Playlist

* Multi-holiday song Christine Lavin & the Mistletones 2:07

* Ye Christian Heralds The Elastic Millennium Choir 1:48

* A New Year’s Round Christine Lavin & the Mistletones 1:44

* Dona Nobis Pacem Leah Salomaa & friends 3:30

Music notes

Rounds, also called perpetual canons, are both fun to sing and make for enjoyable listening. They are one of the easiest choral styles to learn because everyone sings the same words and tune – they just start at different places. The musical style appears to have been first invented in Germany in medieval times. The oldest known ones are in Latin dating back to the time of the construction of Notre Dame Cathedral in the 12th century.

These four add to two rounds that I have already posted this year – King Henry VIII’s Green Grow’th the Holly posted on Dec 1, and Joyce Poley’s Christmas is Here on Dec 5.

Multi-holiday song This was written by New York City singer-songwriter and promoter of contemporary acoustic music Christine Lavin. This is not the actual name of this song. She calls it A Christmas / Kwanzaa / Solstice / Chanukah / Ramadan / Boxing Day Song, but I found that name rather clunky so I abbreviated it here. It is not really a round or a canon even though it sounds like one; it is six songs that she wrote to the same melody that lock together. The melody is by the English composer William Sheild (1748-1829), so that is at least 200 years old.

This recording is from her 2003 album The Runaway Christmas Tree which is out-of-print now but still available from her website as a digital download. Also on her website, Christine apologizes for the absence from this song of other international holidays that celebrate the New Year near this time but which she missed; to me, Diwali comes to mind because we have lots of folks here in BC from the Punjab. She suggests that people celebrating those other occasions write their own verses to include themselves in the song.

We wish you a Merry Christmasa joyful and merry Christmasto all who celebrate Christmaswe wish you a Happy New YearWe wish you a happy Kwanzaaa hip hop Happy Kwanzaato all who celebrate Kwanzaawe wish you a Happy New YearWe wish you a happy Solsticea sunny satisfying Solsticeto all who celebrate Solsticewe wish you a Happy New YearWe wish you a Happy Chanukaha hap hap happy Chanukahto all who celebrate Chanukanwe wish you a Happy New YearWe wish you a Happy Ramadana peaceful holy Ramadanto all who celebrate Ramadanwe wish you a Happy New YearWe wish you a Happy Boxing Daya hap hap happy Boxing Dayto all who celebrate Boxing Daywe wish you a Happy New Year

Ye Christian Heralds This circle canon of unknown origin was found by the Elastic Millennium’s founder and music director Faye Armsworthy in a hymnal called The Harmonicon, compiled and published in 1850 by Charles Robson and James Hepburn of Pictou, Nova Scotia. It is not clear whether those gentlemen wrote it or whether they got it from another source. Faye thinks that the song may have been included in that hymnal for use as a warm-up song for choir practice. The recording is from the Elastic Millennium Choir’s 1997 album An Old Canadian Christmas, which has the lovely subtitle Songs to Beguile a Winter’s Eve.

Ye Christian heralds, go proclaimSalvation, salvation in Emmanuel’s nameTo distant climes the tidings bear,And plant the Rose of Sharon there.

I was not familiar with the Rose of Sharon, so I had to look it up. In a religious context, as it is used here, the phrase is used as a metaphor for Jesus Christ, portraying him as the source of spiritual blessings that is intended to be nurtured and shared in the world.

The Rose of Sharon is mentioned in the the Song of Solomon in the Bible, but as is typical with the common names for many plants, there are several species that are called by the same name in various places. There is dispute among scholars as to which species is the one that has biblical status. You can read about that in its Wikipedia entry. The one thing that is certain is that it is not a type of rose. According to an annotation by the translation committee of the New Revised Standard Version of Song of Solomon 2:1, rose of sharon is a mistranslation of a Hebrew word for a type of crocus.

Here in North America, the name rose of sharon is usually applied to a type of deciduous hibiscus – Hibiscus syriacus to be precise, although that name is a misnomer because it is not native to Syria. It is indeed beautiful and grows readily without much care, but planting it is not advisable because Hibiscus syriacus has been declared to be an invasive species in several jurisdictions. You can read about that here.

A New Year’s Round This is another one from Christine Lavin’s album. It is a fairly well-known round that was written in 1971 by the late Alix Herrmann, who was a member of the San Francisco Folk Music Club and daughter of folk music collector Lani Herrmann. It is included in the Rise Up Singing songbook under the title Ring in the New Year.

Ring it in, ring in the New YearRing it in, ring in the New yearBells are ringing, bells are ringingBells are ringing, bells are ringingPeace and love, throughout the New YearPeace and love, throughout the New YearJoy, joy, joy!Joy, joy, joy!

Dona Nobis Pacem You probably already know this one too. It is not necessarily a Christmas song, but because of its message of peace it appears on a lot of folk music Christmas albums. Usually I would not include such a well known song in my postings, but in this case I wanted to share this version with you to show how rounds can sound so rich when they are sung slowly. This recording is from the late Leah Salomaa’s self-published 2008 children’s album under a winter star.

Its lyrics are just the three words in its name; dona nobis pacem – Latin for “grant us peace”, a phrase from the Agnus Dei in the Roman Catholic mass.

For such a famous song its origins are quite obscure. Some have credited it to famous composers including Mozart, Bach, or Palestrina. But, as someone pointed out in a Mudcat discussion forum thread about the origins of this song:

This particular round is often attributed to Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina … Though rounds were popular in Palestrina’s day -- the English round “Three Blind Mice” first appeared in print c. 1600 - it is unlikely that he wrote Dona Nobis Pacem. On the word “nobis“ when first sung when first heard the melodic leap is a 7th, the distance of seven steps between two notes. Such an interval, expressive though it might be, was considered dissonant or “disagreeable” in Palestrina’s time and would have been avoided by so conservative a composer.

Similar issues would apply to Bach, Mozart or any other classical composer. The Mudcat discussion could not identify a composer, or even an estimate for its date or place of composition. Separately, the late Sol “Roundman” Weber, who collected rounds and compiled a book of 340 of them from international sources, speculated that it was of medieval German folk music origin since it is in Latin and comes from the Catholic mass, and that is where the circular canon format of singing first began.

Its time of origin is therefore anyone’s guess, but remember, at the beginning of these music notes I said that the earliest known Latin circular canons date back to the 12th century. That is when polyphony was just beginning to emerge from Gregorian plain chant, and the classic rules for harmony singing had not yet been formulated. Possibly the folk music origin of this song was a bunch of medieval monks or nuns goofing off during whatever free time they had.

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