It’s time to enjoy Christmas music, whether carols, pop songs playing in the shopping malls or deeply reflective classical music, writes arts editor HELEN MUSA.

Canberra’s Luminescence Children’s Choir will be at the forefront, presenting a completely new song cycle as part of the annual season, A Luminous Christmas.

And in a Canberra-conceived international venture, the cycle, commissioned from composer and ABC Music Show host Andrew Ford, will be performed by the Canberra choir here, in Antwerp Cathedral between its two large Rubens paintings, in Tallin, Estonia and in Perth. 

With funding from all quarters, including Canberra’s Helen Moore and the APRA AMCOS Art Music Fund 2023, the Flanders Boys Choir, Estonian Girls’ TV and Radio Choir, and the Schola Cantorum of St Aquinas College in Perth, it’s a formidable project.

Artistic director of Luminescence AJ America and its music advisor, Roland Peelman, tell me it started with a performance by the choir of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols in 2020.

“I’ve always been wondering why is that no one since Britten has written a piece like that, half an hour long and of a quality that can stay in the repertoire,” Peelman says. 

He and America agreed to commission such a work from a composer with capacity and understanding, and after canvassing many options, settled on Andrew Ford two years ago. 

Peelman says, adding that with a young daughter and a track record of composing to nursery rhymes, Ford would clearly be able to respond to the imagination of children.

Then the idea of a more international flavour came when they reflected that “children are children”, whether they grow up in China or Peru or Belgium or wherever.

“We were looking for Christmas music and as it comes around once a year, Roland and I got thinking [that] our new songs could have a life all around the world,” America says.

The idea emerged of a piece that could be played in many countries, and, let’s face it, attract more funding.

The end result is a significant collaboration involving four choirs from around the world, all of whom will perform the work on the same day.

Peelman had been spending a lot of time in his native Belgium recently helping to care for his ageing parents and remembered his old school choir, In Dulci Jubilo, where he’d sung treble.

He found that the choir was now renamed the Flanders Boys Choir, operating in the provincial city of Sint-Niklaas, home to the biggest town square in Belgium and to a huge feast of Saint Nicholas each December. He contacted the director, Dieter van Handenhoven, who thought it was a terrific idea.

By chance, America was visiting Europe and, in Sint-Niklaas’ Australia-themed coffee house Skippy’s, also met van Handenhoven. 

America had also made connections with the Estonian choir from when they were on tour in Australia in 2019 and with Aquinas College in Perth, which boasts a choir of 52 choristers made up of boys between years 4-12.

Back in Canberra, she had specific reasons for pursuing the commission. She’d noticed that a lot of music written for children is quite challenging, especially for those newcomers, some of whom only joined three months ago and whose sight-reading skills are only just being developed.

She’s particularly happy that Ford was the choice, saying: “Andrew does have the passion to write music that is incredibly sophisticated, but also tunes that are very simple, he understands kids and writes very singable music for them… also Andrew has great skill with text.”

On that front, Ford has been inspired by the great tradition of Christmas carols such as In The Bleak Midwinter, a William Dunbar poem, Thomas Hardy’s poem The Oxen and poetry by Australian writers Mark Tredinnick and Judith Crispin.

So far it’s all gone smoothly, except for their need to give a bit of cultural context to words such as “huntsman”, which in Europe has one meaning but in Australia mostly definitely refers to a spider.

One unusual feature, America says, is that Ford has chosen electric guitar for the backing, to be performed by Melbourne musician Theo Carbo. Britten had opted for harp for A Ceremony of Carols but Ford was looking for a more contemporary feel.

“The way the guitar interacts with the singers will bring a new sound,” America says.

“But it does sound like Christmas.” 

I Sing the Birth, Wesley Uniting Church, December 14, part of A Luminous Christmas, December 13-15.