“The Boar’s Head” (Wikipedia/YouTube) can be made very subtle and pretty, as in the arrangement I’ve linked to, but at bottom it’s a silly song. Written half in Latin doggerel, it begs to be belted out with gusto: “Let us servire cantico!“
My wife’s family had printed packets of sheet music, so singing carols always meant picking from the ones in the book. When she moved to Albany, we went on-line to look for sheet music. Sending links back and forth, we sang from our open laptops. This led to us discovering lots of great holiday songs, but The Boar’s Head is perhaps my favorite.
Blair Thornburgh isn’t far from the mark in calling it “Almost the absolute best carol ever written.”
