Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival Music Festival 2023-‘24

                     Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles perform The Twelve Days of Christmas.

December 1 is World AIDS Day.  In honor of that we feature the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles (GMCLA), the oldest, largest, and most prestigious Gay choral group in the United States.  It was formed in 1979 at Plummer Park Community Center in Los Angeles, with 99 members.  Its first public performance was at the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights that October and they also performed at n the first ever national LGBT concert at the Washington Memorial.

World Aids Day 2023 commemorates its origins.

As GMCLA continued to grow throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s the AIDS crisis did not spare its members, the chorus suffered the loss of its musical director, Jerry Carlson, as well as over 20 other members by 1988. Ultimately, over 150 members were lost to the AIDS pandemic leaving only eight original members of the chorus as members now known as the “First Nighters.”

Members of the GMCLA doned ugly Christmas sweater in a holiday performance.

The Chorus has grown in size, gained professional artistic and administrative staff, toured nationally and internationally, released 16 CDs, and appeared with numerous stage, film, and television celebrities including Billy Porter, Lily Tomlin, Angela Lansbury, Bea Arthur, Jerry Herman, Melissa Manchester, Mary McDonnell, Stephen Schwartz, Liz Callaway, Lance Bass, Jennifer Holliday, LeAnn Rimes, and Christy Metz. The Chorus has appeared on several television broadcasts including the 85th Academy Awards, Access Hollywood, Will & Grace, The Ren & Stimpy Show, Mad TV, and a six-episode arc on Six Feet Under.

Back in 2011 I was honored and astonished when Chorus members commissioned an original choral setting from my poem Rainbows Are Not Enough as a retirement salute to their long-time music director. The poem was included in my 2004 Skinner House Books collection We Build Temples in the Heart.

GMCLA’s annual Holiday Spectacular concerts are highly awaited seasonal programs.  This year performances will be on Saturday, December 16 at 8 pm PST and Sunday, December 17 at 3:30 pm at the Saban Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.  This year the production will feature the music of Motown—expect a cappella of all kinds, including covers of the Temptations, the Supremes, the Ronettes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and the Jackson 5.

 Today’s selection, The Twelve Days of Christmas as featured in the Chorus’s 2013 show.

 

Here We Come A-Wassailing—The Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2022-‘23

                            Alan Lomax recorded Kentucky traditional balladeer Jean Richie for the Library of Congress in 1949.

Note—As we close in on the end of our Winter Holidays Music Festival we will spend two days on the close of the Twelve Days of Christmas as observed in British tradition and the Anglican liturgic calendar on January 5.  The next day, the Feast of the Epiphany or Day of the Three Kings will wrap things up.

Twelfth Night is the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany and the end of the Christmas Season.  In England especially it was one last eruption of gaiety and mirth before the more somber and sacred reflection of the Epiphany—somewhat analogous to Mardis Gras or Carnival before Lent.

A ragged caroler offers a steaming wassail bowl at a gentleman's table and is rewarded with fine libations.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was the climax of the caroling and street revelry that followed Christmas Day and was marked with dancing, a sexual cavorting—the subject of William Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night— and costumed revelry often evoking the Holy King and semi-pagan masquerades. Mostly it was celebrated by caroling with wassail, a hot mulled wine or cider prepared and served in bowls.  Often a landlord’s peasants and tenants came bearing large wassail bowls for the lord of the manor in exchange for lavish gifts of food and other beverages.  So popular was the beverage and custom that there were a number of songs about it that asked—or demanded—the hospitality of the landlord at whose door the carolers appeared.  The most familiar is the gay Here We Come A-Wassailing, But there were several others from different regions of the Realm, each of which might variant local lyrics set to any number of folk tunes.

Here We Come A-Wassailing is a traditional English Christmas carol and New Year song, sung while wassailing—singing carols, wishes of good health and offering homemade bowls of wassail exchange for an invitation to share drinks and food with the master of the house.  It is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index. Gower Wassail and Gloucestershire Wassail are similar carols.

                                 A late 19th Century carol collection included it under the alternative title The Wassail Song.

The song was collected and printed in the mid-19th Century but is much older.  The a in “a-wassailing” is an archaic intensifying prefix found in A-Hunting We Will Go and lyrics to The Twelve Days of Christmas—“Six geese a-laying.”

Hundreds of versions of wassailing songs have been collected, including dozens of variants collected by Cecil Sharp from the 1900s to the 1920s, mostly in the south of England.  It appears to have travelled to the United States with English settlers, where it was found several times in the Appalachian region.  Early American recordings included Edith Fitzpatrick James of Ashland, Kentucky in 1934 folk legend Jean Ritchie in 1949.  Americans often sing a variant, Here We Come A-Caroling probably because publishers and record producers didn’t thank the Yanks would know what the hell wassailing was.

                                        A  gentler form a wassailing was the visit of neighborhood children who got treats much like trick-or-treaters.

Jean Ritchie came from an old family of Scottish and English settlers in Virginia and Kentucky stretching back to pre-Revolutionary times.  The extended family brought many traditional songs including those that would be identified as Childe Ballads and passed them on from generation to generation and collected many more over time from neighbors and relatives.  They played instruments and became well known as local singers in Kentucky.  She was born the youngest of 14 children in Viper in 1922.  Her family encouraged the children to get educations and 11 of them graduated from college. 

Jean enrolled in Cumberland Junior College—now the four-year University of the Cumberlands—in Williamsburg and from there graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in social work from the University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1946.  She moved to New York City as a social worker at a settlement house where she taught her traditional ballads.  She fell in with the post-World War II folk music scene and befriended Woody Guthrie, Oscar Brand, Pete Seeger, and Alan Lomax.  She appeared with The Weavers, Guthrie and Betty Sanders at the annual Spring Fever Hootenanny in 1947 and soon became a regular on Brand’s pioneering folk music radio program.

Kentucky bred traditional singer Jean Ritchie with her mountain dulcimer about the time of her 1949 sessions with Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress.

In 1949 Alan Lomax recorded hours of her songs, storytelling, and family recollections in 1949 which ended up in the Library of Congress collection.  The red-haired singer played primarily a simple mountain dulcimer but could also play banjo, guitar, and autoharp.  In 1953 she became a full-time musician and signed a contract with Electra Records.  She has subsequently recorded dozens of albums, written and published family memoirs and song collections, helped found the Newport Folk Festival, and mentored generations of singers.  A much beloved mother of American folk music she continued to sing and perform almost up to her death in 2015 at age 92.

Her version of Here We Come A-Wassailing was recorded by Lomax in the 1949 New York sessions. 

 

2019 Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival—The First Nowell/Noël/Noel

The First Noel by Pentatonix.

Somehow Americans have come to think that the Christmas season begins at Thanksgiving and stretches through Christmas Day after which it abruptly ends.  This is largely due to tying the season to retail sales and gift giving since the 1920’s when Macy’s had Santa arrive at the end of their annual parade.  It got a boost during the Depression when it became government policy to encourage Christmas shopping as a way of stimulating the shattered economy and really took off during the post-World War II economic boom and the stimulus of advertising, especially on television.

In this view the Holidays that Bing Crosby sang about would extend to New Year’s Eve and Day after which everyone switches back to the daily grind and a long stretch of cabin fever producing Winter.

The U.S. Christmas includes all of traditional Advent, a Christian liturgical season of reverent anticipation of the coming of the New Born King.  Christmas for Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and other Christians who observe that traditional calendar extends from Christmas Day through the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany in January—the Twelve Days of Christmas.  It was in this season that the celebration of Christ’s birth was exuberantly blended with ancient pre-Christian customs including the turn-about of St. Stephen’s/Boxing Day, caroling and street begging, country dancing, punctuated by a riotous New Year’s, and ending with the wassailing and revelry of Twelfth Night.  

True Christmas carols were only sung in church during this season and there were numerous less reverent songs for the street celebrations and private parties.  No where were these festive songs more popular than in the British Isles.  Among the oldest of these songs is The First Nowell, First Noël, or First Noel.  Noel is an early modern English synonym for Christmas from the Norman French.

The song is of Cornish origin first noted in the early 19th Century during the fad for collecting traditional folk song, but is undoubtedly much older.  Cornwall was an ancient Celtic region occupying the southwest peninsula of Britain with its own distinctive language and culture.

The version now most commonly sung was printed in Carols, New and Old by John Stainer in 1871.

The First Noel in its current form was first published in 1823 in Carols Ancient and Modern and again in 1833 in Gilbert and Sandys Carols, both of which were edited by William Sandys and arranged with extra lyrics written by Davies Gilbert for Hymns and Carols of God. Today, it is usually performed in a four-part hymn arrangement by the English composer John Stainer, first published in his Carols, New and Old in 1871. 

A number of variations on the lyrics have been published over the years and two final verses completing the story of the Wise Men were omitted by Stainer and are not now usually sung or included in hymnals.

Hip and modern, the a cappela  quintet Pentatonix has become Christmas music favorites.

Today we feature a version by Pentatonix, the American a cappella group from Arlington, Texas, consisting of vocalists Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi, Kirstin Maldonado, Kevin Olusola, and Matt Sallee. The group gained a wide following after winning the third season of NBC’s The Sing-Off and now have a popular YouTube channel.  They mix pop arrangements with close harmonies, basslines, riffing, percussion, and beatboxing and have become especially well known for their Christmas music.