The Angels Sing, the Shepherds Too
by Ken Myers
According to my American Heritage Dictionary, the first definition of the word "Noël" is simply "Christmas." The second definition is "a Christmas carol." The word entered Middle English from Old French, where it earlier derived from a Latin family of words tied to birth and the day of a birth. It's the same neighborhood from which our English words natal, native, nature, and nativity derive.
Etymological trajectories can teach us a lot about how creation is ordered and about how cultures take shape in light of that order. The birthday that Christians know simply as "The Nativity" inexorably calls forth music, and of a particular character. The birth of Jesus contains paradoxes and otherwise unimaginable contrasts: a King born in a stable, God in humble human flesh, the turning point of history witnessed initially only by humble rustics. Likewise, the Christmas carols with the most power and longevity seem to combine—in both text and music—simplicity and depth, reverence and festivity, a sense of tentative wonder ("Can this possibly be happening?") and confident decisiveness ("Yes! God has made it so!").
In notes written for a 1990 album of French Christmas music from 1200–1600, conductor Joel Cohen observes that "in the musical expressions of the season the barriers that separate 'learned' art and folk expression come tumbling down. The healthy odors of the stable and the village marketplace invade the church sacristies and the salons of the well-to-do." Like Cohen (who playfully signed his name "Joël" in these album notes), I hear in the large body of traditional French carols—and the complex compositions inspired by them—an exceptional expression of quiet paradox.
A Procession of Carols
Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704), one of the masters of the French Baroque, left behind a number of works composed to celebrate the mysteries of Christmas. As a young man, Charpentier spent three years in Rome, studying with Giacomo Carissimi (1605–1674), the leading and most influential pioneer in the development of the oratorio.
For most of his lifetime and even today, Charpentier's compositional skills have been overshadowed by those of his contemporary Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), Louis XIV's much-honored court composer. Charpentier composed significantly more sacred music than did Lully; his catalogue includes at least a dozen Masses, a half-dozen Te Deum settings (including a famous one with a Prelude long used as a fanfare by the Eurovision Song Contest), ten Magnificats, more than eighty psalm settings, hundreds of motets, and a few dozen oratorios.
Charpentier's most popular music for Christmas is his Messe de Minuit pour Noël ("Midnight Mass of the Nativity"), composed in the 1690s. It achieves its seasonal flavor not by adding any extraneous words referencing the manger, shepherds, or angels, but by creatively setting the fixed texts of the Mass to the tunes of eleven traditional French carols. Music journalist W. A. Chislett has noted that Charpentier "chose his carol tunes with great care, not only for their musical value, but also for their allegorical and liturgical significance."
The procession of carols commences with the Kyrie's evocative use of "Joseph est bien marié." Those words open the carol and are repeated at the end of each stanza, and they conveniently have the same number of syllables as "Kyrie eleison." But French worshipers hearing this Mass would surely have been reminded of central historical and theological claims surrounding the Feast they were celebrating, beginning with the first assertion: "Joseph has married well to the daughter of Jesse."
Like all good folk songs, this one tells a story. After summarizing Joseph's experience of shock and consternation at discovering Mary's condition, and the miraculous explanation offered by the angel, the carol exhorts: "So change your attitude, and come close boldly, for by his power you are dedicated to serve him through his childhood."
Of course, what worshipers are actually singing and hearing is "Lord have mercy upon us." But by layering one text with deep echoes of another, Charpentier invites churchgoers at the Christmas Mass to situate their repeated pleas for mercy in the historical experience of Joseph, of Israel, of all mankind.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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more on Christmas from the online archives
21.10—December 2008
Early Christian Teaching on the Incarnation & Redemption by Patrick Henry Reardon
31.6—November/December 2018
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An Architectural Sign of Mere Christianity by Michael Ward
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