Development Of The Carol
The seasonal songs popular in western music, especially in conjunction with the Christmas season, known as carols, have a rich and complex history full of tradition and controversy in the realms of both sacred and secular music.
The concept of singing carols to celebrate holidays developed during the 13th century in France, although what was to be known as carol music had been around from centuries earlier. It is believed that when troubadour Saint Francis of Assisi had made the first Greccio crib, he began to sing songs honoring the Nativity and the joy of celebration in religion, for this was a strict Puritanical era wherein communal singing, drama, and any type of festivity was looked ...
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for these plays. The still popular English "Coventry Carol" dates back to this period. By the end of the 15th century, carols had begun to stand on their own as anonymous pieces of music, and were dung on almost all religious feast days, including Christmas, Easter, and throughout the Spring in celebration of the peoples emancipation from Puritanism.
As mentioned earlier, the music that these early carols were based on dates back to the 9th and 10th centuries Medieval period, where it was used as dance music. The word carol itself is derived form the Latin "choraula," which was a monophonic ring dance accompanied by singing during the Medieval era. The form of the early carols followed the binary structure of these dances. It consisted of the stanza, which was basically a verse, and was used as a resting point for the dancers, and the burden, which was a theme repeated at the beginning and ending of each piece as well as between each stanza. It expressed a sort of summary ...
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syllables per line, known as a one-rime iambic tercet, plus a refrain. This is evident with the exception of a few extra syllables in "The First Nowell."
But as the carols progressed and flourished throughout the 16th century, the ordinary ballad metre and common time were used more often. The simple single monophonic lines developed into three-part polyphony, although the music did remain relatively simple. And in 1521 the first printed collection of carols was issued by Wynkyn de Worde, containing one of the popular Boar’s Head Carols. In 1550 Richard Kele reprinted de Worde’s collection as Christmas Carols Newly Imprinted, which is the first surviving manuscript containing ...
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"Development Of The Carol." Essayworld.com. February 25, 2008. Accessed April 24, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Development-Of-The-Carol/79578.
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