74: Cumulative (Christmas) Music in mid-March

Cumulative music is a form that I rarely hear discussions about—except in one instance: “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. The premise of the song is that one’s true love gives them, from Christmas until the Epiphany:


1.       A partridge and a pear tree

2.       Yesterday’s gifts (another partridge) plus 2 turtle doves

3.       Yesterday's gifts (another partridge and 2 more doves) plus 3 French hens

4.       Yesterday’s gifts plus four (calling/colly—there is debate about this word) birds

5.       Yesterday’s gifts plus five golden rings

6.       Yesterday’s gifts plus six geese actively laying eggs

7.       Yesterday’s gifts plus seven swans actively swimming

8.       Yesterday’s gifts plus eight maids actively milking cows

9.       Yesterday’s gifts plus nine ladies actively dancing

10.  Yesterday’s gifts plus ten lords actively leaping

11.  Yesterday’s gifts plus eleven pipers (woodwind players) playing pipes (flutes)

12.  Yesterday’s gifts plus twelve drummers actively drumming

The fact that you get all your gifts from yesterday, again, plus a new gift today, as the song progresses, means the gift lists get considerably longer as time passes. Each verse of the song builds on the verse before it. This is where the “cumulative” nomenclature comes from.

Here is verse/day 1—short enough that MuseScore natively displays it on a single line:

Now here is verse/day 12, with all the gifts counting down:

 

 

In between, the verses build the same way every time: listing the gifts from most recent to oldest. Here, for example, is day 7, with the same gift labeling:

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