A Christmas Carol

SATB and piano or chamber orchestra

Charles Dickens’s 1843 masterpiece, A Christmas Carol, is a story about transformation and the chance for redemption which just happens to be set during the Christmas season. This holiday can mean many things to many different people but, in my case (as in Ebenezer Scrooge’s), it’s simply a time that serves as a reminder about how we’re supposed to be treating our “fellow-passengers” during the rest of the calendar year. This work is kind of a meditation on that idea.

The original piano version of A Christmas Carol was commissioned in 2006 by the Mesa High School A Cappella Choir (Germán Aguilar, conductor) and is dedicated with love to my little sister, Caitlin. The orchestral version was commissioned by The Choral Project (Daniel Hughes, conductor) in 2011.

The Text:

Excerpts from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Adapted by the composer

“There are many things from which I might have derived good by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew, “Christmas among the rest.  But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that, while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.

Scrooge was better than his word…He became as good a friend, as good a master, as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.

“A merry Christmas to us all my dears.  God bless us!” 

“God bless us, every one!”

Performed by The Choral Project and the San José Chamber Orchestra
(Daniel Hughes, conductor).