The Christmas story through carols

andrewwyndham
Dec 26, 2025
13 min read

A playlist featuring all of the music mentioned in this blog can be found here: Talking about music – the Christmas story through carols

One of the many joys of singing in a choir is the pleasure of singing Christmas music, whether it’s in a church or in a local choir that puts on a Christmas concert. If you are one of the fortunate, then you may not find anything new in this blog, in which I’ll talk about some of my favourite carols and Christmas pieces. I like to think I’m not snobby about Christmas music – if it’s good, it doesn’t matter which genre it belongs to, and I knew Jona Lewie’s ‘Stop the cavalry’ long before I knew Peter Warlock’s ‘Bethlehem Down’ (in the same way that I knew John Williams’s music for Star Wars before I knew the Brahms symphonies). I don’t feel the need to choose or give one up in favour of the other.

One of the things I love about running a choir is building a concert programme. I don’t think it’s enough to throw together a random selection of pieces to fill a certain amount of time – I’d much rather the programme had some sort of shape or narrative to it. This is especially true at Christmas and so I will often go down the route of having a ‘folky’ Christmas, or a nativity-based programme or something that evokes a snowy Christmas on card-type Christmas. In that spirit, I’m going to try to put my musical choices in an order which tells, more or less, the Christmas story. Hopefully, that will come through should you listen to the accompanying playlist.

My story/selection starts with the annunciation – the appearance of the angel Gabriel to Mary. The Medieval, Basque carol: ‘Gabriel’s Message’ is justly popular. The most often sung arrangement, with its lilting rhythm and refrain of “Most highly favoured lady, gloria!” immediately caught my imagination both with its sense of gentle, minor-key wonder but also with the most wonderful translation of its opening lines: “the angel Gabriel from Heaven came, his wings as drifted snow, his eyes as flame”. What a marvellous way to start a carol! This has appealed to musicians from different musical realms and I was tempted to start my playlist with the plaintive rendition sung by Sting, included on his album “If on a winter’s night…” but I decided to keep with tradition and Edgar Pettman’s arrangement sung by a cathedral choir. Do feel free to try out the Sting version though. Indeed, his whole album is good Christmas listening.

For many conductors and choirs, Christmas would not be the same without some Rutter. Personally, I like to have a bit of Warlock on my programme. Peter Warlock, the alter-ego of Phillip Heseltine, was a man of intelligence, strong opinions, enquiring mind and a love of drinking! His biography describes an interesting although not always very likeable character. He had an interest in both folk music and Elizabethan music before either was fashionable and this probably fed into his musical style, which is tuneful but which features some occasionally unexpected harmonic twists.

‘Carillon, Carilla’ tells of the arrival of Mary and Joseph at Bethlehem. Warlock wrote the lyrics himself and presents a very stylised Christmas image, with wind, snow and bells in Bethlehem! That should not put anyone off. The music, like Gabriel’s Message, has a lilting quality but, here, the harmonic shifts never let us settle and my ear is never certain what key we are in. The overall effect is haunting and possibly (at least to my ears) unsettling.

Having had two fairly quiet carols, some contrast is needed – we don’t want our audience to nod off! John Joubert’s ‘Torches,’ is popular with audiences but not, for some reason, always with choirs. I don’t know why this is the case. It’s a good, rousing piece with a memorable tune. It’s also not too difficult to learn, which makes it a godsend for conductors who are either working with an inexperienced choir or who are short on rehearsal time! Its relative simplicity gives it a rustic feel and it’s a piece that, on first hearing, I was sure I’d known all my life.

The star is a key feature of the Christmas story. I’d love to plug my own choral miniature; ‘Star!’, written for upper voices, but it’s had very few performances and has never been recorded. The music is available to buy online though!

Instead, I’ll happily include a song which I grew up with – Chris de Burgh’s ‘A spaceman came travelling’. This puts forward the idea of the star being a spaceship hanging in the sky, while its captain (the angel) brings a message of peace to the world. No doubt some people will disapprove of a pop song rubbing shoulders with the likes of Warlock and Rutter but they shouldn’t - this one is intelligent, well written and memorable. That’s more than you can say for some classical songs!

Going off on a tangent for a moment – I do find there is a big difference between pop songs and classical pieces (and this may be just my opinion). A classical piece may take me some time to understand but stays with me throughout my life, like a friend. As time goes on, I hear different things in it and take different things from it, resulting either from a different performer’s interpretation, or from my greater familiarity with the music or through my own personal experiences. The relationship deepens and becomes more nuanced. It grows and matures like a friendship. With a pop song, I might come to a deeper understanding of the text, but the song itself remains largely unchanged. It’s like the postman that one sees regularly but never really engages with. There’s a comforting familiarity and sometimes an association with the place where I first heard it, but the song itself doesn’t grow – it remains preserved like a memory. That’s not in any way a judgement on the validity of one or the other, just how I experience it. I’d be interested to know if that strikes a chord with anyone else.

Back to the stable and a carol about Mary. Patrick Hadley was a 20^th century English composer. Although very busy during his lifetime as a musician, educator and assistant to other composers, he is best known these days for his ethereal carol ‘I sing of a maiden’. This is a setting of a 15^th Century poem - “I sing of a maiden, that is makeles (matchless) King of all kings to her son she ches (chose)”. The music suggests a very gentle rocking motion, hushed throughout until the end (“Mother and maiden was never none but she”) when there is a brief, impassioned climax.

The text ‘O magnum mysterium’ has been set to music many times over the last 500 years. Taken from the Roman Breviary, the words convey a sense of wonder of the nativity:

“O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord, lying in a manger! O blessed virgin, whose womb was worthy to bear the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!”

In the 21^st century, some composers have written choral music in many parts to create a richness of sound. This is not necessarily anything new – Tallis wrote his motet ‘Spem in alium’ for 40 voices: 8 choirs of 5 singers. But the modern style is different in effect – creating a warm bath of choral sound. Nowhere is this better heard than in the setting of O Magnum Mysterium by the American composer Morten Lauridsen. Beginning simply and softly, the music builds to a joyous, radiant climax. I had the pleasure of conducting this for a Christmas concert, it’s a marvellous thing to be in the middle of.

Christmas carols have their origins in folk music. As they were not written down for hundreds of years, but passed down by teaching the next generation, variations of a single tune can exist as one singer put their own spin on the carol or perhaps simply misremembered it. In some cases, a text can have a number of different musical settings. Although there is a best-known version of ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night’, there are a number of others, including one to the tune of ‘On Ilkley moor b’aht at’. There are also a number of carols named after places – The Sussex Carol, The Hereford Carol, The Gloucestershire Wassail and, possibly the first carol to be written down – The Coventry Carol.

My next choice is ‘The Wexford Carol’, which is believed to be based on a Celtic tune, although the words are likely English in origin. The carol neatly summarises the whole nativity, from the journey to Bethlehem to the arrival of the magi. There are various arrangements of the tune, all equally valid, but a popular one is that by the remarkable John Rutter, Classic FM’s so-called ‘Mr Christmas’. Rutter has composed and arranged a huge number of carols and was a key figure in the production of the Carols for Choirs books which are an essential for choirs. When repeatedly writing in one form, there is a danger of repetition or the music becoming formulaic. I must confess that I find this to be true of some of Rutter’s music – when I hear the words “the latest carol from John Rutter” I find myself listening to the first phrase and then guessing (often successfully) what is coming next. Some of Rutter’s carols are often a little too saccharine for my taste.

He is, however, a very skilled composer and has written some marvellous carols and choral works. He is equally skilled at arranging music for choirs in a way that can be quite challenging but very effective and often great fun to perform. One of Rutter’s own carols will pop up later but, for now, his arrangement of the Wessex Carol is my choice and is quite excellent.

My next carol is hugely popular and another original work by the never-predictable Peter Warlock. Christmas music can sometimes be bitter-sweet as Jesus was born in order to die for mankind. Nowhere is this better heard than in Warlock’s ‘Bethlehem Down’. There are four verses. The first verse describes Mary’s hopes for her son: “When He is King we will give him the Kings' gifts, Myrrh for its sweetness, and gold for a crown”. But the third verse tells us that “When He is King they will clothe Him in grave-sheetsMyrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown”. The first and third verses are harmonised in one way, the second and fourth slightly differently. There is not a huge difference, but just enough to disguise the repetition. The hushed, sad beauty of this carol mark it out as one of the greats.

Time to lighten the mood now with an instrumental item. In 1984, the BBC broadcast an adaptation of John Masefield’s book – The Box of Delights just before Christmas. The story centres around a boy who is given a box which enables him to fly, shrink and go back in time. It is a much loved and fondly remembered series although I was quite unimpressed at the time, finding the acting hammy, the effects a bit ropey and the story not very engaging. It could be that, at the age of 16, I was just a tad too old although I see regular posts online from people who absolutely love the series and watch it every year. I was, however, grabbed by the theme music, which was really atmospheric and Christmassy. This theme music, it turned out, had been previously used for a radio adaptation broadcast in 1943. The tv producers had decided, in a moment of genius, to use it for their TV version.

The music in question was from ‘The Carol Symphony’ by Victor Hely-Hutchinson, a composer, music administrator and educator who died at the very young age of 45. The symphony is very pleasant listening but the third movement is particularly special, beginning softly with The Coventry Carol before moving onto The First Nowell. It is this section that grips the imagination, with its distinctive harp accompaniment, evocative of falling snow.

I hope the reader will forgive me for mentioning that I made a choral arrangement of this music which is available to buy online and can be heard on Youtube.

Composers and poets will often link the Christmas story to others. In the case of Down in yon forest, links have been suggested to the Grail legend and the Glastonbury Thorn, which was a tree which supposedly sprouted from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea and which bloomed once in winter (on Jesus’s birthday) and again in spring. There is a sense of myth and mystery about the words:

Down in yon forest there stands a hall: