Day Four - Coventry Carol

I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the Mediaeval Mystery Plays. (Specifically on how they intersect with 20th and 21st century Queer theatre). I love just about everything about them! The fact that they are inarguably both community drama and literature; the way they jump between theatrical and narrative styles - juxtaposing farce and tragedy, domestic and spectacle, ritual and play; the fact that they were suppressed for being too subversive - and now we study them in the ivory towers of academia and perform them in churches, on the BBC...  I've seen them performed in Xhosa and Afrikaans, I've seen them performed dead-pan straight by school boys from Eton and queer as Terrence McNally could make them, in the same theatre at the Edinburgh fringe festival, one after another.

Coventry Carol is from the Coventry version of the mystery cycle, of which only two plays survive into the present. The Massacre of the Innocents in the New Testament is another one of those intertextual bits of the Bible, with parallels in the slaying of the First Born in Exodus; this intertextuality is often played with by the mystery plays - as foreshadowing, or simply as a means of structuring the vast and sprawling biblical narratives that they play with.

There are two musical techniques used in the composition of Coventry Carol which are worth pointing out. The first is the 'picardie third', a major sound in an otherwise minor piece, which here is a note of hope during a tragic incident. The second is the 'false relation', a particularly English quirk of harmony in which two clashing notes sound either closely one after another or simultaneously to create dissonance and tension. I've tried to emphasise both sounds in my arrangement - the strong dissonance of the false relation resolving to the hope of the picardie third.

Hope you enjoy!


Coventry Carol by Jessie Holder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Lully, lulla 
Thou little tiny child
Bye bye lully lullay, 
Thou little tiny child
Bye bye lully lullay

O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling
Of whom we do sing
Bye bye lully lullay

Herrod the King, in his raging
Charged he hath this day
His men of might,
In his own sight
All young children to slay!

That woe is me, poor child for thee
And evermore and ay
For thy parting
Neither say, nor sing
Bye bye lully lullay


Lully, lulla 
Thou little tiny child
Bye bye lully lullay, 
Thou little tiny child
Bye bye lully lullay