‘O Come All Ye Faithful: A Musical Mystery Tour’

Beloved by Christians and non-Christians alike Christmas carols are amongst the few   musical genres to transcend religious and cultural differences. Uniting people through the magic of seasonal song, carols help us share our feelings and communicate the true meaning of Christmas. But what is the true meaning of Christmas? And what was the true meaning of Christmas when Christmas carols became popular in the eighteenth century? In this paper, Professor Bennett Zon tells the true but shocking story of the meaning behind Britain’s most popular carol ‘Adeste Fideles’, otherwise known as ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. Join Zon for a ‘Musical Mystery Tour’ tracing its history from the 1740s to the present, through London Embassy chapels, recusant houses, Protestant churches and Catholic cathedrals.

Bennett Zon is Professor of Music at Durham University, and Director of the International Network for Music Theology. He is also Director of Durham’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International, and was recently elected President of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. He is General Editor of Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge) and the book series Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Routledge), and Editor of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. Zon researches music, religion and science in the long nineteenth-century. Recent publications include Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (2017) and the co-edited volume Victorian Culture the Origin of Disciplines (2019). Zon is one of two general editors of the forthcoming five-volume Oxford Handbook of Music and Christian Theology, and is currently writing No God, No Science, No Music, a history using music to explore the relationship between religion and science from the Big Bang to the present.

All are welcome to YGS lectures. Admission is free to Members and students, and a suggestion from non-Members of £5.

Image credit: MS Euing R.d.90 superscript 2; with permission of University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections