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managart · 7 years

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Pentatonix: A Contemporisation of The First Noel

The First Noel is a popular Christmas Carol sung from ages old till today in the 21st century across the world, mainly during Christmas to celebrate the birth of Christ in the Christian Faith, although in more secular groups, it is regarded as a seasonal song.

This essay will trace the origins of The First Noel and its significance to the themes of Christ and the celebration of Christmas, from the beginning of its existence to a modern-day interpretation of it by a popular A capella group (Pentatonix) that now performs it to a globalised audience.

The History of Carols

To begin, a carol, simply put, is a festive folk tune. Christmas carols are mostly similar, except they revolve around Christian ideologies. There is much dispute over when exactly The First Noel was composed and performed, but it is largely agreed upon that its first official date of publication was in Carols, Ancient and Modern (1823), in London. The publication is a collection of popular Christmas Carols, edited, arranged, and compiled by William Sandys, and Davies Gilbert. Depite that, the actual origins come from far before the early 19th century, between the era of classical antiquity and the dark ages, where churches held prominent power.

To understand how the form of a Carol has evolved to its universally adored figure today, its relationship with the church – the sanctified figurehead most people associate with Christmas Carols – must first be clarified.

During the earlier days of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, ‘Paganism’ referred to all beliefs outside of its body, in basic terms. The challenge of classifying Paganism into a single religion lies in its inclusion of multiple traditions with ways of life heavily influenced by nature, which unfortunately, are associated with witches, dark rituals, and cultists due to misrepresentations by current-day media and the early church who were the first to invent the label ‘Pagan’, which was originally Paganus - as translated in the Latin Dictionary by Charles T. Lewis and Charles Short as ‘Of or belonging to the country or to a village, rustic’. To summarise, the meaning of ‘Pagan’ can range from anything between a commoner residing in the outskirts of town to an actual follower of the Pagan beliefs.

Due to its dissenting relationship with the church, the meaning of the word ‘Pagan’ has fluctuated and changed greatly in the time since its existence. Nonetheless, the Church at that time abhorred these Carols that the Pagans sang as they were a celebration of an entire community of beliefs that went against the Catholic Christian faith.

In an article written on BBC, Burton-Hill wrote that singing and related Christmas festivities were abhorrent and sinful because they viewed celebrating Christ’s birth on 25 December as a ‘commercial’ tradition that derived – with no biblical justification – from the Roman Catholic Church, threatening their core Christian beliefs as nowhere had it been written that God had called upon mankind to celebrate Christ’s nativity in such manners. In 1644, an Act of Parliament effectively banned the festival. Following up in June 1647, the Long Parliament passed an ordinance confirming the abolition of the feast of Christmas.

Despite difficult circumstances, carols have persisted from the dark ages far into the 18th century, mostly by word of mouth, given that they did not exist in the form of a score sheet as the singers of these tunes – peasants – were often illiterate.

Fast forward into the 19th century, The First Noel is collated and published with the introduction of lyrics for the first time in history under Carols, Ancient and Modern, as mentioned before. From there, it grows into the tune of The First Noel that the world is familiar with today.

In between the 20th and 21st century, The First Noel has been performed several times and published in many commercial Christmas albums in the style of the singer in question, a few notable ones being Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and more recently, Pentatonix.

A Contemporary Interpretation of The First Noel

Pentatonix is an American-based performance group consisting 5 vocalists - Avi Kaplan, Scott Hoying, Kirstin Maldonado, Kevin Olusola, and Mitch Grassi, which reflects the pentatonic scale of five notes.

The group first rose to fame after winning NBC’s The Sing-Off in 2013. Since then, they have toured all around the world, including Singapore, where they will return again in 2017 as part of Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix’s Headlining Acts as a contemporary pop group performing in the style of A Capella singing.

A Capella is a form of music-making where a group (or at times, a soloist) of voices are unaccompanied by any other instrument in performing a piece of music

Originating from Gregorian Chants first sung in the Renaissance period in Roman Catholic churches across Western continents and composed by anonymous groups of people whose names are now lost to time, the structure – including notation, composition, and distribution of voice – has evolved greatly between the time of Gregorian Chants to what A Capella is today, though both forms still keep to the rules of producing music purely with the human voice.

With that introspective, alike Gregorian Chants, The First Noel we know today is vastly different from what it was.

For comparative purposes, the ‘original’ The First Noel that shall be used as a study against Pentatonix’s cover will be the version published in Carols, Ancient and Modern (1823).

Length-wise, the original The First Noel is much shorter, with only one stanza of combined lyrics and scores for piano and an accompanied voice:

The first Nowell that the Angel did say

Was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay

In fields where they lay keeping their sheep

In a cold winter’s night that was so deep

Nowell Nowell

Born is the King of Israel

Pentatonix’s cover is the version inherited from the New English Hymnal, with extended lines as it has already shifted from its original form, which was meant for a singular voice sung along with the piano based from its score sheet.

The New English Hymnal (1986) has rearranged The First Noel to fit the four-part harmony (Soprano Alto Tenor Bass) structure that majority of church choirs are familiar with singing, and Pentatonix has taken an excerpt of that with the lyrics mentioned beforehand along with the following:

They looked up and saw a star

Shining in the East beyond them far

And to the earth it gave great light

And so it continued both day and night

Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel

Born is the King of Israel!

The old rendition of The First Noel lacks a contemporary flair introduced to its more recent cover by Pentatonix’s usage of the SATB voices interchangeably. In its predecessor’s form, there is no presence of the SATB format, given that it was not produced to be sung by four voices at that time. Instead, it resembles a series of tonal harmonies with a bass constructed purely to harmonise with the melody.

Pentatonix has the luxury of 5 flexible voices that range between a mezzo soprano to a bass along with a beatboxer who all actively play different parts, although they overlap responsibilities with melodies often being either shared all switched amongst all voices involved in the song as a stylistic decision to brand themselves as a performance group with this as their specialty. Sopranos are often the main skeleton of a melody that people hear as what the tune encompasses. The Bass Line provides the harmony to match the main tune sung by the Soprano while the Alto and Tenor are known as harmonic fillers that flesh out decoratively to give finishing touches and to fill up what otherwise would sound empty in its wake.

Based on a video on TIME, Pentatonix has broken down rearrangements for A Capella in a very simple form – introduction of the beatboxer to establish a ‘groove’, which would be a common tone constructed by beatboxing, the emptiness amongst the beats filled up by a bass line, followed by background part(s) that would also be sounds made by the mouth instead of actual lyrics, then a harmonisation to match said background part before the proper solo lyrics of the song are introduced. Decorations to individual songs are added along the way to the end of the arrangement to provide a uniquely ‘Pentatonix’ personality to each cover.

Disregarding just the altered medium of presentation, the team behind Pentatonix has completely unwrapped and redressed the original The First Noel in a fashion that was impossible in the 19th century, utilising aural and visual communication skills via publicity through social media, in the entire package of a music video on YouTube as its method of delivery to its audience.

Pentatonix’s The First Noel is targeted to its audience of a general age between early teenage years to late adulthood. Other than performing live at concerts and touring around the world, as primary consumers of the world-wide web, their audiences have easy access to YouTube, where similar covers have been published on their channel, granting them the ability to rewatch the video repeatedly to their heart’s content at no cost, thus allowing the band to monitor their fans’ reactions to everything they do from a statistical viewpoint as YouTube collects data on its watchers with precise accuracy.

Compare this to the target audience of the original The First Noel, or even the New English Hymnal’s version of only churchgoers. The target audience has changed incredibly, from being a song sung in churches to celebrate the birth of Christ to now being marketed as a seasonal song for anyone of any religion, as long as they are connected to the internet. Carols in the context of the 21st Century have advanced beyond the Pagans and the Church to reach people across all walks of life who listen not for religious reasons, but to keep up with the everchanging inclinations of society as a single unit.

Previously, The First Noel were notes on a score with words scribed into them that were an entire entity distanced away from its audience, but Pentatonix’s version has revamped the carol completely with the usage of audio-visual tools that involve cinematography in the form of a music video showing the five-member band singing at the consumer in stylised fashion attires, branding the experience as almost ‘being interpersonal with the singers’ to sell the song in way where the watcher feels as if the cover was made only for them, the marketing team going so far to involve fans in a competition designed to include audiences in a community where they are able to feel closer to their idols. These methods have influenced how The First Noel is being received today as a Christmas Carol, as it is now promoted as a pop song with multiple marketing strategies to attract new listeners, even if in the eye of the hurricane, it is fundamentally a simple tune that has been refurbished and republished time and again.

Concluding Thoughts

Pagan carols were appropriated by the Roman Catholic church and now further appropriated by secular performance groups for a modern audience as part of entertainment. A traditional song with a religious subject is able to reach a modern-day audience through its presentation which appeals to aural and visual senses for communication. Alike a chameleon, the survivability of The First Noel has been dependant chiefly on its ability – or man’s ability – to change its form and colour to keep up with trends of different times and to cater to the demands of the public, or spending power, which used to be the Church, but now belongs to the common people.

Ultimately, it is an everlasting symbol of Christ as well as the impact of the religious affiliations by the early church, which is evident still in today’s version of The First Noel as it is still considered a celebratory seasonal piece released as covers during Christmas. Pentatonix has opened up the listening audience by blending 21st Century technology together with an old tune known by millions – a direction that will be able to bridge connections and form bonds between the old and the new.

List of Citations:

Burton-Hill, Clemency. “When Christmas carols were banned.” BBC, 19 Dec. 2014, http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20141219-when-christmas-carols-were-banned. Accessed 18 Feb 2017.

Butterworth, Anna. Harmony in practice. London: Associated Board of the Royal School of Music, 2009. Print.

Greene, Richard L. “Modern Language Notes.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 48, no. 2, 1933, pp. 133–134. www.jstor.org/stable/2912275. Accessed 18 Feb 2017.

Greene, Richard L. “Renaissance News.” Renaissance News, vol. 15, no. 3, 1962, pp. 224–227. www.jstor.org/stable/2857888.

Kephart, Rick. “Gregorian Chant Notation.” Lphrc, http://www.lphrc.org/Chant/. Accessed 18 Feb 2017.

Neale, K. Elizabeth. “Colonial Celts and Christmas Carols: Cornish Music and Identity in South Australia.” Ethnomusicology Review, 3 Sept. 2015, http://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/content/colonial-celts-and-christmas-carols-cornish-music-and-identity-south-australia. Accessed 18 February 2017.

Taylor, John. “Original Correspondence.” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, vol. 13, no. 311, 1869, pp. 647–647. www.jstor.org/stable/3353734.

““THE FIRST NOEL” FAN A CAPELLA COVERS.” PENTATONIX, http://ptxofficial.com/news_archive?page=news_item&NewsID=3765647632921&last_page=news_archive. Accessed 18 Feb 2017.

“[Official Video] The First Noel – Pentatonix.” Youtube, uploaded by PTXofficial, 15 Dec 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u5UvnKlCTA

“Watch Pentatonix Break Down Their Sound.” Time, uploaded by Feeney, Nolan and Salima Koroma. http://time.com/4083364/pentatonix-interview-cheerleader-cant-sleep-love/

Ware, Mark and Jerry Harrison. “What makes a Christmas carol?” BBC, 16 Dec. 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8414000/8414395.stm. Accessed 18 Feb 2017.

#Pentatonix #Christmas Carols #The First Noel

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