Talk:A Ceremony of Carols

Wolcum Yole!
"At one point, all the parts come in at separate times to introduce each guest who has arrived for the holidays"

This is not the point of the text. They welcome Yole, Steven, Jon, Innocents, Thomas, Newe Yere, Twelfthe Day. These are all important dates: Yole 25th December, St Steven 26th, St John 27th, Day of the Innocents 28th, Thomas a Becket 29th, and so on.

I propose to edit the text to reflect this, unless there are objections.

Pemboid (talk) 12:11, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Source of texts
I can't find any online sources for the claim that the texts are from "The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems" by Gerald Bullett. Can anyone verify that this is indeed where Britten got the texts? EldKatt (Talk) 14:31, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
 * It says so in this book" Humphrey Carpenter Benjamin Britten: a biography (London: Faber, 1992) ISBN 0571143245. Sorry, I don't have it with me so I can't give you a page, but if you look in the index it should be easy to find. Makemi 17:12, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I have it handy, and it has much less to say than one would expect.  Neither Bullett nor Julius Harrison (the SATB arranger) are in the index, but on p.168 on finds: "A similar stroke of luck was finding the book which contained most of the medieval poems in a shop in Halifax..." (my emphasis, perhaps only the "Hodie" is meant to be excluded).   Pears reported "7 Christmas Carols for women's voices and harp"; I wonder if this first incarnation explains the curious 4a 4b numbering... Sparafucil (talk) 07:10, 16 December 2010 (UTC)


 * http://www.vaneyckensemble.be/achtergr05brittene.html has an excerpt from an interview with Britten in which he says, "From this book I used five poems for 'A Ceremony of Carols': 3, 5, 6, 8 en 10.". It doesn't say where/when the interview is from though. Jaddle (talk) 01:11, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

More detail?
I wonder whether it would be appropriate to provide some slightly more sophisticated musical analysis to each piece and to the work as a whole. Movement toward and away from dissonances and the use of the half-tone are especially interesting in this work, especially as they relate to the texts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Roger Chait (talk • contribs) 14:00, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

A few comments
Experienced editors with access to source material may be able to help clear up these issues:

(1) In the opening paragraph we are told there are eleven movements, but later the article lists twelve.

(2) The movement titles have what I assume to be attributions of the sources of the text in parenthesis, although this is not explained and I think it should be for clarity.

(3) One of the movements, however, instead of the text source, states in parenthesis that it was also set by William Cornysh. Is that relevant in the context of this article? Most of the texts have probably also been set by other composers.

Hoping somebody can help. Christmas greetings! --188.30.156.58 (talk) 20:47, 24 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Also, two movements (6 and 12) have numbers other than the WP section numbers and the others do not. Is there a reason for that?  It seems like an editing error; I would delete the numbers, or else all should have numbers.  Christmas greetings two years later!  Zaslav (talk) 07:30, 23 December 2021 (UTC)