For me, Christmas begins when we come to the last verse of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” – Yea, Lord, we greet Thee, born this happy morning. Jesus, to Thee be glory given. Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing. Taken from John’s Prologue, we are reminded that the eternal Word, by Whom all things were created and in Whom all things have their being, became incarnate. But what illumines this truth for me every year is the music to which this verse is set.
Sir David Willcocks, the longtime Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge, made a new arrangement of “O come, all ye faithful” in 1961. It’s the version we almost always hear and sing, with a great fanfare and soaring descant on the next to last verse. But Willcocks did something so amazing in this arrangement that if you ask a musician about “the Willcocks chord,” almost everyone lights up. When I asked a Facebook group I’m in about it, I got 101 comments in six hours. “I get tears just looking at it,” one person said. “My favorite part of playing for Christmas,” said another. “It’s not Christmas till I hear it,” said someone else. I agree.
I wait for this chord all year, and even though I know it’s coming, when I sing my note and hear the chord underneath, my heart swells and my eyes fill with tears. It is so powerful. It happens quickly – just four beats and it’s gone. What Willcocks did was to change the expected tonality of the chord on “Word” in “Word of the Father” from major to a minor tone, and he altered two notes and added a seventh, or leading tone. In music, this is called a half-diminished seventh, but what’s important is this is a very strong and emotional chord, and it comes at us like a lightning bolt. It’s outside the normal harmonic structure. And then, Willcocks continues the verse harmonically where it’s not expected either, and leads to the glorious ending where the organ opens up all the stops, and we sing our hearts out.
It means the Incarnation to me, because, like “the Chord,” the Jews anticipated the coming of the Messiah for thousands of years. And when He came, it was in a way totally unexpected. Outside the normal process. Mysterious. Emotional. The Word condescended to become one of us – poor, tiny, in a manger. And then we look ahead to our redemption and the Resurrection, and the glory of eternity. That’s a lot for one chord.
“The time that made Advent meaningful, that made the Incarnation come alive, is we had a family tradition where we viewed slides on an old technology called View-Master, and one of the slide sets was the Christmas story. There was this one picture of the wise men following the star, which covered the wall of the house that we were sitting in, and it was just amazing and mysterious…”