Program Note:

In September 1996, record producer and music publisher Robert Schuneman asked Hagen, “I’d like you to create a CD full of Christmas choral music sung by the American Repertory Singers, but with accompaniments done in studio as we do with pop music. Mind you, something very creative, but really different from the usual classical seasonal fare.” In response, Hagen created reinterpretations of familiar carols that, as Brian Eno described ambient music, "accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular" — that is, music that is "as ignorable as it is interesting." The "reinterpretations" were made during December of 1996 at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and recorded at the Cathedral Church of St. Matthew the Apostle, Washington, DC on 20 April 1997 by the American Repertory Singers, conducted by Music Director Leo Nestor, Robert LaRue, cellist. Hagen then produced the recording of Robert La Rue’s overdubs (the cello is periodically multi-tracked by recording and mixing engineer Benjamin Milstein) on March 16th, 1997, and then performed the various acoustic and electronic tracks (including percussion and synthesizer) himself at the Bard College Electronic Music Studio on May 30th 1997. 

• Lullay, combines aspects of the 15th century English traditional carol with a four bar fragment from Gustav Holst’s Lullay my liking, op. 34 and an original, polyrhythmic harmonization.

• O Come, O Come, Emmanuel is a long-lined fugal treatment of the 15th century Advent carol, itself a a metrical paraphrase of the O Antiphons, a series of plainchant antiphons attached to the Magnificat at Vespers over the final days before Christmas. A string orchestra version of this movement may be found here.

• God Rest Ye / O Come, Emmanuel combines original music based on the traditional English carol and the previous plainsong melody.

• Silent Night overlays a sheen of synthesizer loops of distant bells over a stylized reinterpretation of the tune by Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863) carrying the Joseph Mohr (1792-1848) text about the birth of Jesus as translated by John Freeman Young (1820-1910). As coda, the cello (the voice of Joseph?) overlays the opening four measures of Leonard Bernstein’s song, Somewhere.

• Once in Royal David’s City does five variations on Irby, the source tune from the 1840s on which a slightly adapted version of Cecil Frances Alexander’s lyric from 1848 is hung. Hagen takes the opposite strategy to Dr. Arthur Henry Mann’s 1919 arrangement (which begins with an otherworldly solo boy chorister) by supplying a virile solo cello part that is both opulent and worldly in its articulate commentary.

• Sussex Carol features the cello alone, combining reinterpretations of two tunes; the first is a traditional carol from Monk’s Gate, Sussex; the other is a traditional carol from Dublin, mid 1880s. There is also a nod given to the 1919 version published by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

• What Child is This? arrays a fistful of querulous clusters that repeatedly pose the rhetorical question carried by William Chatterton Dix’s 1865 lyric. The melody alluded to, of course, is the English folk tune Greensleeves, thought to have been originally composed by King Henry VIII.

• At Bethlehem Proper gives the traditional English text a florid musical treatment combining three tunes, one by Davies Gilbert in 1822, another by Cecil Sharp in 1911, and the third an original tune by Hagen.

• Hosanna consists of original music to the shout which means “Praise to God in the Highest.” It is associated with both Advent and Palm Sunday.