Hark!

Tim Woodcock writes: The carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” stirs up very specific memories in me and, perhaps more than any other piece of music, it has the ability to transport me elsewhere. No matter where I am when I hear it, I imagine myself to be in a Methodist chapel in Ketton, a village in England, where my mom’s family is from and where we would typically spend Christmas when I was a child.

“Hark! The herald-angels sing / ‘Glory to the newborn king.’” My mom’s voice, my grandma’s voice (recognizably the same timbre yet older), my grandad – a farmer whose hands are a little too large for the keys on the organ – vigorously bashing out the tune. A small crowd singing with great gusto. This is absolutely a chapel not a church, a building that holds no more than 30 people, a good portion of whom I am related to, one way or the other.

But beyond that idiosyncratic association for me, there’s something more universal at play. The rising notes of “Join the triumph of the skies / With the angelic host proclaim” allowing you to believe – if only for a moment – that you, an earth-born creature, embedded right now in this congregation of untrained singers, are in fact part of an angelic chorus.

It’s a challenging song with the knotty theology and laborious word order of the second verse: “Hail the incarnate Deity / Pleased as man with man to dwell / Jesus, our Emmanuel.” And the third verse takes it up a notch, with a complex descant, that keeps you musically on your toes. Only the musical confident try it: “Hail the Heaven-born Prince of Peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness!”

And it all circles back to the familiar refrain. We are somehow, by singing it, ennobled and made more alert, more able to hear distant voices: “Hark! The herald-angels sing / ‘Glory to the newborn King.’"

* Click here to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (with just a few more people than can fit in a typical village chapel).