At the Choral Society of the Hamptons Christmas concert at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church last week, I found myself getting quite misty listening to the opening notes of the first carol. Aside from being transported by the music, by the familiar notes, I realized how many years it had been since I had first learned the carols.
I grew up in Lower Manhattan and was a student at Grace Church School, which started out as the choir school for Grace Church and in the early ’50s went coed. That’s when I got there.
I like church architecture, and Grace Church, in my mind, is the standard by which all churches are measured. These buildings are dramatically gothic, built in 1846 at the crook of Lower Broadway by the architect James Renwick (then 23!), who went on to design St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
In this church, I learned most of the Episcopal hymnal.
Our classes were in the wildly gothic buildings along Fourth Avenue at 11th Street, but each morning all students moved down a long passage (think Harry Potter) and were delivered through a hidden door into the big church and then down side aisles to the chantry, actually a small side chapel originally built to house the Sunday school and the choir that was used for the kid services. It has a very nice organ.
In the ’50s we had a choirmaster named Mr. Shane who played the organ for us and tried to teach us how to sing. The chantry services were about 15 minutes long with lots of singing from the hymnal and some collects and the Apostles’ Creed and a prayer or two followed by a little talk from the headmaster, E. Allison Grant (in black robe, very grand).
On Tuesdays, we had what we called the “long service,” which was led by an eighth grader who picked the lessons and the hymns. When I got to eighth grade and my turn came, I always picked “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” which is still my favorite hymn.
Imagine two hymns a day, five days a week for eight years. That’s a lot of hymns.
We all know how easy it is to remember songs, though sometimes we are a bit off. For many years as a kid, I was singing the words to “Onward Christian Soldiers” as “with the cross-eyed Jesus, going on before.” My mother thought it was hilarious when Mr. Shane told her what I was singing.
To this day when the bells from the Presbyterian Church in East Hampton play something, I find the words — right or slightly wrong — hidden in my memory.
When I was there, Grace Church School was just a grammar school with 14 students per grade in first through eighth, and, whether or not we were good at singing, older students became part of the choir. There were special occasion services we practiced for, and what we really looked forward to was the school Christmas pageant in the big church. Big means 43,000 square feet of marble floors, carved oak pews with wine-colored velvet seats, incredible detail, beautiful stained glass, soaring heights, and a massive organ that boomed.
We wore black robes for the Christmas service and marched in from one of the side chambers, all very grand. We would split into two groups and were seated in the nave facing each other along with the regular Sunday choir of men and boys. The church was decorated with greens.
This is what I see in my mind’s eye when I hear any Christmas carol.
As a kid in Manhattan, many of my buddies were singing in the choirs of the neighborhood churches: the Church of the Ascension, St. Luke’s in the Field, and St. George’s. We would go from church to church to watch our friends. Christmas Eve was always very busy, and we stayed up late for the midnight service at Grace. We sang and sang, bad singing drowned out by enthusiasm and great old organs.
In Bridgehampton last week, those memories came flooding back. Maybe everyone gets misty at these choral concerts. Outside of church, there are not a lot of moments when people sing together. I looked around and saw people sharing hymnals with their neighbors, and I smiled to myself that I did not need the hymnal because I knew all the words. And while they were singing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” my memory was singing “Adeste Fideles,” because we learned it in Latin as well as English from Mr. Shane.
There is a passage that goes “o come let us adore him.” As students, we were a bit sloppy with our diction and Mr. Shane would stamp his foot and say, “Boys and girls, it is not ‘o come lettuce adore him,’ it is ‘o come let us adore him.’ Pause there, boys and girls. Make it crisp.”
I never hear it without thinking of Mr. Shane.
Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.