Strumming Dynamics Part 2
Coventry Carol sings the loss of slaughtered infants in a play depicting Herod’s massacre of the innocents. These mystery plays were religious community events, telling Bible stories in the vernacular with humour and pathos, from the creation right through to judgement day. They were performed annually by the local trade or craft guilds, a tradition that began in the middle ages. They were threatened in 1548, along with the banning of the Feast of Corpus Christi that was the occasion of their performance, in a royal and ecclesiastical bid to rid England of all vestiges of Catholicism.
The song and play that carries Coventry Carol has only been preserved through acts of good timing and good luck, surviving the general loss of many period artefacts, suppression of its staging, and a devastating fire that destroyed the original document.
My first hearing of it was an act of theatre that changed my life. This was way back in 1984, but even now a shiver runs down my spine each time I think of it. The experience showed me the door to early music, a door which John Renbourn later opened; and it taught me what, at its best, a song can be.
Coventry Cathedral: the slaughter of the innocents
This background makes the dating of the Coventry mystery play manuscripts highly significant. Henry VIII’s concluding Act of Supremacy was passed in November 1534. Robert Croo’s manuscript of the plays was dated 14 March 1534, only 8 months before. This was during Henry’s final crescendo of anger at Catholic Church authority, but he had made no attempt to suppress mystery play performances. The second Coventry manuscript, including Coventry Carol, is from 1591, 43 years after mystery plays had been threatened, then revived, then suppressed again in a climate of fear. Someone was eager to remember and document a long and well-loved tradition to prevent it fading from memory.
So with the mystery play tradition gone, and with so much of what was written down lost, and with the unintended destruction by fire of a manuscript that did survive, it is only by several strokes of luck and good timing that we have this song and the drama that carried it at all.
The meaning of a song
When I first heard Coventry Carol, sung spine-tinglingly in pitch darkness by a lone female voice; then, as the lights slowly faded up, two, then three voices, something very powerful happened inside me. I understood, I think for the first time, the full potency of a song. I understood it, not from an academic, intellectual, researched point of view – though all of that is important – but on the level of my experience, my gut, my stunned heart. And that is more important: if this music doesn’t move us, why would we want to invest time in researching, understanding and playing it?
This was the first time I had heard early music, but I had yet to hear that label or know what it meant. The Mystery Play experience seared right through me, but I had nowhere to place it. It was a few years later, on listening to folk guitarist John Renbourn’s album, The Lady and the Unicorn, that I first heard a John Dowland piece, played on concertina and acoustic guitar; medieval dance tunes, played on guitar in open tunings and guitar and sitar duet; branles from the danceries of Claude Gervaise on guitar, fiddle and concertina; and J. S Bach, played on electric guitar with heavy tremolo. What a beautiful treat. I read the liner notes and began to understand what early music is. I now had the corner of a map on which I could place Coventry Carol. Thank you, John.
In that moment, hearing a voice in the dark singing mournfully, Lully, lulla, thow littell tiné child, I began a journey. I had my first taste of the beauty and power of early music; and I powerfully understood that in music it is never enough to know the notes: the real work of understanding is to climb inside a song and feel its beating heart. Technical musical ability is important, of course, but this is just the beginning, not the goal. For there to be communication between singer and listener, a shared empathic experience, music must be driven by something deeper: emotional truth, akin to that I experienced on an April evening in Coventry.
Lully, lulla, thow littell tiné child; By, by, lully, lullay thow littell tyné child: By, by, lully, lullay.
O sisters too how may we do For to preserve this day This pore yongling for whom we do singe By, by, lully, lullay.
Herod the king in his raging Chargid he hath this day His men of might in his owne sight, All yonge children to slay.
That wo is me pore child for thee, And ever morne and say For thi parting nether say nor singe By, by lully, lullay.
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