“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is easily my least favorite Christmas carol. Fun to sing, maybe, but maddening to listen to. Like “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” with the beer replaced by wassail and eggnog. Maybe that would take some of the sting out. But to have to listen to anyone sing it? Sinatra, Crosby, The Chipmunks, I don’t care – it’s torture.
Be that as it may, it was part of the season’s rituals to sing it as a kid. It was only much later that it became clear that this Twelve Days of Christmas business doesn’t really start until December 25. In fact, many seem to be oblivious to the fact that the twelve days run through January 6, or Epiphany – the Feast of Three Kings.
By then, for most, the gifts are already put away, and for plenty, the trees, the stockings, and other Christmas trappings are already snug in the attic. But really, everything is supposed to stay up until Twelfth Night.
On the other hand, if you’re superstitious, you don’t want them up any longer than that, or it will bring bad luck. The only way to avert it, then, would be to leave all the decorations in place for another year. Which wouldn’t exactly be horrible – I’m sure that’s what Santa does – but your neighbors would beg to differ.
Today, then, is the Fourth Day of Christmas, which I single out for the gift of “four calling birds.” Apparently, it was originally “colly birds,” “colly” being archaic for “black as coal” (think “collier”). So, blackbirds is what you would get, if you were a recipient of this peculiar Christmas largesse.
The carol has been around forever, appearing in print for the first time in 1780, but as a fun “memory song” from an era before recording artists, it’s the kind of thing that probably reaches back further into the primordial ooze of oral tradition.
What’s really interesting to me, as a classical music nut, is that so many of the familiar carols are so closely connected with the great composers. “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” was set to music of Mendelssohn. “Joy to the World” leans on Handel. “O Holy Night” was written by Adolphe Adam (composer of “Giselle”), and so on.
In the case of “Twelve Days,” its origins are traditional, but it was English composer Frederic Austin who gave us its modern form in 1909. He codified the melody and lyrics, replacing “colly” with “calling,” and – the masterstroke – extending the cadence of “five go-old rinnnnnnnnngs.” That’s the part of the song any singer really likes, isn’t it?
Now, Austin is not the best-known of English composers, but I’ve always been a bit of a musical Anglophile, so I do have some of his concert works in my collection.
Here’s Austin’s “The Sea Venturers,” from 1935:
I know of two treatments of this insufferable carol that manage to make it somewhat interesting, and I try to play them every year. The first is “Partridge Pie,” by English composer Richard Rodney Bennett. It’s a piano suite, consisting of wholly original music for each of the twelve days. Thankfully, unlike in the carol as it is sung, the material is not repeated from verse to verse.
Book I
Book II
The other is “A Musicological Journey Through ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas,’” by American composer @Craig Courtney Craig Courtney. Courtney arranges each of the verses in the style of a different composer or historical era, reaching back to Gregorian chant and culminating in a pseudo-Sousa march. It tickles the ear as no recording of the traditional “Twelve Days” ever does. Here’s my preferred recording, with the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Brass. Each of the movements is posted separately, so you have to let the playlist run through to enjoy each of the twelve days.
Let the gratuitous gift-giving continue! Still eight days of Christmas to come!
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