The pastoral tradition in music has had a long and distinguished history dating back to ancient times. It is likely that ancient Greeks wrote pastoral music to accompany poems and dramas. Pastoral elements are encountered in Homer’s Iliad. Idylls and other literary works were certainly meant for public recitation and it is assumed that performers would accompany the verse with instruments such as the syrinx – a kind of flute that had pastoral connotations for the ancient Greeks.

The pastoral was also a favourite literary genre during the Renaissance. In fact, by the end of the 16th century it was the predominant poetic style in Italian speaking areas. Pastorals were poems that dealt with shepherds or other rural subjects and quite often had a mythological element.

As with the poetry of the ancient Greeks, these poems recounted various idyllic scenes that composers found were ideal subjects for musical treatment. Composers of madrigals used this musical sensibility, generally to assist the depiction of inner moods during monologues. While the style had dramatic limitations it is recognised as being an important forerunner to the art form of opera.

During the late 12th century, greater liturgical freedom permitted the singing of popular noëls during midnight mass. In the 17th and 18th century, this freedom also allowed composers to use popular tunes, and to compose new music with pastoral elements for these occasions. Italian composers began to create specific musical styles for use during Christmas celebrations, notably Christmas Eve, which were eventually taken up by composers throughout Europe.
Many of these Italian composers found themselves with a wonderful orchestra at the basilica of San Petronio in Bologna. Concerti and symphonies were played before and during services. For Christmas, these works included pastoral movements. Corelli’s ‘Christmas’ Concerto (Op.6 No.8) is the best known example of this type. Although Corelli had spent his formative years in Bologna, the ‘Christmas’ Concerto was written after he had moved to Rome. These styles also made use of pastoral elements, taking their inspiration from the concept of Christ the good shepherd, and the pastoral tradition where the animals speak on Christmas Eve. These works were performed during the offertory or gradual at Christmas midnight mass.

Many pastoral symphonies and concerti grossi represent events based on Luke 2: the announcement of midnight, the appearance of angels, shepherds and their offering of gifts to the Christ child.

There were a few common conventions to this style. One of the most readily recognized is the frequent use of a drone bass – usually on the dominant or tonic, which evoke rustic instruments such as various types of bagpipe or hurdy-gurdy. Melodies in this style were generally in triple time – most often in 6/8 or 12/8 and were usually symmetrical in construction. Melodies were often harmonized in parallel intervals – mostly in thirds and sixths. It seems highly probable that these particular features were adopted from the music of Italian shepherds. Handel derived the ‘Pifa’ from his Messiah from an actual bagpipe tune that he heard in Italy. The imaginative use of wind instruments in many Christmas symphonies further symbolized the playing of reed pipes. Echo effects are a commonly used convention of the style and perhaps allude to echoes of pipes heard in the valleys below.

Flutes and oboes were generally used in pairs and this instrumental convention became more prevalent in the later Baroque period. One can hear these Italian pastoral conventions in such late Baroque works as Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. The tradition of pastoral music entered the classical symphony with notable works by many Mannheim composers such as Stamitz. Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ piano sonata and his sixth symphony also make use of standard pastoral musical conventions. Composers still continue to use many of these same conventions used in early Baroque music for their Christmas and pastoral settings, albeit at times with a sense of irony or as a neo-classical gesture.

While most of these pastoral works were vocal, in the early 18th century pastoral elements were used in concerti grossi and other instrumental forms, such as early symphonies. The ‘siciliano’ is a particular kind of pastoral much favoured by Baroque composers. There is debate amongst musicians and scholars regarding the correct tempi for these works. It is generally assumed that these works were played in a gentle flowing manner, though there is a school of thought that holds that faster tempi, more in the style of a hurdy-gurdy, was accepted practice.

Instrumental music for Christmas written during the 18th century also derived material and musical convention from more popular sources. Since the 15th century the term ‘noël’ has defined a non-liturgical verse usually based on Christmas themes. These verses would have often been sung to plainchant tunes and also popular and rustic tunes of the day. As time progressed, these noëls became more complex and often contrapuntal. During the 18th century, organ composers began writing Christmas music based on popular and rustic tunes of the day. Instrumental composers such as Michel-Richard De Lalande and François Joseph Gossec also took up this trend. Certainly the works by these composers in this recording typify the style of music that a person in the 18th century would expect from a noël. Their wonderful use of wind instruments adds to the immediate popular and rustic appeal of the music. Rousseau in his Dictionary of Music of 1768 writes that noëls are ‘tunes intended for certain canticles which the people sang at Christmas: these types have a rustic and pastoral character consistent with the simplicity of the words and of the shepherds who were supposed to have sung them when paying homage to Christ in the crib.’

Marc Taddei