History of Carols of the Bells

Although “Carol of the Bells” has become a popular tune during the holidays, the original lyrics had nothing to do with Christmas.

The song with a haunting four-note melody was originally a Ukranian folk song written as a “winter well-wishing song,” said Anthony Potoczniak, a Rice University anthropology graduate student who is studying the song’s history.

Written in 1916 by Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovich and titled “Shchedryk,” the song tells the tale of a swallow flying into a household to proclaim the plentiful year that the family will have. The song’s title is derived from the Ukrainian word “shchedryj,” which means “bountiful.”

“The swallow is a herald of spring coming,” Potoczniak said, referring to its possible pre-Christian origins. The original lyrics describe the swallow calling out to the master of the home and telling him about all the wealth that he will possess — healthy livestock, money and a beautiful wife.

For a Christmas concert, a choir director by the name of Oleksander Koshyts commissioned Leontovich to write a song based on Ukrainian folk melodies. Using the four notes and original folk lyrics of a well-wishing song he found in an anthology of Ukrainian folk melodies, Leontovich created a completely new work for choir – “Shchedryk.”

“Very few people realize that the composition ‘Shchedryk’ was composed and performed during a time when there was intense political struggle and social upheaval in Ukraine,” Potoczniak said. The same choir director who commissioned the song formed the Ukrainian National Chorus, mandated by a fledgling Ukrainian government, in 1919 to promote Ukranian music in major cultural centers in the West. Touring across Europe and North and South America, the chorus performed over 1,000 concerts. 

Meanwhile, back in Ukraine, the original folk melody that Leontovich used to compose his work was one of many well-wishing tunes sung in many Ukrainian villages on Jan. 13 — New Year’s Eve on the Julian calendar — usually by adolescent girls going house to house in celebration of the new year. As the girls sang the tune predicting good fortune, they were rewarded with baked goods or other treats.

A program for the Ukrainian National Chorus’s concert tour of American cities and universities in the fall and winter of 1922.Credit...Ukrainian Institute, Kyiv

The Ukrainian National Chorus did not limit its performances of “Shchedryk” to the Julian New Year, and the song became popular in other parts of the world as the choir introduced it to other nationalities, including the United States, where they first performed the song to a sold-out audience in Carnegie Hall Oct. 5, 1921.

When American choir director and arranger Peter Wilhousky heard Leontovich’s choral work, it reminded him of bells; so he wrote new lyrics to convey that imagery for his choir. He copyrighted the new lyrics in 1936 and also published the song, despite the fact that the work was published almost two decades earlier in Soviet Ukraine. In the late 1930s, several choirs that Wilhousky directed began performing his Anglicized arrangement during the Christmas holiday season.

Now called “Carol of the Bells,” the song has become associated with Christmas because of its new lyrics, which include references to silver bells, caroling and the line “merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas.”

American recordings of the song in English began to surface in the 1940s by such notable groups as Fred Warring and his Pennsylvanians, the Roger Wagner Chorale and Phil Spitalny’s “Hour of Charm All-Girl Orchestra.”

Since then the song has become a popular Christmas tune, particularly among choirs for whom the soprano-alto-tenor-bass arrangement of the song seems custom-made. The song’s opening lines, “Hark! How the bells, sweet silver bells,” coupled with the “ding, dong, ding, dong” countermelody, have been recorded in a variety of formats and styles – from standard choir arrangements to improvisational jazz to sultry soul. Last year at least 35 recordings of the song were available, Potoczniak said.

Despite the song’s ubiquitous presence during the holidays in the West, “Shchedryk” remains less popular in its country of origin, where songs like it are still performed on the eve of the Julian New Year.

Carols of the bells :

Source : Almond, B. J. (2004). ‘Carol of the Bells’ wasn’t originally a Christmas song. Rice University

Favorite Christmas Carol: What Sweeter Music can we bring

 

What Sweeter Music Than a Carol?

It seems to me there is no sweeter music than Christmas carols, especially the older ones—and by older ones I mean the really older ones, Medieval and Renaissance carols.  In the words of the 1964 edition of the Oxford Book of Carols they are, “songs with a religious impulse that are simple, hilarious, popular and modern…spontaneous and direct in expression;” true folk-poetry, popular, spontaneous and modern because they sprang from the lives that common folk were living right then, hilarious because of their roots in the dance.

But sometimes a really modern Christmas song, meaning twentieth- or twenty-first-century, moves easily beside the older carols.  One such number is John Rutter’s s What Sweeter Music, a setting of Robert Herrick’s 17^th-century poem A Christmas Caroll, Sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall (sung to King Charles I).

Rutter shortens the poem a bit, modernizes the spelling, dresses it in contemporary musical language, and turns out a carol that sounds ancient and fresh, all at the same time.

Rutter made some judicial choices in his setting of the text, and it’s fascinating to compare the lines he plucked out of Herrick’s poem with the original (Rutter’s selections are in red below):

Chor. What sweeter musick can we bring,
          Then a Caroll, for to sing

          The Birth of this our heavenly King?
          Awake the Voice! Awake the String!
          Heart, Eare, and Eye, and every thing
          Awake! the while the active Finger

From the Flourish they came to the Song.

I.        Dark and dull night, flie hence away,

          And give the honour to this Day,

          That sees December turn’d to May.

2.        If we may ask the reason, say;

           The why, and wherefore all things here

           Seem like the Spring-time of the yeere?

3 .       Why do’s the chilling Winters morne

           Smile, like the field beset with corne?

           Or smell, like to a Meade new-shorne,

           Thus, on the sudden? 4. Come and see

           The cause, why things thus fragrant be:

          ‘Tis He is borne, whose quickening Birth

           Gives life and luster, publike mirth,

           To Heaven, and the under-Earth.

Chor. We see Him come, and know him ours,

          Who, with His Sun-shine, and His showers,

          Turnes all the patient ground to flowers.

I.         The Darling of the world is come,

           And fit is, we finde a roome

           To welcome Him. 2. The nobler part

           Of all the house here, is the heart,

Chor. Which we will give Him; and bequeath

          This Hollie, and this Ivie Wreath,

          To do Him honour, who’s our King,

          And Lord of all this Revelling.

And here is Rutter’s carol:

Rutter sets the first four lines of the “chorus” in the signature carol melody (A), sung in unison by the women, and the three lines of the first stanza, in a new melody (B), sung in two-part harmony by the men, to create his own opening stanza.

He takes the first five lines of stanza 3—set to melody A but with variations—to create the first half of his next section.  And then he continues the rest of Herrick’s stanza 3 with a loose expansion of melody B.  But notice that the men open the section this time, mostly in unison, followed by the women in beautiful three-part harmony, a vocal mirror of his first stanza.

It is only at Rutter’s third section, which encompasses the remainder of Herrick’s poem, that the entire chorus finally sings in four-part harmony, perhaps a reflection of the words “We” and “ours.”  Even though he lumps these final lines together, he follows Herrick’s structure through various vocal combinations: melody A in four-part SATB for “We see Him come;” expanded melody B in four-part SSAT for “The Darling of the world is come;” and then building to the climactic words “honour” and “Revelling” with quickened vocal trading and free variations on both melodies.

Finally a gentle unison repeat by the entire choir of melody A, the most recognizable of the two melodies, with a four-part coda to bring it all to a quiet ending.

What sweeter music?  Old and new, it is all sweet.

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic director and conductor

Master Chorus Eastside