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Is your favorite carol from a Ukrainian folk song? [1]
['Tim Neville']
Date: 2024-12-20 17:01:02+00:00
A few years ago, in 2022, a group of friends gathered outside a home in a snowy Oregon town and began to sing, as best as they could, a Christmas carol that none of them knew much about.
Christmas caroling is a longstanding (if somewhat old-fashioned) holiday tradition in the United States, where neighbors, friends and colleagues get together on a cold December evening to roam their neighborhoods, knock on strangers’ doors and sing a song.
I was one of those singers who chose “Carol of the Bells,” a selection that is among the most enduring yet also the most difficult-for-amateurs songs of the season. The thing my friends and I didn’t know as we struggled with that haunting, repetitive melody? The song stems from a Ukrainian folk song called “Shchedryk” that is older than celebrating Christmas itself.
“Ukrainian folk culture is very rich,” says Mark Andryczyk, a translator and scholar who runs the Ukrainian Studies program at Columbia University.
Andryczyk explained that my friends and I were singing “Carol of the Bells” 100 years after Americans had first heard it performed live by a Ukrainian choir at New York’s Carnegie Hall. He says that since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more people are paying attention to the Ukrainian origin of some valued art and traditions.
Today, it’s hard to imagine a holiday season going by without hearing “Carol of the Bells.” Utah’s Mormon Tabernacle Choir has sung it, as has the popular a cappella group, Pentatonix. It’s in the soundtrack of the cult-classic Christmas movie Home Alone. Professional basketball stars once performed it by using the sound of dribbling basketballs to create the melody. American business Boot Barn used it in a commercial — “Carol of the Boots” —featuring cowboys and farmhands working a ranch to the backbeat of jangling spurs.
“It leaves so much room for filling it in with other things with that repetitive back and forth,” says Andryczyk. “Other musicians just kind of use that as a background and work and add layers on top of it … sometimes unnecessarily.”
“Shchedryk” went from a simple four notes set to a melody sung by a single voice to wish a farming family well at the new year —
“Your lovely sheep have given birth
To little lambs of great worth”
— to a modern holiday classic, beginning when “Shchedryk’s” modern arrangement made its debut in December 1916 in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital city.
It was Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych who took the simple song and created a more complex arrangement.
“The song immediately appealed to the [Kyiv] audience,” writes former Indiana University fellow and Fulbright scholar Tina Peresunko. She presented her research into the song at the university’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.
“Shchedryk” at intervening times has become a song of Ukrainian national pride. In 1919, a Ukrainian choir slipped past Russian soldiers and walked nearly 600 miles (970 kilometers) west to the border. There the singers began a concert tour, performing in Prague, Zurich, Paris and more.
“The Ukrainian Republic is striving to restore its independence and decided to demonstrate it really exists,” a journalist for La Patrie Suisse wrote after a performance in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, according to Peresunko. “‘I sing, therefore I exist,’ it says, and it sings amazingly.”
In 1922 the Ukrainian choir came to the United States and performed “Shchedryk” live at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The choir also sang in Chicago and Washington, Philadelphia and St. Louis — in 115 cities in all, across 36 states.
The song as I sang it that evening in Oregon didn’t come about until 1936, when American conductor Peter Wilhousky rearranged the melody for an orchestra and added English lyrics to “Shchedryk.” Wilhousky wrote in a letter that Peresunko reviewed, “I focused on the cheerful ringing of the bells.”
“Christmas is here
Bringing good cheer
To young and old
Meek and the bold.”
What makes today’s arrangements so popular in the United States is the soaring, soul-stirring repetitiveness (called “ostinato,” in music circles). Pop music fans know this technique well, though they’d call it a “riff” or “loop” that worms its way into your head. (Think of Flo Rida’s “Low” or the strings in The Verve’s 1997 hit “Bitter Sweet Symphony.”)
During the holiday season, though, as Americans and people all over the world enjoy the “Carol of the Bells,” Ukrainians can celebrate the beauty and resilience of their culture.
“Incredibly beautiful,” comments a YouTube viewer following a performance of the original song by a Ukrainian artist. “Much love from America.”
Tim Neville is a freelance writer.
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