The program notes are written by Rena Roussin, Musicologist-in-Residence.

Welcome to the 25th annual Festival of Carols! A beloved holiday tradition in Toronto that is now a quarter-century old, the Festival of Carols is a chance to mark the spirit of the season by communally listening to and singing Christmas carols. Historically, this performance brings together the old and the new, musically and otherwise: every year the evening combines well-known carols with lesser-known, contemporary holiday pieces. At the same time, the Festival brings together members of the TMChoir’s long-term audience, who have made this event part of their own holiday traditions, with a large number of individuals who are often attending their first-ever TMChoir concert. Whether this is your first Festival of Carols, your fifth, your twentieth, or even your twenty-fifth: thank you for joining us!

Of course, having so many repeat attendees also means that one of the great challenges for me, as the TMChoir’s Musicologist in Residence, is thinking about how to keep the Festival of Carols program notes from feeling repetitive year after year! And on this special anniversary year, I find myself thinking about the program notes a bit differently than normal. Musicologist that I am, when I think about how music connects to holidays, memories, tradition, and stories, I tend first to think about the origins of the music itself: what the composer wanted to communicate, and what stories, traditions, themes, and historical understandings that music conveys and connects us to.

This year, however, I find myself thinking instead of all the stories, memories, and traditions that all of you, our audience, bring to these songs, and to this event. Over the years, I’ve had the honour of hearing from several of you about what this event means to you. Some of you have told me that the Festival is a break amid busy holiday preparations, a moment of peace, a chance to reflect or recapture the joy of the season. For some of our younger audience members, it’s inextricable from their memories of the holidays growing up, and is a reminder of childhood joy in the days leading up to Christmas. Yet the theme that always seems to echo across everyone’s stories is that the Festival offers a special moment of community and connection, even (or sometimes especially) during years that held a particularly hard or lonely holiday season.

There’s something to it, I think: to the act of singing and listening together each year; to coming back to old memories and traditions, and to making space for new ones. And this year’s edition has all the standard favourites we expect from the Festival of Carols (including an excerpt from another beloved Christmas music tradition, Handel’s Messiah), along with seven recently-composed pieces that are destined to become new favourites. Craig Hella Johnson’s 2007 fusion of “Lo, How a Rose/The Rose” is a reminder that love and beauty can be found even in dark and challenging places. Sir James Macmillan’s 2008 “O radiant dawn” uses repeated words and musical motifs to portray the longing for Jesus’s advent and the arrival of a brighter world. Rosephayne Powell’s 2019 “Christus Natus Est” sets a text by Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, fusing its message of social justice with musical motifs from the spiritual “Go Down Moses.” Tonight’s program also has a particularly strong focus on childhood and lullabies. Ēriks Ešenvald’s 2010 “Only in Sleep” joins Sara Teasdale’s poem about recounting childhood memories in dreams to music evocative of child-like wonder. John Rutter’s 1978 “Mary’s Lullaby,” a contemporary classic that was infamously composed in under 24 hours, depicts a lullaby at Christ’s Nativity; by contrast, Kelly-Marie Murphy’s 2022 “By-by Lullaby” depicts a similar scene, but draws on an anonymous traditional English text from 1530. Finally, tonight’s performance also features a world premiere of Aaron Manswell’s newlycomposed “Good News,” which fuses the melody and textual concepts of J.S. Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” with Manswell’s compositional influences from gospel and R&B.

The holiday season celebrates many things that are sacred. The birth of Jesus. Light emerging in darkness, particularly at the break of dawn after the Winter Solstice. Family, friendship, and community. Traditions, ceremonies, and memory. Perhaps what’s so special about the Festival of Carols is the reminder that singing in community—something which is, unfortunately, an increasingly rare experience—is also something sacred. After all, in singing together, we join our voices, our stories, our heritage, and our traditions. And so, on behalf of the TMChoir singers and staff: thank you for singing with us and making us part of your stories and traditions—and for being part of ours. Happy Holidays!

—Rena Roussin, Musicologist-in-Residence