Customer Reviews

The New Oxford Book of Carols

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The New Oxford Book of Carols makes available an extraordinarily rich collection materials that bear witness to the resilience of the traditions of popular piety. These "carols", along with their editorial, historical and performance annotations, provide a rich insight to paths by which complex theological materials were filtered, tranformed and made personal expressions of great beauty and joy. Re-presents materials lost, forgotten, or discarded in a clear, simple, and readily performable format. Performance notes are specific, and clearly systematized.

This book should be in the household of anyone who listens to Christmas music, whether or not they can actually sing. Although I do not read music, my sister does, and we were able to learn a carol that I had heard on a Christmas CD and perform it as a duet at Midnight Mass.

This is the most AMAZING collection of Christmas carols!
It includes many hard-to-find gems, such as "Cherry Tree Carol", "Jesus Christ the Apple Tree", "Three Kings", Darke's "In the Bleak Midwinter" (as well as the more famous & congregation-friendly setting by Holst), "Bethlehem Down", and several of the Oxford Descants. If you take a look at the table of contents, that alone should sell you. The editor's work in compiling this book was incredible. The voicing of the 4 (or more) part harmony in each of the carols is consistently excellent, performance-grade material.

This book is truly the best of its kind available, and for $35.00, it's quite a steal.

A vast collection of fantastic harmonizations/voicings of the traditional and less known carols. A must for anyone who wants to delve seriously into Christmas music on any level.

Just a few words to say that this book is a valuable addition to a collection. It's a musician "must have"! 201 songs from 13 different areas of the world with english translations. 123 are composed and the rest are traditionals. All carols are presented with a historical text. Very good!

How could I have known that there were two versions of "In the Bleak of Mid-Winter" or "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" or three versions of "O Little Town of Bethlehem"?
For anyone interested in a comprehensive resource book of music for the Christmas season, your search is over. This book is a treasure containing a compilation of such music annotated and presented in manner easily understood by everyone.

Not only do I own a copy but also I have given this book as gifts to my family and friends. It is a book to treasure!!

Whether you're a singer in a group, the artistic director of a group, a musicologist, or just someone who loves Christmas carols or early music, this book should be in your library. From the earliest known carols to the 19th century, Oxford's impeccable scholarship and taste shine forth in every page of this incredibly useful book. The selection is wonderful, although a bit weighted towards the earlier periods (although early musicians should welcome this!). All in all, you NEED this book!

The New Oxford Book of Carols has been in my collection for several years in the hardcover form. OUP discontinued this book for a while and I am glad to see its return. In addition to all the Carols, both familiar and unfamiliar, there is a ton of information about the history of and the performance of Carols. Any Choir Director should have this book in their collection. You will use it often.

I agree with the previous reviewer that this is an essential *listener's* resource, not just for musicians. I am no musician, but this book is where I go when I need the real story of that obscure track I just heard, or when I want to dig deep into the story and variations of my favorite songs. It comes down from the shelf every year. It's a great pity that it seems to have gone out of print again.

The New Oxford Book of Carols is an excellent resource for anyone interested in Christmas carols -- particularly those carols outside the standard, late 20th Century, popular, American canon. Although this book is a product of the music department at Oxford University and contains a fair amount of musical arrangements and notations, it is still accessible to people who aren't well versed in music.

This anthology is authoritative and includes a handy table of contents, a lengthy introduction, a thorough bibliography, indexes of feasts, seasons, sources, first lines, and titles, and several appendices. It is divided into two parts: composed carols and traditional carols. This distinction roughly translates to historical/ancient (composed) and contemporary (traditional).

Part I groups carols by date of composition and loose geographic region: Middle Ages, English Carols 1400 -- 1700, European Carols 1550 -- 1700, Europe and America 1700 -- 1830, Later Nineteenth Century, and Twentieth Century.

Part II groups carols by ethnicity: English, Irish, Welsh, American, Trinidadian, German, Czech, Polish, Provencal French, French, Basque, Spanish, and Neapolitan.

Entries for each carol provide title, approximate date of composition, basic musical arrangement, lyrics, and explanatory notes as to date of creation, sources used, traditional/original musical arrangements, etc . . .. The date provided for each carol is based on the first appearance of the words and music together, so older melodies whose lyrics were composed decades to centuries later are categorized by the date on which the music is first known to have been arranged with the text.