Each year, the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, commissions an original song for its Christmas service, giving the composer an audience of around 100 million people.
Every Christmas Eve, the British composer Cecilia McDowall follows the same routine. At 3 p.m., as family members arrive at her London home, she goes into the kitchen, turns on the radio and starts making a Christmas pudding — a slow-cooked, booze-soaked British dessert — while listening to the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, perform its Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. That service of Bible readings and Christmas music is one of Britain’s best known festive traditions, broadcast live on radio stations worldwide, including on around 450 in the United States. A spokesman for the choir estimated that 100 million listeners would tune in. But this year, McDowall won’t be in the kitchen. Instead, she will be sitting in King’s College’s huge Gothic chapel, listening as the choir performs “There Is No Rose,” a carol she has written especially for the event. “It really is something significant,” McDowall said of the commission. “It must be the most people who’ve ever heard my music in one go.” Since the early 1980s, when the Choir of King’s College began ordering up new works for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, notable composers of religious music like John Tavener and Arvo Pärt have written for it, as well as more surprising names like Harrison Birtwistle, a British composer of spiky modernist pieces. King’s is far from alone in trying to bring new carols, or at least new settings of old texts, into the Christmas repertoire. McDowall said she had written 10 carols since the 1980s, starting with a piece for a school choir. This year, in addition to the King’s commission, she wrote a setting of “ In Dulci Jubilo” for the choir of Wells Cathedral in southwest England. John Rutter, a prolific British composer of Christmas music, said in a telephone interview that this year he had also written two new carols: a setting of a William Blake poem for a cancer charity’s carol concert, and another for the Choir of Merton College, Oxford.
