37: A Legendary Christmas Chord

 

As I’m writing this (you’ll be seeing it much later), today is Christmas. If there’s one chord that musically defines English-speaking Catholic, Anglican, or Lutheran Christmas, it’s the “Word of the Father” chord—simply known by church musicians as “the chord” this time of year (often written as “THE CHORD!!!” with varying numbers of exclamation points, because that’s how you indicate a fortissimo dynamic—very loudly, if not even fortississimo, or “very, very loudly”—in speech, i.e., yelling, or in musical lyrics, on the internet).

(For the record, at the Mass I went to about 24 hours before I started writing this article, we did not hear the chord this article is about.)

Here's a pretty no-frills arrangement of Adeste Fideles (don't mind the pink arrows; those are just me forcing MuseScore to render in a line-break at those points to make the phrases more obvious, and therefore to make the score easier to read):



This works perfectly in a congregation and is nearly exactly what you’d find if you go to any church, find a hymnal, and open it to Adeste Fideles. The reason it’s so close to what your average church choir will sing is that nothing particularly strange happens in voice-leading or harmony, ever—so it’s very easy to learn, since everyone already knows the melody.

We start, naturally, at home, in G. At the end of bar 8 (“Bethlehem”), I had a choice—harmonize the D as the fifth of the I, or steer the harmony before it toward momentarily tonicizing the V, thereby steering the harmony toward D, so the melody note is the fake momentary “tonic” and the root of that chord. In bar 9 (the fabled spot of legendary Christmas harmony—but nothing special here), I deliberately go back to tonicizing the real tonic G throughout “come and behold Him, born the King of angels,” before again cadencing to D at the end of that phrase. Once we start singing “O come let us adore Him,” there are no more harmonic shenanigans whatsoever, even as common and acceptable (though technically shenanigans) everything else I’ve chosen to do has been.

Sir David Wilcox, on the other hand, (I think to make a theological commentary on the radical love involved in the act of the Incarnation of the Son), choses a completely different route in the seventh and last verse of his arrangement (which starts“Yea Lord we greet thee…”). (His and my first verses are very similar; then again, most harmonizations of the very first verse are almost identical to mine.)

First, Sir David writes the last verse in a way that everyone—the whole choir—sings in unison/octaves, not traditional 4-part harmony all the way through, like I wrote. With the whole choir in unison, all the harmony is left in the hands of the organist, and they may or may not be (not here—Sir David wrote it explicitly) allowed or expected to do whatever they want, since we’ve essentially created a blank canvas for the organ by putting the whole choir in unison.

The reason everyone gets so excited about “THE CHORD!!!!!” is how jarring a fortissimo (at the bare minimum, frankly; fortississimo would be even better if it’s possible—but that literally comes down to the structure/architecture of the organ and how powerful it is) half-diminished chord is, especially in that place (where, for example, I worked so hard to reestablish where “home” was after tonicizing the dominant in the immediately-prior cadence.).

The anticipation of (and here I mean “jitters for” not “musical preparation of”) that chord—singers wait all through the 4 weeks of Advent to finally be able to start singing it on Christmas Eve—and, frankly, the adrenaline-fueled exhilaration the choir feels rushing through their bodies (I have heard The Chord in the past and felt that same rush, so I can confirm this is very real; and few emotions in liturgical music compare to it—except maybe finally getting to sing “Alleluia” in a recessional hymn at the end of a 3-plus-hour Easter Vigil), combined with, as I said earlier, the way the chord itself is a sort of commentary on how incredible the fact of the Incarnation is, makes this chord a hit (and, online, a meme) year after year.

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