These final few days of Advent leading into Christmas take us from a Gloucestershire wood and the Norwegian tundra, to a TV studio, on to Cambridge and finally arriving in an organ loft in the City of London.<\/p>\n
In 1872, the American literary magazine Scribner\u2019s Monthly asked the English poet Christina Rossetti to contribute a Christmas poem for publication. Rossetti wrote A Christmas Carol<\/em>, better known as In the Bleak Midwinter<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n It is notable for its simple pastoral description and its placing of the birth of Jesus In a Western European midwinter setting. \u00a0So we have the frosty wind, the hard earth, and the ‘snow on snow’ replacing the milder climate found in Bethlehem. But Rossetti was conveying a deeper truth. Midwinter is a dark time and becomes a metaphor for life itself. It is into this darkness that Love in human flesh is birthed. For Rosetti, the birth of Jesus has cosmic significance and impacts all of humanity forever.<\/p>\n Three different musical settings will take us through the final days of our Advent journey.<\/p>\n Sunday 22 December<\/strong><\/p>\n The first setting is by Gustav Holst: simple and even a bit stark. Holst named the tune Cranham<\/em>, after the village he had lived in near Cheltenham. It’s a wild and woody place (trust me on this), and a bit off the beaten track. A straightforward, even \u2018cold\u2019 tune which is easy to sing and focuses our attention less on itself and rightly, in my opinion, on these wonderful words. In a sense it is a tune that simply serves the words. And of course this points us to the One who is at the heart of Christmas. The One who came \u2018not to be served, but to serve\u2019.<\/p>\n Oscar Gjeilo (Yayloh) is a Norwegian composer and pianist whose music expresses his core belief that music is there to be uplifting and inspire harmony.\u00a0\u00a0 He creates a beautiful winter sound from which Holst\u2019s tune emerges. A Gloucestershire wood in midwinter meets a snowbound Norwegian Tundra.<\/p>\n