Octaves of Christmas

New Year's Day this year was the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas. That is a phrase I love, the Octave of Christmas.

I think of the first line of "Joy to the World." That is an octave! Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Handel just goes down that scale. It is an octave.

Also in "The Nutcracker," Tchaikovsky goes down the scale in the great Pas de Deux.

There must be other octaves of Christmas however I will have to think of them.

For now I am thinking of the 1,000-year-old carol we got to sing at church on the occasion of the Octave of Christmas, which was Sunday, New Year's Day.

That is it at the top! In English it is "Of the Father's Love Begotten." In Latin it is "Corde Natus Ex Parentis." That is what we sang.

That melody!

As someone wrote in the comment section of the above video: "Magical song!"

The melody just gets better and better as the song goes on and it has a haunting feel. The words lare beautiful. When I was singing it I thought about that.

"Psallat altitudo caeli, psallite omnes angeli..." My Latin is not great -- my Latin teacher father would be horrified! -- however I believe that says, "Sing heights of heaven, sing all angels..."

Sure enough! I just did Google translate: "Let the height of heaven sing, let all the angels sing."

Someone writes in the comment section:

Created: circa 4th century AD (between 348 and 413). 

Written by: Aurelius Prudentius Clemens

Country of Origin: Roman province of Tarraconensis (modern-day northern Spain).

Everything I know in life I learned from comment sections! This song is older than I thought. Our church song book said it was around 1000.

Who knows. It seems Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was a poet, so perhaps he wrote only the words. The melody likely came later. Aurelius Prudentius was not only a poet, he was a lawyer, and apparently a good one. Also he was the provincial governor for a while. Later in life he renounced the vanities of this world, I am reading, and fasted and became a vegetarian. He wrote his Christian poems during this time of his life.

You know who that reminds me of, Clemens Brentano. Brentano was one of the most famous Romantic poets however he dropped all that and devoted the second half of his life to promoting the Catholic faith. That is a coincidence, another Clemens.

Now that we have covered all this ground, it is time just to listen. The recording above, it seems just to be a husband and wife recording it in an attic. That is also in the comments. I like how the singer just sticks to the melody. I also like how they show the music and the translation.

Here is the schola of St. John Cantius where I virtually attended Christmas Day mass this year.

You feel you can hear all the centuries echoing in this song.

One thousand six hundred years!

Just listen...