56th Annual Festival of Lessons & Carols

The 56th annual Festival of Lessons and Carols at the University of the South will be celebrated at three services, at 5 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 5, and at 5 and 8 p.m., Sunday, December 6. 

At once solemn and joyful, the Festival of Lessons and Carols evokes the meaning of the Advent season through the radiant music of the University Choir and selected readings by members of the University and Sewanee community. The service is based on one that has been sung annually since 1918 at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, England. It features the University Choir under the direction of University organist and choirmaster Robert Delcamp.

As part of the University mission and the program of education and formation of All Saints’ Chapel, the Festival Service of Lessons and Carols offers students, faculty and staff the opportunity to experience one of the oldest traditions of Anglican music and Advent expectation.

As part of the University’s outreach to others, the public is also welcome to attend; tickets were available by reservation in November. All available spaces were reserved quickly, but it still may be possible to attend a service without a reserved seat. The University expects that some people with tickets will decide not to attend, and will distribute those tickets in advance of each service.

There will be a sign-up sheet in Convocation Hall beginning at noon Saturday and Sunday. People who wish to attend a service may add their names to the list for a service that day.

Thirty minutes before each service (4:30 p.m. Saturday, and 4:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday), people from the sign-up list will be seated with tickets that were not picked up by those who reserved them. Tickets will be distributed in the order in which people signed up.

Guests must be present in Convocation Hall 30 minutes before the service in order to receive a ticket. While there are no guarantees, all walk-ups have been seated during the last two years in which the ticketing system has been used.

Guerry Auditorium will be open and will live-stream each service for anyone who cannot be seated in All Saints’ Chapel, or who is sensitive to the incense used in the Chapel.

Guests with reservations should pick up their tickets in Convocation Hall on the day of the service between noon and 30 minutes prior to each service. Tickets not picked up by 4:30 p.m. (for Saturday and Sunday 5 p.m. services) or 7:30 p.m. (for the Sunday 8 p.m. service) will be released for walk-up guests.

For guests who wish they could take the service with them, the University Choir’s CD release from December 2014, “A Festival Service of Nine Lessons and Carols—A 10-Year Retrospective,” is being re-released this weekend. The two-CD set, which sold out last year, is a complete recording of the beloved service of Lessons and Carols heard in All Saints’ Chapel each year since 1959. It contains music and readings drawn from 2003 to 2013 and represents the work of more than 300 choristers, with readers drawn from faculty, administration, staff, clergy, students and members of the Sewanee community.