He heard, very far off in the wood, a sound of bells

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Many of my friends have realised by now that it amuses me greatly to wander round for the whole of December with sleighbells in my pocket, so that I jingle slightly when I walk (and even more when I run). I was just thinking today about two incidents from my past that are probably responsible for this habit.

At the first school I taught at, I worked closely with a lady called Marilyn, who ran the woodwind ensembles. One year, she had two boys in her class who were beginner percussionists, and they were so keen that she let them both join the senior ensemble even though there was often nothing for them to do (they wanted to play the drum kit, but there was an older boy who did that). At Christmas in their first year, she rewarded their patience by allowing them both to play the sleighbells in any piece requiring them. To save time, she told them each to keep their sleighbells in their tray (the school had those desks that have a removable tray underneath the writing surface) rather than having to go to the percussion storeroom every time they were needed. However, Michael and Mark both soon realised that the slightest movement, while they were sitting at their desks working, would result in a slight jingle... and every time this happened, Marilyn would jump, and look round wildly to see where the noise had come from. (She'd forgotten the boys had sleighbells in their trays.)

After a while, they took to carrying the sleighbells in their pockets when they weren't in the classroom, so that if they saw her in the corridor they could wait till she'd passed them and then jingle from a distance while hiding. I think the poor woman was losing her mind by the time Christmas came!

Several years later, I was teaching in a special school, and we always ended every day by reading aloud to our classes for ten minutes. One year, I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to them, and when I was getting to the bit where the White Witch first appears (heralded by sleighbells) I remembered I had a set of sleighbells in the bottom of my desk drawer. I surreptitiously sneaked the drawer open, just enough for me to be able to reach the sleighbells, and I shook them at exactly the right moment, and then quickly withdrew my hand and kept a straight face while reading on.

The effect on the class was fabulous. They'd obviously all heard the jingling, but because I hadn't mentioned it, and (as far as they could see) there was no-one who could have caused it, they all started looking round the room and out of the window. When I got to the end of the chapter, I responded to "Did you hear that, Miss?" with "Hear what?" and didn't admit anything. I went home giggling to myself, reminded of Michael and Mark and Marilyn.

For the rest of the book, I used the sleighbells at every relevant opportunity - far more often than they were actually mentioned in the text! - just because it was so funny. The kids did catch on eventually, and seemed quite amused that I'd fooled them for so long. But ever since then, the idea of random jingling has made me smile throughout December.



Back to the present day. The last carol concert was the best of the four, I thought. It was certainly the best attended, but most importantly all five horns wore inflatable Santa suits! And I think the whole of the 2nd alto section - and probably some of the 1sts (you'd think it'd be the other way round, but I bet it wasn't) - sang the descant in O Come All Ye Faithful. It was a bit of a strain but GREAT fun - we can do a brilliant top G, as long as (a) it's allowed to be fortissimo; (b) the vowel can be fairly approximate; and (c) we don't have to sing much afterwards. (Good training for Mahler 2, of which more in a minute.)

(The descant verse of O Come All Ye Faithful, by the way, has one of the best examples of a dominant pedal there is. At the "O come let us adore him" bit, the organ and the bass instruments all hold a long D for several bars. This heightens the buildup to the end of the carol.)

I'm watching the Carols from Kings thing on TV as I write this, and it includes the Rutter arrangement of O Holy Night. Nice to hear it from the front - the altos don't get the tune anywhere in it, so we got a bit of a skewed perspective. I must say the King's boys don't get the top B flat anywhere near as well as our sops did! (It wasn't in the radio version, which I heard this afternoon. Does ANYONE know why there are always so many differences between the radio and TV versions? I've always wondered. The TV one doesn't look live - at least, they never show the congregation - so I guess they record it earlier... but why not just televise the radio version?)

(Huh - they just got to Personent Hodie, which WAS in the radio version, but it was in Latin on the radio and English on the TV! Bizarre!)

Just one final carol-related thought for people for next year. I've noticed that most people in the choir spend quite a bit of time attaching paperclips and various coloured slips of paper to their copies of Carols for Choirs, so that they can flip instantly to the next carol on the list. I used to do this, but then I became lazier and just wrote "go to page 246" (or whatever the next page is) at the end of each carol. This worked fine. Then I became even lazier, and just wrote the page numbers on the running order. I've found that there's plenty of time during the concert to find the correct page just by looking at the running order, although I sometimes ease my way a bit by using the sheet music as bookmarks for the first few carols. Just something you might like to try next year if you can't be bothered to faff around with post-it notes.

Anyway, I mentioned Mahler 2. This is our next concert, on 28th January, and I know a few people are already getting a bit anxious about singing it from memory. I've therefore updated my mp3 page, and it now contains not only mp3s of the relevant bit of the symphony, but also PDFs of the vocal score (both full and for individual parts), and a copy of the German text. I've also included an mp3 of me reading the German, in case new people don't know how to pronounce it. I hope this is useful, particularly as I don't think there's any Mahler on Cyberbass. (I could produce Cyberbass-style learning files for Mahler 2 if necessary, but let's see how you get on with what I've already done. I did this other stuff last time we did Mahler 2.)

(By the way, I've had to transfer my downloadable stuff to a free web hosting service, because the person who used to supply my webspace stopped responding to my attempts to contact him. It means there's a couple of extra steps before you can download things - I hope it's not too offputting. Please let me know if you need any help.)

Other stuff... I was told earlier today that there was a programme on BBC Radio Manchester this teatime that might include bits of our carol concerts, but I listened to it and it didn't. However, there's a similar-looking programme tomorrow (Christmas Day) at 5am, but it's probably a repeat. You'll be able to find it on iPlayer.

Also from the BBC, they've got a composite video of lots of choirs singing the Hallelujah Chorus. As they mention, it's intriguing how varied the pitch is!

This health and safety guidance for the singing of festive songs was read out by Fanny before the last concert. (My sister sent it to me last week, but I hadn't got round to posting the link until now.)

Much to my surprise, on the same night as our last carol concert, the Manchester Cathedral carol service was cancelled due to snow.

The Guardian had a nice editorial about carol singing. Also, they had a lovely article about evensong at St Paul's Cathedral.

In the Telegraph, several famous musicians tell us their favorite carols.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Times asks various famous artistic types what they secretly hate. Who'd have thought that Stephen Hough hates Bach? Or that our own music director doesn't like Belshazzar? (Via Intermezzo.)

Intermezzo also has a review of the best of 2009, which includes our Wagner weekend.

The Telegraph wonders whether classical music can ever be sexy.

ChoralBlog leads us to a post on the Confessions of a Choral Singer blog, with the great title Giving the Choir the Finger (get your mind out of the gutter). This post also links to a great post about body language of conductors. Well worth a read.

Here's a great article I saw a day or two ago, but annoyingly I forgot to make a note of where I saw the link. (Anyone who's reading this and thinks they deserve the credit, please let me know.) It's by Kenneth Woods and is about how some orchestral players can be described as terrorists.

On a very non-Christmassy note, here's yet another article about the vuvuzela, this time about a guy who's claiming he invented it. (I've decided to make it my mission to ensure that before the World Cup starts, everyone who reads this blog knows the name of that instrument!)

Choral Evensong on Radio 3 on Wednesday (30th December, 4pm) is live from Eton College Chapel, and the director of music is Ralph Allwood. And at 10pm the same day, they're repeating the Ukulele Prom, in case you missed it in the summer.

And finally, Venice is currently flooded, and the Big Picture does snow. Pretty!

P.S. Watch out for a series of twelve very short daily posts starting tomorrow, in which I will tell you (hopefully) useful and interesting stuff :-)