swirling rhythms building up in the church sanctuary in an almost hallucinatory way.

At least forty years have passed since that one-time singing; yet the music still moves me in the same ways, and with the same intensity, which I discovered this past Saturday night at the Cathedral's Christmas concert. This time I was an alto, but that old memory of how each carol goes served me well, and I was thrilled again to find myself again in that music, and to know exactly where I was.

How is it possible to remember words and music for so very long? I know I sang That Yongë Childe once for my harpist friend, Linda Thomas, in Chicago in the early 1980s (it is Linda who plays so entrancingly on my recording of Lazy Afternoon) for her graduate recital. But the rest of the carols... well, I doubt I have even heard them since the sixties. yet they are there, in my musical memory. As are Bach's cello suites, every song the Beatles ever recorded, and every shade, nuance, and choreographic gesture of seven years of Manhattan Transfer music. And most especially the songs my parents and grandparents sang at Christmas, the songs that come back every year and make me as a child again. I guess this is my oral tradition - music passed down, voice to ear, ear to heart, and out in voice again, more so at this season than any other. In Advent we wait. And while we wait, we sing.