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Ho, ho, ho!

It's that time when sensible people take a break from the internet. There won't be any blog posts next week, but I'll be back soon. Meanwhile, there's a great carol below...

For those of us who celebrate Christmas, have a great one - and an excellent 2025 to all.

Having sung in choirs pretty much all my life, I'm a huge fan of good church music. Here's one of my favourite carols, Arthur Oldham's setting of Remember O Thou Man, which I first discovered when singing at the Oxford Physics Department carol service (don't ask) - it's not very well known, but well worth a listen.

If you like a bit of musical history (source The New Oxford Book of Carols), the words date back to the early seventeenth century, appearing as 'A Christmas Carroll' in Thomas Ravenscroft's 1611 Melismata: musical phansies fitting to court, citie and country humours to 3, 4 and 5 voyces. It's not known if the tune Ravenscroft used was original or a traditional one. It also has a small starring role in Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, when the choir has trouble singing it. As one character says 'The first line is well enough, but when you come to "O, thou man," you make a mess of it.' Oldham's setting bears no resemblance to Ravenscroft's and is far more challenging to sing, but haunting:

Image by Andreas Kretschmer from Unsplash

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