The Music's History

The Background of Downe In Yon Forrest: Christmas From The Middle Ages

In the centuries following the breakdown of the Roman Empire, the Christianity which had been adopted by Rome both outlived the Empire and gradually converted the Germanic and Norse tribes who had flowed across Europe to fill the power vacuum left by the demise of Imperial authority. The artistic and cultural practices of these newly-converted peoples were adapted into expressions of their faith, marrying Christian ideals to indigenous ideas and expressions, resulting in original and unique art-forms.

Adding to this cultural fermentation was not only the influence of older Roman culture and of their fellow newly-Christianized tribes and nations, but the infusion of the cultural modalities of the burgeoning and powerful Islamic civilization, with which the Europeans traded and fought for centuries, exchanging goods, ideas, and art all along.

This volatile mix of artistic, religious, and cultural ideas were especially brought to a head during the great Medieval renaissances: the Carolingian Renaissance (late 8th-early 9th Centuries), during which Charlemagne, in an attempt to reestablish a new Rome, fostered and sponsored both erudition in learning and excellence in the arts; the Ottonian Renaissance (936-1002 A.D.), which arose during the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire under the German Emperors Otto 1st, Otto 2nd, and Otto 3rd, who, like their predecessor Charlemagne, established schools of learning and art (which helped to bring about the conversion of the Norse peoples to Christianity); and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, which was centered around the courts of France, England, and Germany, and which was greatly influenced by the chivalric Troubadour culture which owed so much artistically to the Islamo-Judaic-Christian cultural fusion of Muslim Spain, as well as to the artistic forms brought back to Northern Europe from the Middle East by returning merchants and Crusaders.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the musical expression of the Medieval peoples. The Church, which was alternately welcoming and suspicious by degrees toward the importation of these musical mutations, was nonetheless inevitably influenced (and eventually won over) by the new musical practices, and over the centuries found its liturgical and worship repertoire overrun and immeasurably deepened by them.

The Medieval societies were temporally organized around the Calendar of the Church, with its feasts and fasts held in honor of the various events in the life of Christ. Along with Easter, Christmas was one of the two greatest festal seasons in the Calendar, celebrating as it did the birth of Jesus Christ, held by the Medieval Christians to be a time of great joy.

The music associated with Christmastide is resultantly some of the most celebratory produced by the Medievals, and makes the most of the various aspects of the musical cultural stew as it developed across the entire historical period.

A measure of the Medieval musical success achieved with this body of Christmas songs can clearly be seen in the fact that, alone of the entire corpus of Western music down to this day, we continue to sing them annually, and have done so, with a number of these songs, for over a millennium, since some were composed in the 8th and 9th Centuries (with some of the lyrical content dating back as far as the 4th Century).

There is no other equally ancient body of songs to which Western society continues to return to in such a systematic and regular fashion: the Medieval Christmas carols are indeed the greatest hits of the Western musical canon. (This is so much a part of Western society that today, even in Eastern countries which have no appreciable Christian history, but which have been influenced on some level by Western culture, such as Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India, etc., Western Christmas music is heard, enjoyed, and embraced.)

The sheer joyfulness and ancient beauty of these songs as doubtless a strong factor in this relatively recent phenomenon, and we should not be surprised, considering that Medieval Christmas carols are themselves products of multicultural engagement, that the songs should be attractive to those who are only just being exposed to them in the recent world-wide cultural engagement and exchange in which the West is once again so deeply involved.

The name carol, applied universally in the last few centuries to all older Christmas songs, was originally the name for a dance in which the dancer engaged in a sort of hopping motion, an energetic dance associated with feasting and celebration. It is not surprising that the Medieval composers adapted this joyful dance music to the celebration of Christ’s birth. Since virtually all Christmas songs are celebratory, it is easy to see why the term eventually came to be applied to Christmas music across the board.

Of course, much of the music of the Christmas season was originally liturgical chant-forms, intended to be used in Christmas Masses or other Christmastide Church services. However, the joyous pull of the seasonal celebration across the centuries has shaped even these sonorous formal chants into more rhythmically upbeat expressions (this is easily seen in carol such as Divinum Mysterium [Of the Father’s Love begotten] and Personent Hodie, both of which began their existence as chants).

This is also likely due to the fact that many of the chants and songs designed for liturgical use in a church-service gained such popularity that the musicians and people began to perform and sing them in the streets and other venues, marrying them to the raucous, Middle-Eastern-infused percussion of the period.