King's College, Cambridge announces McDowall was commissioned for a new carol for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
On November 12, 2021, the Choir of King's College, Cambridge announced on their Facebook Page that composer Cecilia McDowall had been commissioned to write the annual new carol for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carol. A press release was also released.
Since 1983, the Choir of King's College, Cambridge has commissioned a prominent composer to write a new carol to be performed at the annual Festival of Nine Lessons in Carol on Christmas Eve.
The tradition was started by the late Stephen Cleobury to continue the tradition of carol composition. The first composer commission was Lennox Berkley and the last was Phillip Moore. No composer was commission in 2020, most likely due to the world-wide pandemic.
The announcement of the new carol is often the most anticipated new carol in the choral world and we think the carol-loving world was sad that no carol was premiered last year. See "The State of the Christmas Carol: 2020."
The Christmas Carols Blog has been using King's list of past commissioned composers to explore the modern carol repertory. So far we have focused on:
Also of interest to readers is our post Working List of Choral Recording Focusing on Modern Composers Christmas Works on albums dedicated to the Christmas repertory of select composers. They include Peter Warlock, Stephen Paulus, Ola Gielo, Bob Chilcott, Ralph Vaught Williams, Michael John Trotta, Leo Sowerby, William Ferris, Paul Edwards, Leroy Anderson, Witold Lutoslawski, Alfred Burt, Gustav Holst, William Walton, John Rutter, Jacques Cohen, John Tavaner, Daniel Pickham, Samuel Pegg, and Ben Perry.
Of course the Festival of Nine Lesson and Carols is not the only place to hear new carols. Last year our blog posted an extensive lists of New Carols, Premiered Carols, and Premiered Christmas Music 2020.
King's announced McDowell's carol would be a setting of "There is no rose."
"There is no rose," of course, is a text very famous in the carol world. According to the editors of the New Oxford Book of Carols, it is found in the "early fifteenth-century manuscript roll in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge."
Is is the last item listed in the manuscript and had original music but the original music is difficult to decipher due to manuscript decay.
The editors state, "The identification of Mary with the rose was a common medieval conceit which forms the bases of several surviving English carols and a multitude of Latin hymns." The editors state the Latin in the first three verses may be derived from the "Chirstmastide office (Introit) antiphone "Gaudeamus, omnes fedeles: Alvator noster natus est in mundum..." ("Rejoice, all we faithful, our Saviour is born into the world...").
There are also modern settings by John Joubert and Benjamin Britten among other composers.
For more information and a bio on Cecilia McDowell, see her website: Cecilia McDowall | British contemporary composer - Cecilia McDowall. If Cecilia McDowall is reading this, congratulations and we love the scarf.
Sources: Keyte, Hugh and Parrott, Andrew. The New Oxford Book of Carols," Oxford University Press, 1992: 28.
Disclaimer: The heading photo used above is from McDowell's website. We do not know who is the owner of this photo, and infringement is not intended. We will gladly oblige any take down under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). We will also obliged to add an photographer credit. The second photo is by Karina Lyburn and is a post on the Choir of King's College, Cambridge's Facebook page and also appears to be a photo on McDowell's website also. Photos are used under the allowance made for "fair use" under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 for the purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. We will obliged any takedown request of the Lyburn photo under the DMCA.
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