麻豆约拍

In 1942, during a stop-off on a boat journey home to England after three years in America, composer Benjamin Britten came across a poetry anthology in a bookshop – The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems. In his cabin, he began work on setting some of these poems for voices and harp and these developed into A Ceremony of Carols.

Tori Amos

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a performance of it.

Harpist Sally Pryce on A Ceremony of Carols

"Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a performance of it," says harpist Sally Pryce, who recalls performing the piece in deepest winter, desperately trying to keep her fingers warm as she prepared to play the first harp notes. And Matt Peacock remembers a very special performance of the work bringing together professional musicians, choristers and people experiencing homelessness in an Oxford college chapel.

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2. I Wonder as I Wander

Written by American folklorist and singer John Jacob Niles, its origins come from a song fragment collected in 1933. Mysterious and inspiring, this traditional Christmas carol reflects on the nativity and the nature of wondering.

This most unusual of carols touches people in different ways. With childhood memories from a 1960s RAF base in Oxfordshire, a Nigerian schoolgirl who found her place in Winchester Cathedral, reflections from a candlelit vigil in an Appalachian town, and a Christmas gift as described by world renowned singer Melanie Marshall.

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3. Coventry Carol

Only two play-texts are known to have survived Coventry’s cycle of late medieval mystery plays, one of which is the Pageant of the Shearman and Taylors. Coventry Carol comes from this and tells the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents.

A copy of the manuscript survived a fire in Birmingham Library in 1879 by sheer chance. Musician Ian Pittaway describes seeing the play in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in the 1980s – the drama was so powerful it still moves him to tears. Plus, composer and performer Tori Amos describes what inspired her cover version of the song.

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"O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining..." and so begins the gentle carol of reflection that has touched the lives of listeners around the world.

She missed her family and friends and stencilled the words 鈥淔airytale of New York鈥� on her apartment wall

For Dr John Sentamu, the former Archbishop of York, it's the carol that lifted his spirits as he lay in a London hospital battling pneumonia. In Philadelphia it is the song that outreach worker Asteria Vives sang when she took Christmas to the homeless, while for singer and songwriter Katie Melua it's the carol that awoke her love of music as an eight-year-old child in Belfast. And for Tymara Walker it's the Christmas family favourite which went viral when she sang it on a Washington subway, eventually reaching a worldwide audience of over five million.

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5. Fairytale of New York

The Christmas classic Fairytale of New York is a tragi-comic tale of love gone sour and shattered dreams. James Fearnley, pianist with The Pogues, recounts how the song started off as a transatlantic love story between an Irish seafarer missing his girl at Christmas before becoming the bittersweet reminiscences of the Irish immigrant down on his luck in the Big Apple, attempting to win back the woman he wooed with promises of “cars big as bars and rivers of gold”.

Gaelic footballer Alisha Jordan came to New York to play football aged 17 from County Meath in Ireland. Despite being dazzled by the glamour and pace of New York City, she missed her family and friends and stencilled the words “Fairytale of New York” on her apartment wall as an affirmation of her determination to make the most of her new life in the city. The words later took on a new meaning for her after a horrific ordeal.

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This Christmas staple was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and was first performed by Judy Garland in the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me In St. Louis, for the now famous scene in which she and her seven-year-old sister are downcast about the prospect of moving away from their beloved home.

Robert Burns

A woman had a correspondence with a man on Death Row, whose final request from his mother was for him to sing Silent Night.

Hugh Martin's collaborator and friend, John Fricke, explains the importance this song had for the composer and the joy he experienced in hearing it covered by every major artist since, from Frank Sinatra to Chrissie Hynde, punk band Fear to Coldplay, Rod Stewart to James Taylor.

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7. Silent Night

Surrounded by myth and magic, the story goes that Silent Night was penned speedily on Christmas Eve 1818 by the parish priest and organist of the tiny Austrian village of Oberndorf after a mouse had eaten through the organ bellows and it was written for two men to sing with a guitar accompaniment at Midnight Mass.

Guests relay their moving experiences of the carol, including a woman who had a correspondence with a man on Death Row, whose final request from his mother was for him to sing Silent Night.

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8. Auld Lang Syne

What better way to round off the year than belting out Robert Burns’s words to Auld Lang Syne, which means “Time remembered with fondness”? It’s sung across the world on New Year’s Eve, but it began as an 18th-century song about impotence…

Musicians and academics explain why Auld Lang Syne means so much to them in stories of love, sorrow, hope and joy, emotions that are especially heightened at this time of year.

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