When I was a child, the closest thing to classical music we
had was Christmas carols. In a village hard by New Jersey farmland, I looked
forward each fall to the advent of carols in my Methodist Sunday school.
There were hymns, of course, throughout the year, but it
wasn’t the same. “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” just doesn’t have the magic of
“O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Where was Bethlehem anyway? The picture in my
Sunday school flyer showed guys in turbans riding on camels past palm trees. I
knew it wasn’t near Imlaystown, New Jersey. Christmas carols came in foreign
languages (“Adeste Fidelis,” “Stille Nacht”) and introduced mysterious chants
otherwise unknown in the Protestant tradition (“Glo-oh-oh-ri-a,” O Come, O Come,
Emmanuel..”).
In fact the first sheet music book I ever purchased cost a
quarter at the “five and ten-cent” store: a slim volume of Christmas carols,
the pages of music alternating with public-domain etchings of angels. Yes, it
was the sound of angels. Angels we have heard on high, from the realms of
glory, bending near the earth, through the cloven skies. Even one named Harold
(or so I thought). Angels with golden harps, opening the pearly gates, not
necessarily to greater religious fervor, but to the unlimited and infinite
world of music.
Christmas songs
were another matter altogether. “White Christmas,” “Silver Bells,” “Chestnuts
roasting…” all had their place, and added to the festive frenzy of the
holidays. Later, there were the songs of sarcasm and novelty, like “The
Chipmunk Song,” “I saw momma kissing…” and every other song featuring Santa or
reindeer. They were fine, but not in the same category as “real” Christmas
carols. Christmas carols had parts you could sing in different voices and took
on an even greater fascination when I learned to sing the silky alto line
snaking between the soprano and tenor. What a feeling!
At times, Mrs. Foultz would become enflamed with some
celestial fire as she sat at the electric organ, and her fingers, cramped from
years of “If you come to Jesus, you will outshine the sun,” would escape like cooped
wild animals set free into the melodic lines and harmonies of Mendelssohn and
Handel. I had never heard such music before.
The holidays over, I was trying to remember the name of one
of the carols as I fell asleep last night. It was the one with “Gloria in
excelcis Deo” as the chorus. Where else would a farm girl have heard a melisma
like that in the 1960s? Angels, plain, domain, high, sky: the lyrics of several
carols tumbled together in my head and only a Google search this morning
recalled “Angels we have heard on high.”
My cat, Max, leapt from my lap with a growl as I hummed the
alto part, still vivid after all these years. I glanced at the walls of a room
filled with scores and recordings, Vivaldi blasting from the Bose. Perhaps none
of this would have existed had my friends and I not been handed those well-worn
songbooks in fellowship hall and, to the accompaniment of a tinny piano with
two broken keys, learned to warble “It came upon a midnight clear” and Handel’s
“Joy to the World.”
A more devious scheme to turn kids on to music was never
devised! --Linda Brown Holt
