When the Australian Chamber Choir commissioned Alan Holley (above left) to write an Australian Christmas carol in 2022, Alan invited Mark Tredinnick (above right) to create the text. Mark envisaged a set of poems on the subject of birds and the changing seasonal landscapes they inhabit. He proceeded to produce nine poems, each with nine lines, each line with nine syllables.
Having premiered the first of the nine – Carol of the Two Crows – in 2022, Douglas Lawrence and the ACC8 will repeat the first and premiere the second – Carol of the Butcherbird – as part of their Baroque Christmas 2023 program. Mark explains “I can’t think why it took me so long to work out how to write contemporary carols – carols that nod toward the ideas in the Bible stories of the Nativity (rebirth, hope against hope, joy in the despair, and the triumph of life) without being narrowly Christian; carols that are spiritual but not pious, reverent without slipping into dogma or the sentiment of Yuletide. Birds carolled long before humans did. The verb was there long before it was overwhelmed by Christmas.”
Alan elucidates “The word carol comes, via a Greek word, from a French word meaning singing and dancing in a semi-circle and surely we all want to praise the world that nurtures us. Mark’s words draw us into the environment of streams and lakes and birds and the changing nature of all around us. Ultimately it is a celebration. Surely that is what Christmas is all about!”
Mark has just returned from China, where he was honoured with the prestigious Golden Tibetan Antelope Poetry Prize. The prize recognises the body of work of an international poet whose work has made a difference in their homeland and beyond it, and whose work touches on themes of justice and the preservation of the wild and the human spirit; it has been given to Syrian poet Adonis, Argentine poet Juan Hermann, Indigenous American poet Simon Ortiz, and San Franciscan beat poet Jack Hirschman.
Mark Tredinnick’s Nine Carols are recently published in a beautiful 18-page hardback edition (by 5 Islands Press), with illustrations by Gerhard Bachfischer and Damian Gascoigne. The volume makes an excellent Christmas gift, and can be ordered online or purchased at the box office at the ACC’s forthcoming Baroque Christmas concerts.
ORDER NOW BOOK NOW FOR BAROQUE CHRISTMAS
Carol of the Butcherbird
Music forgives us the violence
….Of our small lives, our cruel idiom.
Or so the butcherbird hopes—earth’s first
….Prodigal, who sings up the dawn each day
In luminous cadences too pure
….For heaven to keep. Your trade’s to flay
Your prey—and whose is not, these days? Your
….Fluted phrases have mercy on us
All, little one. And don’t we need it?
