I Sing the Birth (2024)
(for treble voices and electric guitar)

1. Introit (guitar solo) – 2. I Sing the Birth (Ben Jonson)
3. The Magi (Lancelot Andrewes)
4. In the Bleak Midwinter (Christina Rossetti)
5. The Christmas Life (Wendy Cope)
6. Rorate coeli desuper (William Dunbar)
7. Interlude (guitar solo)
8. The Burning Babe (Robert Southwell)
9. Make We Joy (Selden manuscript, 15th century)
10. Carol of the Advent Moon (Mark Tredinnick)
11. Midsummer Star Map (Judith Nangala Crispin)
12. The Oxen (Thomas Hardy)

When I moved from my native England to Australia in 1983, I was surprised to discover that Christmas traditions were more or less the same. Although it was now midsummer, the temperature around 35C, department store windows featured displays of reindeer and snow, and on Christmas Day many people sat down to a lunch of roast turkey. The imagery of Christmas is hard to dissociate from what Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, in 1622, called ‘the very dead of winter’. I Sing the Birth, composed for children’s choirs in Australia and Europe, is founded on this paradox.

The words span six hundred years, the earliest from an anonymous carol in a medieval manuscript, the most recent a specially written lyric, ‘Carol of the Advent Moon’. The piece stretches from the ‘snow on snow’ of Christina Rossetti’s bleak midwinter to Judith Nangala Crispin’s starry sky above an Australian desert. It also explores the notion of faith, beginning with Ben Jonson’s simple wonder at the Nativity and ending with Thomas Hardy’s agnostic wish to believe again in the kneeling oxen of his childhood (there was an old story that at the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve, animals fell to their knees).

I Sing the Birth was commissioned by Luminescence Children’s Choir in Canberra, the Flanders Boys’ Choir, Aquinas College Schola Cantorum (Perth) and the Estonian TV Girls’ Choir, with support from Helen Moore and the APRA-AMCOS Art Music Fund.

Andrew Ford