The first episode of a 10 part series started today on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.



A Cause for Caroling

"1. A Carol's a Carol, to Begin With

A Cause for Caroling

Choral conductor and scholar Jeremy Summerly tells the story of the Christmas carol in Britain in this ten-part series.

He begins by trying to capture something of the caroling traditions of today and then heads back into the misty caroling past discovering what he believes is the first carol in the English language.

The Christmas carol is as popular now as it was when carolers celebrated the birth of Edward III in 1312. Back then the carol was a generic term for a song with its roots in dance form.

Nowadays only the strictest scholar would quibble with the fact that a carol is a Christmas song.

But the journey the carol has taken is unique in music history because each shift in the story has been preserved in the carols that we sing today. Go to a carol concert now and you're likely to hear folk, medieval, mid-Victorian and modern music all happily combined. It's hard to imagine that happening in any other situation.

Jeremy Summerly follows the carol journey through the Golden age of the Medieval carol into the troubled period of Reformation and puritanism, along the byways of the 17th and 18th century waits and gallery musicians and in to the sudden explosion of interest in the carol in the 19th century.

It's a story that sees the carol veer between the sacred and secular even before there was any understanding of those terms..

Jeremy traces the folk carol in and out of church grounds, the carol hymn, the fuguing carol and the many other off-shoots, some of which survive to this day and many others which languish unloved but ready for re-discovery.

It's a journey full of song describing the history of a people who needed expression for seasonal joy in the coldest, hardest time of the year. And however efficient the heating system may be, the carol still generates warmth. Much of that is to do with the positive nostalgia of this music.

The series title is taken from a Thomas Hardy poem in which he ponders of a Darkling Thrush why it should chose to sing - 'so little cause for carolings of such ecstatic sound' - is the question asked. This series is an attempt to answer why carols remain so popular and familiar to so many.

Jeremy brings the series up to date with the story of the famous Nine Lessons and Carols service broadcast by the BBC since the 1920s but born originally in Truro. It's a service that commands a worldwide audience measured in millions, but as Jeremy concludes it has left an imbalance in the appreciation of our caroling tradition, a tradition that has always had one foot in the pub and another in the choir stalls.

Producer: Tom Alban"