I don’t know (well, in fact I do know; post about that later) how I got this earworm about 3 months late or 8 months early; it’s a St Nicholas song. But the lyrics are deliciously complex and I’ll dissect them for fun.

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Last Sunday, when I had too much of a cold to go to church, the choir was only two sopranos and a tenor: neither of the basses could make it either. Last night, at choir practice, they not only told me they’d missed me, but demonstrated how: they’d had no fundament.

I’ve been told before that I “keep the choir together”, but I never believed it, just acknowledged it as a compliment, perhaps even a left-handed one: not much quality of my own, I’m just the glue. Now I know how. Even if I am just the glue, without that it’s in danger of falling apart. Not that I think I’m indispensable, they did do well enough without me and I don’t think many people noticed, but it’s a nice feeling to be really useful.

After that, we spent most of the practice session working out different ways to cope with incomplete choirs: the bass and I singing melody with the tenor a third above us (in an absolute sense a sixth below me, but it doesn’t sound that way), to which the choirmistress said “you’re doing better than we did!”, various configurations of three parts, ways to fix an awkward pitch that the priest hands to us. Enlightening, bracing, fun.

Tenor: Up?
Me: I’m already up.
Tenor: I’ll sing alto.
Choirmistress: <nods>

Even some people in the choir looked boggled. But it was perfectly clear: this was at the end of Matins when the pitch is usually very low, and people are more comfortable if they take the next part up. Altos (there was only the one of me) sing the melody which sopranos usually have, sopranos the third above that tenors usually have, and tenors (there was only the one of him) take the alto part. Poor basses, who can’t go up, but they can sing the lowest notes an octave higher.

This usually goes seamlessly, but we had a large sprawling choir with some people who don’t come to evening services often so it had to be confirmed.

That I was “already up” was because at that point I tend to be so tired that I don’t get the alto part right: it’s got lots of fourth-up jumps, like the beginning of “Away in a Manger”, and I overshoot that by a quarter-tone at least and raise the whole choir because, confound it, people are used to me being in tune and follow me. So I play it safe and sing the easier melody, which has the added benefit of being so high that I don’t have much room to be sharp.

Well, I hope. It’s too little to deconstruct, being only Domine Fili unigenite Jesu Christe from, I think, Mozart’s Krönungsmesse. Either the alto part or the first part that starts the fugue-like object (or perhaps they’re the same; I haven’t sung it for, count on fingers, about thirty years). I don’t know how it goes on. Well, obviously I do know the words, it’s the Gloria, but the tune escapes me.

I earwormed myself with it when the thirteen-year-old was doing vocatives in Latin. I wrote “Dominus Filius unigenitus Jesus Christus” on a piece of paper, with the vocatives under it: it’s got two different forms for the second declension (Domine/unigenite/Christe versus Fili) and also Jesu, which I thought was fourth declension but seems to be a straightforward borrowing from Greek.

I realise now that “Deus” doesn’t seem to have a separate vocative, but uses the nominative instead like other declensions.

And, apropos of the classics, I can’t help liking the vocative of “Master” in Greek: despota.

One of the most effective ways to get rid of an earworm is to analyse it to death. Here goes.

I’ve known this song for ages, from an obscure folk record, and I like to sing it because it does interesting things with tune and rhythm; I’ve always been slightly uneasy about the lyrics, especially the last verse.

First, I looked up the lyrics on the web to see if anybody else had already done it and found to my astonishment that it’s in (or perhaps from) Wim Sonneveld’s repertoire. Wim Sonneveld is, or rather was as he died in 1974, a famous Dutch entertainer, cabaret artist, singer, songwriter; not someone I’d associate with a song that sounds so much like a traditional folk song. But I read somewhere that it was first attested in 1730, so perhaps he didn’t write it but only sang it (in 1968).

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It was St. Andrew who put me on the track, really. I was cycling (I always get ideas on the bike) through town, thinking of the saint in whose honor we were having a fish day and wondering what troparion to sing: whether it was the general one for the apostles in the third tone, or he had one of his own (I found later that he does have one of his own, but half of it matches the one for SS. Peter and Paul). That made me wander off (I always wander off when I get ideas on the bike) to think what a good exercise it is, for instance for the children’s choir, to sing the same words to different tunes or different words to the same tune.

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