Before The Downbeat: Joy of Christmas December 10, 2024

Before The Downbeat is a study guide by and for the Cathedral Choral Society in preparation for its concerts. Previously distributed in print form to singers only, we are thrilled to present this content to all our audiences in digital form.

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They come unbidden—these “mystic chords of memory”—amid the daily round. The annual trips to see the Christmas windows at Woodward & Lothrop, the lighting of the National Christmas Tree, that first trip home from college, a family outing in a softly falling snow to choose the perfect Christmas tree, then decorating it with treasured ornaments, each with its own special remembrance of person or place, setting the table with Haviland china and sterling silver, baking saffron bread for Santa Lucia Day, making the hard sauce for plum pudding while little fingers sneak “a taste,” writing holiday cards and letters to share one family’s account of another year of grace. Always there are memories of carols—on the radio, in shopping malls, in a nursing home, sung around the family piano, in a rural parish —or this great Cathedral.

Christmas at Washington National Cathedral

For generations of Washingtonians since 1976, the annual Joy of Christmas concerts at Washington National Cathedral mark the true beginning of the holiday season. The sense of expectation is palpable as the audience gathers, just before the pale light begins to fade from the afternoon sky and the last rays of a winter sun still warm the colors in the West Rose window. Slowly the lights recede: first the yellow, then the red, then the green. As the last vibrant hues of blue dim to an inky midnight, inside the Cathedral a holy silence descends. Then, candles light the darkness as the Advent Wreath and torches are borne in solemn procession by three Cathedral acolytes.

Christmas is here once again.

Earth Shall Ring With the Song Children Sing

Whether the solo treble singing Once in Royal David’s City at King’s College, Cambridge, or the mixed voices of a choir, it is the voices of children that feature in our most precious memories of Christmases past. The Washington Latin Public Charter School Choir under its Music Director Melissa VerCammen leads young voices in twentieth-century musical arrangements of new melodies and ancient texts spanning centuries.

The music chosen by Music Director Steven Fox for this year’s Joy of Christmas is a mixture of old and new, of ancient texts set to new tunes, old tunes adapted to new forms. All come from the infinite treasury of music composed and arranged by American, Austrian, English, French, Italian, and Spanish composers. The story they tell is an ancient one, heard anew.

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas evokes these “mystic chords of memory” in his idyllic reminiscence of Christmas as a young boy:

Always on Christmas night there was music . . .
Looking through my bedroom window, out into
the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored
snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the
other houses on our hill and hear the music rising
from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned
the gas down, I got into bed.
I said some words to the close and holy darkness,
and then I slept.

—Dylan Thomas,
A Child’s Christmas in Wales, 1952

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(c) 2024 Margaret Shannon