Skip to main content

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

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:

See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
118 comments
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...
25 comments
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...
6 comments
Read more