All seated on the ground

Let’s go back to a traditional Christmas carol today. “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night”, about the annunciation of the Nativity to the shepherds, dates from the turn of the 18^th Century, and has been set to different music down the years.

You might have sung one version in a Christmas pageant. If you’re old enough to have been in institutions that had Christmas pageants. In the US, that version is likely to have been the one using an aria from Handel’s opera Siroe, arranged by Lowell Mason (who gave us “Joy to the World”, amongst others).

That one sounds like this:

(Let me just say that listening to this is a complete blast from the past. I can hear all the little piping city voices trying to understand the concept of shepherds being out at night… “And glo-ry shone around” always sounded like we were drunk. For the record, we were in the third grade, and no, we were not drunk.)

In the UK, however, the prevalent version is set to the hymn known as Winchester Old. You hear it quite often in productions of A Christmas Carol. This is it:

I’ll confess that this Libera choir kind of gives me the creeps. It’s the Cistercian robes, partly—they look like evil ghost monks-in-training. Also, the overproduced sound annoys the spit out of me, but YMMV, so I offer it up in the spirit of ecumenism.