By the time you finish reading this post, you will have listened to my piece Jingle Bells Hallelujah. My purpose in writing this blogpost is to flesh out for you some of the background that appears very briefly in the printed score for this piece. You are a curious group of readers, and I thought you might like to have some more of the story. Read on!

If you’ve met me, you’re probably aware that I have a rather quirky sense of humor. One of the ways in which that sense of humor shows itself is in the way I think about the relationship between lyrics and melody. This is pretty nerdy stuff… guilty as charged! Please indulge your inner nerd for a few minutes, and I hope you enjoy this background on a song that has made thousands of people laugh out loud. At the end you’ll also learn about the connection between this piece and the founding of Sounds Good Choir.

As any good reporter will tell you, the questions that go into a good story include “What? Who? Where? How? Why?”

For starters on the “What?” part, here is a video of the world premiere of “Jingle Bells Hallelujah,” from back in December 2011 when Chicago a cappella sang it at Fourth Presbyterian. Here also is a screen shot of that group enjoying singing the piece. I’m looking forward to seeing about 500 Sounds Good Choir singers with similarly happy faces singing the piece (now with piano) in our December concerts!

As the printed sheet music to Jingle Bells Hallelujah says, this piece is the first in a series of “Wacky Christmas Carols.” This is a group of choral arrangements which are all built on the principle that began with Jingle Bells Hallelujah: the words to one carol are matched with the melody of another. Singers who have been with Sounds Good Choir since the beginning may remember singing other Wacky Carols of mine, including “Joy to the Merry Gentlemen” and “Bring a Menorah, Jeanette, Isabella.”

As for “why?”, there is the “why” of needing a piece like this and the “why” of writing one. As for needing the piece: we artistic directors are always looking for fun things to sing, pieces that are unusual and of high quality and not anything that people have seen before. My mind is primed in this direction because Chicago a cappella, for which I wrote the piece initially, was founded on the basis of creating high-quality, eclectic (and yes, quirky) programming of music to be sung by virtuoso professional choristers. Sounds Good Choir has a similar orientation on our repertoire-seeking team. Linda Crabtree Powell and Sandy Siegel Miller and I are continually on the lookout for great repertoire; we’re looking for music that will engage audiences and showcase the musicality of our older-adult singers in our non-auditioned choirs led by professional conductors.

From the composer’s point of view, “why” would one write a piece like this, and “how” does one adopt the wacky mindset that taking the music from one carol and singing it to the lyrics of another carol is a good idea? In my case, the “why” and “how” happened in large part due to my decades-long involvement with Unitarian Universalist congregations, which began for me at the age of nine when I joined the Chicago Children’s Choir.

What’s the connection between Unitarian churches and wacky carols? Let me explain. If you focus on the connection—or, more accurately, if you think of the possible disconnection—of music and lyrics, then you’re in the ballpark.  Unitarians began as a Protestant Christian denomination and have been struggling for centuries with the difficulties of their being a non-mainline faith (i.e., they were Christians initially who rejected the idea that Jesus was God) pushing against the boundaries of orthodoxy (the doctrine of the Trinity). What this means in practice is that their congregations need cool things to sing but often have problems with the words that those cool tunes often carry!

There’s the old joke that you might have heard, as follows:

Q: Why are Unitarians such poor hymn-singers?

A: Because they’re always reading ahead to see if they agree with the words.

There is some truth to this, which is why I find the joke funny. In 1997, after attending there for a few years with my first wife and our toddler daughter, I became the music director at Unity Temple in Oak Park, the Unitarian Universalist congregation that occupies the famous building by Frank Lloyd Wright on Lake Street.

When you are the music director in a Unitarian church, you learn very quickly about people’s sensitivity to lyrics. In addition to the tensions from the 1800s, Unitarians have veered since then to becoming a non-creedal denomination, further distancing themselves theologically from their Christian roots. Many people in the Unitarian world today are atheists, agnostics, refugees from fundamentalist denominations, people in mixed marriages, and so on. Think, for example, of a couple where one spouse was raised Jewish and the other raised Methodist, and they’re trying to raise children somewhere that feels like a decent middle ground. Whatever you might think of that mix of congregants, you still have a practical dilemma on Sunday morning. When you have a congregation with lots of people like that, what do you give them to sing?

Let me give you a very concrete example. Think for a moment of the well-known Protestant hymn, Onward, Christian soldiers, marching off to war. The famous tune is by Sir Arthur Sullivan, of “Gilbert and Sullivan” fame. The lyrics were written by Anglican priest Sabine Baring-Gould, created in the 1860s to be sung—hard to believe in the present day—by children! This militant hymn is great for rousing imperialist enthusiasm… but it doesn’t appeal so much to people who are on the progressive end of the political and social spectrum.

Put yourself in my shoes as a music director, working with a progressive minister, trying to pick hymns for a given Sunday. We all want great things for our singers and congregation to belt out, but how on earth do you sing this hymn if you’re a pacifist or a conscientious objector or at least a little squirmy about the idea of spreading your faith in such militaristic metaphors?

One temptation would be to throw out the “baby” of this fabulous tune with the “bathwater” of a text that doesn’t feel right.

If you’re a Unitarian music director, does this mean you are forever finished singing this wonderful melody, even if the words are a problem? No way! Enter the solution: a new text.

Sullivan’s tune is so good, and the words so strident, that Unitarian preacher and poet Frederick Lucian Hosmer wrote an alternative lyric in the 1870s, Forward Through the Ages, in unbroken line, which fits perfectly to Sullivan’s tune. Hosmer’s lyric is quite a bit toned down but still gives the heart that good old Victorian sense of exhortation: “let’s get out there and do good in this world!” You can imagine that this might be more palatable than Rev. Baring-Gould’s text, which is more like “Let’s go crush the infidel with our overwhelming moral superiority!”

Although congregational singing is very serious business—after all, a congregation that isn’t singing is, in my view, in serious trouble—Unitarians have also enjoyed laughing at themselves. To my reckoning, one of the great achievements in “shaking it up in the pews” is the collection from the 1960s written by Unitarian minister Christopher Raible, who turned the world on its ear by publishing new lyrics to a number of favorite hymns. The best new lyric in his book is “Coffee, Coffee, Coffee,” sung to the tune of “Holy, Holy, Holy.”  

Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, Praise the strength of coffee.
Early in the morn we rise with thoughts of only thee.
Served fresh or reheated, Dark by thee defeated,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

Though all else we scoff, we come to church for coffee;
If we’re late to congregate, we come in time for thee.
Coffee our one ritual, Drinking it habitual,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

Coffee the communion of our Uni-Union,
Symbol of our sacred ground, our one necessity.
Feel the holy power At our coffee hour,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

The lyric is a bit dated: we mostly don’t “perk” our coffee anymore; the “Uni-Union” refers to the then-recent merger of the Unitarians with the Universalists; and instant coffee is also largely a thing of the past. But the idea is brilliant and the execution spot-on, and it remains for me a superb example of a way to fit new lyrics to a beloved tune.

When I was at Unity Temple, I even re-wrote some lyrics to hymn tunes myself, including some extra verses to “Coffee, coffee, coffee” and a brand-new set of spoof lyrics to the great tune Personent Hodie.

Now imagine that you have lived in a world like this for a long time. Eventually the sense starts to dawn on you that lyrics and melodies are not in permanent Super-Glued relationship to one another but have a more flexible sort of kinship. That is how my mind works. So on that fateful day in July 2011, while I was whizzing down the Eisenhower back to Downers Grove, I had the idea that you don’t actually need to write new lyrics to make something new: instead, what if you just took existing lyrics and swapped them?

It was one of those great moments in my creative life. I felt like I was in one of those stories you hear about Mozart, where he is just writing down what he was hearing from heaven. I am no Mozart of course, but the analogy I’m trying to draw is about that sense of inspiration, of a thoughtform being gifted to you. In my case, the gift was this crazy idea that you could (at least try to) match the words of Jingle Bells to the tune of the “Hallelujah Chorus” from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. And so it began. A day or two later, I had the lyric mostly fitted to the tune. I thought it would be good to also flip it the other way, so I decided to start the piece with a few of the words from “Hallelujah Chorus” that were fitted to the tune of Jingle Bells. The hardest part, really, was figuring out a key change and transition that felt good.

Chicago a cappella premiered the piece in December 2011, and it was my first minor YouTube “hit” as a composer; about 30,000 views happened within in a few weeks. I started getting calls and e-mails from conductors around the globe, wanting to get copies of the sheet music. I even built a little website just to sell that piece, and I sold 15 or 20 copies to a few dozen choirs as far as Germany and Australia.

Imagine my surprise when, one day in the spring of 2012, I got a call from a lady in Washington, DC. She said that she would like to order some copies of the piece, and I politely said, “Sure, ma’am, how many?” (Based on prior experience, I was expecting 15 or maybe 30 copies if I got lucky). She said, “I’d like 550 copies.” After I scraped my jaw off the floor, I asked her who she was. She explained that her name was Jeanne Kelly, and she was the founder and artistic director of Encore Creativity, the largest choral-music organization in the country for older adults, which at the time had about 25 choirs on the East Coast. They ended up buying 800 copies of the piece, which paid for me and Sandy to fly to our nation’s capital to hear several of their ensembles, about 250 singers, perform my piece on the Millennium stage in the lobby of the Kennedy Center just before Christmas in 2012. There were several other composers there and Jeanne Kelly and her husband, Larry, took us all out for dinner. As we were leaving, she said to me and Sandy, “You know, if you ever want to bring this idea to Chicago, let me know, because we have an affiliate program.” We smiled politely and said, “thank you,” thinking that this would be something we might do 15 or 20 years down the road, after we “retired.”

The next chapter in the history of the piece is that my long-time conductor colleague Jerry Rubino agreed to publish the piece on his “Voices Rising” series at Hal Leonard—a big honor for me. Jerry said that it needed a piano part, and he tapped our now-beloved colleague at Sounds Good Choir, Paul Langford, to do just that. So the song you’ll sing is yet another collaborative effort between yours truly and Paul.

And in another chapter of the story that many of you already know, I lost my full-time job in music publishing at the end of 2015. Faced with that loss, I soon told Sandy that what I wanted to do next was to bring the Encore model to Chicago and see how quickly we could build it. We started in early 2016 and have never looked back. After three years as an affiliate called Encore Illinois, we became independent and changed our name to our current one of Sounds Good Choir. It’s amazing how things come full circle, isn’t it?
Happy singing!