And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!

One of the problems with singing in an amateur choir, as I do, is that we need to do a lot of rehearsal. Every year we sing a concert of Christmas music in the second week in December, so we have to start rehearsing this music as early as the beginning of September. As a result, we're singing Christmas carols as soon as we're back from our summer holidays.

One particularly painful episode occurred last week. Our national 'classical' radio station, Lyric FM, likes to play Christmas carols in the month of December, and they get all the choirs in the country to record them. Only the best are played, and the very best choir gets a prize. So we decided to record 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' for the radio.

I'm sure you all know the song – on the seventh day of Christmas my true love sent to me, followed by a big list of birds, rings, musicians, you name it. The trick is to remember what was sent on each day, and to repeat them all in reverse order after every verse. We have an arrangement of this for four-part choir by John Rutter, the acknowledged master of British choral music. It's quite clever; instead of just singing the song, it passes the various gifts around the choir – the basses sing the six geese, the altos do the second day and so on. The five gold rings are harmonised differently each verse, and there are key changes as well. So the overall effect provides a bit of variety in what could be a dull song to listen to.

We thought it would be just a quick run through, then the recording. Oh no. The conductor decided that we would spend the entire first hour of the rehearsal running over the song, tidying up the details, drumming the dynamics (louds and softs) into us, and catching the people who were still singing the tune the way everybody knows it, rather than the way John Rutter arranged it. I became heartily sick of those five gold rings and all those squawking birds. Eventually, we were ready, so it was time for the break and our well-deserved cup of tea.

All amateur choirs need people to do small jobs. Some make the tea, some organise the chairs. My job is a simple one – I'm the Bellman. I time the tea break and ring a handbell at the end of it, exhorting everyone to finish up and head back in to sing. I feel like shouting 'Nine O'Clock and All is Well' as I do this. Adults drinking tea have great inertia – it takes a lot of bell ringing before they are back in their seats.

The second part of the rehearsal was given over to recording. The song only takes a few minutes to sing, so we recorded it four times, each time getting more proficient. The conductor will choose the best of these to send off, but it was pretty obvious to everyone that the last one was the best. The third one would have been acceptable except that before we finished the final chord, one of the men announced in a loud voice 'Well, that wasn't too bad was it?'.

After about 45 minutes, the conductor and the sound man were in agreement that we had a viable recording and the rehearsal was over. Whether it will be played on air or not is in the lap of the gods, as it depends on what other choirs choose to contribute. But with luck, we'll be able to sit back and listen to ourselves singing on the radio in December.

We stopped singing at 10. But the music didn't stop – the twelve days kept going in my head and days later I was still humming 'four calling birds, three French hens'. It'll take some serious other music to drive that out of my head. I think Nightwish might be appropriate.

The Twelve Days of Christmas is an interesting song, as it was designed as a sort of memory competition, more fun for the people singing than the people listening. Each verse, the list of objects gets longer and you have to try and remember what comes next. Originally, the song only went up to seven days, and every day was a different type of bird – swans, geese, ringed pheasants, colly birds, French hens, turtle doves and the partridge. Even the pear tree may have been a bird – partridge in old French was perdrix pronounced 'pear dree' so the pear tree was just the partridge repeated. Somewhere along the way, the ringed pheasants became gold rings, and extra verses were added, presumably to make the song more difficult, with extra gifts which were not birds: maids, ladies dancing, drummers, pipers and lords.

The song is traditional, but the tune used for everything from 'five gold rings' onwards is not – it was written by Frederic Austin in 1909 and is still in copyright.

The title of the song is puzzling – what exactly are the Twelve Days of Christmas? The Season of Christmas traditionally started on Christmas Day and ended on the Feast of the Epiphany, the 6th of January. That's actually thirteen days, not twelve. There are various explanations for the discrepancy. My theory is that Christmas started at sunrise on the 25th of December and ended at sunset on the 6th of January, so there were only 12 nights, although there were 13 days. The combination of the well-known '12th Night', the last night of Christmas, and the carol have led people to the impression that there were in fact 12 Days of Christmas.

For me, though, it is 12 Days of Madness, as I try to get this tune out of my head.

Gnomon

25.10.2010

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