At the very outset of his career, John Rutter already exhibited many of the trademarks that would follow him for decades. One of his earliest acknowledged pieces is a new Christmas carol from the early 1960s, with both music and text from Rutter's hand. Crafted in a relatively simple idiom, his Nativity Carol betrays a number of basic features that will be present in so much of Rutter's sacred music: a predictable musical structure made richer by harmonic complexities, an aurally accessible melody made more expressive by gently shifting neo-Romantic harmonies, a musical composition borrowing both completely traditional, and historically grounded forms and more contemporary approaches. In the Nativity Carol, we see a very young Rutter making an early, but extremely capable, effort toward writing the kind of music that will define so much of his life in pieces that breathe musical freshness into forms and genres that might otherwise become moribund. In 1960s America, at least, the Christmas carol was already morphing into a commercialized genre; English musicians may have lamented the transformation of a centuries-old musical tradition that took on new familial intimacy in Dickensian times. It may be that Rutter's Nativity Carol embodied an early effort to revitalize this lengthy holiday tradition.

Rutter himself wrote the words to the Nativity Carol, following the centuries-old tradition of alternating verses and communal chorus, as well as the dance-led metrical foundation. Rutter takes very traditional topics for his four textual verses: the stable of the Incarnation, the Mother of God, the wise men, and the universal Love born in that stable. His first publication was for voices with organ accompaniment, followed some years later with a vocal score with string orchestra. Rutter's musical setting is quite hymn-like, with generally shorter lines of text and a more overt harmonic climax on the name of "Christ" in the verse each time. Each musical phrase of the verse, in fact, takes an almost completely sequential position in building toward the holy Name. The subsequent verses adopt subtly different textures, according to the sense of each; the women's voices take the lead in the verse about the virgin "mother," there is homophonic chordal unity on the third verse about the wise men and shepherds, and all voices sing the same soli melody for verse four ("Love in that stable was born"). Rutter works in this carol, as in so much of his later work, in obvious but extremely effective musical features.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi