Middlebury Lessons and Carols

Since 1971, the Department of Music and the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life have collaborated to present an annual Lessons and Carols for Advent and Christmas service at Middlebury College. The services are led by Mark R. Orten, Dean of Spiritual and Religious Life, Jeffrey Buettner, Christian A. Johnson Professor of Music, and the Middlebury College Choir. 

Services are at 4:00 and 7:00 PM.

American Sign Language is provided at 4:00 PM.

Join Middlebury College students, faculty, staff and Middlebury community members for the annual celebration of traditional Christmas music and biblical texts of the season. The College Choir and all in attendance will sing popular carols and hymns, and the Choir will perform traditional music as well as new works by Mark A. Miller, Ghislane Reece-Trapp, and Ben Parry. Donations will be accepted for local charities.

go.middlebury.edu/lessonsandcarols/

Overview

This service is based on the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols that has been celebrated every year at King’s College, Cambridge, England since 1918. Since the 1930s the King’s College service has been broadcast annually to audiences worldwide on BBC Radio. It was originally planned by Eric Milner-White, the Dean of King’s College Chapel. He had been a World War I British army chaplain, and became a liturgical pioneer who was convinced that the Church of England needed more imaginative worship. Christmas Eve 1918 was a mere six weeks from the World War I armistice; nearly half of Cambridge University undergraduates had gone off to war and a third of them never came back. Thus the phrase, “all those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light,” from the bidding prayer, had particular resonance. Though the music changes each year, the backbone of the service—the prayers and lessons—has remained virtually unchanged in the Cambridge service since those days.

The first Middlebury College service took place in 1971, under the direction of Emory Fanning, Professor of Music, and Charles P. Scott, College Chaplain. They were certain that the College’s music department was up to the challenge, and that the community would welcome this colorful and moving celebration of the season. Middlebury’s Lessons and Carols was made famous by two public television specials. Christmas in Vermont: A Celebration of Lessons and Carols was filmed in 1984. And in 1988, Vermont Public Television produced A Vermont Christmas, narrated by actor Burgess Meredith and filmed on location in Middlebury and on the College’s Bread Loaf campus. Each production was rebroadcast, over several years, by over 200 public television stations nationally. Each year the offering is donated to HOPE, Elderly Services, and Addison Home Health and Hospice. Past services have raised over $4,000, a testament to the generosity of our community.

The overall format of this service provides such a rich opportunity to experience both the emotional resonance and familiarity of tradition, while each year stretching both the congregation and the choir with music that is unfamiliar or new. Over the years that blend of constancy, depth, innovation, and breadth creates a sense of anticipation and joy well suited for the Advent and Christmas seasons. For the Christian community, Advent is not only about the expectation of the birth of Jesus, which has already happened in history, it is also about the rebirth of the earth, the re-infusing of the New Creation into our currently beautiful, but broken world. The hope is expressed every time the Lord’s Prayer is recited in public and private devotion: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Donations

Our Lessons and Carols services are free admission, but we always take an offering during the services, all of which is shared among three local organizations whose work serve people in need in our community. This offering is a hallmark of the services, and a substantial gift to these organizations:

• Addison County Home Health and Hospice
• Elderly Services, Inc.
• HOPE (Helping to Overcome Poverty’s Effects)

Programs

Program PDF files may be available for download here.

Download the 2024 Program.

Download the 2023 Program.

Download the 2021 Program.

Download the 2020 Program.

Download the 2018 Program.