A cantata is a story told in music. The word is Italian — it just means “sung,” the way a sonata is “played.” A cantata is one continuous work, usually forty minutes to an hour, built from a dozen or so pieces for choir and soloists that are linked together by a spoken narration. It isn’t a concert of separate songs, and it isn’t a play with music in it. The music carries the story; the narration carries you from one piece to the next.
The form is old. Bach wrote more than two hundred cantatas for Sunday services in the 1700s, each one a short musical sermon for that week’s reading. The Christmas cantata we perform today is the same idea made for church and community choirs: the Christmas story — the prophets’ promise, the angel’s visit, the road to Bethlehem, the shepherds, the manger — told in song over a single evening.
The story never changes, but every cantata tells it differently. One composer frames it as a night of silence broken by a single voice; another as a dream, or a journey, or an invitation. The carols chosen, the moments given to a soloist, the place the narration pauses — each work has its own way in, and that is why we can sing the same story every December and have it feel new. The purpose is the same every time: to bring joy and hope to the people in the room, in a season that needs both.
What’s inside one
Most of the cantatas we sing share a shape:
- An overture that sets the mood and plants a few melodies you’ll hear again.
- Choral numbers — the big moments, with everyone singing in four parts.
- Solos, duets and small ensembles — the quiet, personal moments: Mary’s song, a shepherd’s wonder, a lullaby at the manger.
- Carols you already know, woven in whole or in fragments, so the familiar and the new sit side by side.
- Narration between the pieces, drawn from scripture and the composer’s own words, read by narrators and sometimes acted out.
- A finale that gathers up everything that came before.
How we choose ours
We look for a few things. A real theme — a thread that runs through the whole work and means something, rather than a dozen pretty songs in a row. Writing that fits a community choir, so that a first-year singer and a veteran can sing the same page with pride. And at least one anchor: a solo or a single choral moment so beautiful that the whole evening seems to turn on it. The composers we come back to — Joseph M. Martin, Heather Sorenson, Pepper Choplin — are the ones who get all three right. Run time matters too: forty to sixty minutes is long enough to tell the story and short enough to hold a December evening.
How we learn it
We rehearse from the published score and sing with the composer’s orchestrated accompaniment track in performance, which lets a small-town choir stand in front of a full orchestra. For rehearsal, each section gets learning tracks with its own part brought forward, so sopranos, altos, tenors and basses can practice at home between Wednesdays. Soloists and ensembles are cast from within the choir in the first few weeks. By the last rehearsals we’re singing the whole work straight through, the way the audience will hear it.
What you’re hearing when you come
A story you know, told by neighbors, in music most of them had never seen three months earlier. That’s the form doing what it was built for.