The SCSO commissioned The Children’s Carol for its annual Home for the Holidays concert in 2021, but the pandemic delayed its performance until today. The text is by Thomas Troeger, a well-known and prolific hymn-text writer and professor of homiletics and hymnody at Yale University who passed away earlier this year. The text spoke to me in particular because of its reference to the infant Jesus as a refugee; as a composer particularly interested in social justice at a time when children were being detained in cages along our country’s southern border, Troeger’s words seemed to me both beautiful and relevant. It reminds us that Christians have a divine mandate to care for children—particularly “the bruised, the lost, the poor”—in the way Christ’s parents cared for him.

The carol has four verses, most of which have a gentle and tender character. In the first verse the sopranos and altos sing the entire melody, but in the second and third verses it moves among the different voice parts to create more interesting textures. The final verse begins triumphantly and includes a high descant sung by the sopranos and tenors while the altos and basses have the tune. The melody is almost but not quite identical in each of the four verses. The slight differences create some ambiguity about whether the carol on the whole is in a major key, a minor key, or the Dorian mode, a medieval scale that predates the concepts of “major” and “minor.” Each of the verses is separated by interludes of different lengths in which a flute or horn plays fragments of the choir’s melody. Two of the interludes bring the carol to new and perhaps unexpected keys to provide musical interest. Like the verses, the end of the carol is tonally ambiguous (again, is it in a comforting major key or a somber minor key?), inviting us to consider how or perhaps even whether we as a society will care for the most vulnerable among us.