Music

Dancing the winter blues away: Kitchen Junkets

/ Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment
Max_Rentel_-_Fischertanz_1880_Wikimedia

This is a repost of an article originally published in the Rutland Herald/Times ArgusWeekend Magazine on January 20, 2024.

For our ancestors, winter in rural Vermont was long and arduous. The short days were crammed full with laborious farm and house chores while the dark nights were long and filled with… not much. Maybe dreams of warmer days? And when the snow was too deep for even ox-pulled snow rollers to clear a path, it was not unheard of for some families to be housebound for days at a time.

But Vermonters — many of whom were not long descended from the dance and music-loving English, Scottish, and Irish, or were newly settled French-Canadians — knew how to brighten the dark nights: With music. And more specifically, with a “kitchen junket” or “tunk.”

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Messiah in the Mountains: When Vermonters First Sang Hallelujah

/ Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, December 18, 2021 for the “Remember When” column with the title, “Hallelujah!: When the Messiah came to Vermont.”

A capacity crowd stands for the “Hallelujah” Chorus at the finale of Handel’s “Messiah,” an annual holiday concert at Rutland’s Grace Congregational Church, conducted by Alastair Stout.
Photo by Arthur Zorn

On May 7, 1822, Thomas P. Matthews, “Sec’y” of the Addison County Musical Society placed an ad for their “Annual Concert at the Meeting House in Middlebury.” Extending a “general invitation” to “all Choirs in the County,” he also specifically and “respectfully invite(d) the assistance of Ladies acquainted with the music.”

What music would that be? Well, not what you might expect in the valleys and hillsides of a sparsely populated, farm-dotted state 3,000 miles away from Europe: Handel’s “Messiah,” the “Grand Hallelujah Chorus” and excerpts of Part III, to be exact.

Three centuries later, for the descendants of those Middlebury singers, as it is for many Americans, “Messiah” has become as synonymous with Christmas as Santa Claus and eggnog.

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