Vocal Music

Abstract

Abstract Focusing on the popular Christmas carol “Once in Royal David’s City” and its annual performance at the King’s College, Cambridge Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, this chapter looks to recent developments in the theorization of subjectivity to open up new questions about the nature of vocal music in a communal context. The chapter starts by situating the carol in its various cultural-historical contexts (notably nineteenth-century church music, congregational singing, and Anglicanism), with a view to understanding the nested relationships between tradition and national identity. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the carol’s composition, to its arrangement for the festival in 1919, and to the festival’s continued annual broadcast on BBC radio. The chapter ultimately argues that congregational singing as developed in the nineteenth century mobilises what Anahid Kassabian has called “distributed subjectivity,” so extending that concept beyond the recording technologies that form the focus of Kassabian’s own work.