My involvement with the Carols for Choirs series was actually years before I was actively
co-editing it. Because I think it was one evening in 1961, when I was an occasional
back row bass helper in the church choir in Kensington in West London, where John Tavener,
my great school chum, and of course, eminent composer, as he later became, was the organist.
And it was one November choir practice evening, when John walked in brandishing a green book
that I had not seen before. And he said, 'Look, what I've just got, this is called
'Carols for Choirs', and it's got a fabulous descant to 'O come, all ye faithful' in it’. And
he only had one copy, but we all clustered around the organ and sang that descant, and I said,
'Oh, my goodness me, that lights up the sky'. And of course, there was lots more exciting music
in the book, a lot of which was music that we had heard in the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
at King's College each Christmas Eve. And the arrangements that Sir David Willcocks had done are
favorites such as the 'Sussex Carol' and 'Rocking' and 'Away in a manger' and so on, were known to
us as listeners, but they were not available in print, until Carols for Choirs came out.
And so I remembered the ripple of excitement throughout the choral world;
I was only a schoolboy at the time, but Carols for Choirs spread like a bushfire really,
among choirs throughout the English-speaking world, not just in churches, but in schools,
and choral societies and merry wassailers in the open air even had a go at some of
the unaccompanied ones. So it was a book that really changed our whole celebration of Christmas.
And I never thought then that one day, I would be asked to co-edit the second volume. But
what of course happened was that Sir David's co-editor, Reginald Jacques, died,
not that long after the first volume was issued. And the time came around while I was a student at
Cambridge by then, that Oxford decided that the second volume was necessary and there would be
a need for it, a market for it, an appetite for it, and David said, so I'm told,
'Look, I will do Volume Two, but I can't do it on my own. I'm just simply too busy.
And I feel I need a co-editor and desirably a young one, because it will familiarize me perhaps
with the work of a new and younger generation of composers, new repertoire of carols'.
And he approached me - I think I was walking along King's Parade one day, and
this dapper figure of Sir David, who never strolled anywhere, he always almost ran at
a gallop and you had to struggle to keep up with him. But he was coming in the opposite direction
and said 'Ah Mr Rutter!', he said, 'Very good to see you. Would you be interested in
co-editing the second volume of Carols for Choirs?' and I was quite overwhelmed, really.
And we collaborated in a very free and easy kind of way. I mean, it was extraordinary that even
though I was so much younger than him, and he had so much more experienced than I did,
and reputation, of course, as a choir director and as a very, very skilled choral arranger, but
he always listened to my views about what should be included and what should not be included.
And we would meet on Friday evenings over his kitchen table, in Grange Road in Cambridge, where
he would finish the rehearsals for the evening at maybe 10.00 or 10.30, and he'd say ‘Right, come
on John!’ It was first named terms by then, which was rather lovely; this was 1969, I suppose. And
we would look through piles of possible submissions and inclusions - pieces that
one or other of us had heard about or had been sent in, or had been offered for our consideration
by Christopher Morris, the senior music editor at OUP, and we would work our way through the pile.
We had almost finished editing Carols for Choirs 2 David and I looked at each other. And I asked him,
David, how long would you give it? How long do you think this book will last?
And he said, I don't know, John, five years, maybe 10 years. And so I think that was more or less my
view that we weren't looking to posterity, we were just looking to meet an immediate need right now.
And the fact that these books have bubbled on for such a long period of time, has been something
we couldn't have predicted for one moment. But of course, I'm very happy that that's been the case.