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Lynne Gackle is professor emeritus of music at the longtime modernist compositional language to one
School of Music, Baylor University, and a member of based in modal scales and ethnic/folk styles. The work
ACDA’s Past National Presidents Council. represents a significant contribution to the genre of the
Lynne_Gackle@baylor.edu Christmas choral cycle.

NOTES Background
A native of England, Derek Healey was born in
1 Jean Ashworth Bartle, Sound Advice: Becoming a Better Chil- Wargrave in 1936 and attended the Royal College of
dren’s Choir Conductor (New York: Oxford, 2003). Music, studying composition with Herbert Howells. He
2 Doreen Rao, We Will Sing! Choral Music Experience for Class- later worked with Boris Porena and Gofredo Petrassi
room Choirs (New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1994). in Italy. His website lists around fifty published works
3 Marie Stultz, Innocent Sounds Building Choral Tone and Artistry in the U.K., Canada, and the United States, including
in Your Children’s Choir (Fenton, MO: Morning-Star Mu- works for large ensembles, opera, choral and chamber
1
sic Publishers, 1999), 85. works for all combinations of instruments. The works
most often performed include the suite for orches-
tra: Arctic Images, and In Flanders’ Fields and two sets of
Canadian folk songs for choir. He is now retired from
Music in Worship teaching and spends his time with composition and re-
search, living in the Cobble Hill district of Brooklyn,
Jennaya Robison New York. Healey’s works are available through Ca-
2
National R&R Chair, Music in Worship nadian Music Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada.
jennayarobison@gmail.com Healey’s recollections of the genesis of A Posy for the
Christ Child were inspired by his ruminations on Christ-
mas memories, when, as a youngster, he and a friend
would sing carols outside cottages in his village. In his
The Choral Style of Derek Healey in days directing a choir at a private boarding school, he
A Posy for the Christ Child, Op. 140 would repeat this practice with his singers and a wind
quintet, performing carols. In 1980, “in a fit of nostal-
by Lester Seigel gia,” Healey began a practice he continues to this day
of sketching out two or three short choral works over the
Christmas season. As a composer whose primary work
The Christmas Carol cycle or collection has grown was in instrumental composition, he noted that these
to a vast literature in the last 150 years, beginning with formed nearly all his published choral works up to that
the great English settings of the Victorian and Edward- time. In contrast to his largely atonal style of that time,
ian era composers, through Benjamin Britten, Gerald these short holiday works tended to be modal, tonal, or
Finzi, and into more recent times by composers such folk-based, taken from a variety of international styles,
as John Rutter and the late Stephen Paulus. The pur- and sometimes reminiscent of composers such as Pe-
pose of this article is to acquaint readers with one such ter Warlock and Frederick Delius. Healey refers to this
collection by the Canadian American composer Derek as his “second” or “alternate stream” compositional
Healey (b. 1936). Healey drew on memories of child- style. He notes that the Posy was “an ‘assembled work,’
hood Christmas caroling and a lifetime of work as a analogous perhaps to a collection of photographs, or a
3
composer in a variety of genres to create the choral small child’s posey of wild flowers.” It is dedicated to
collection “A Posy for the Christ Child” in 2014. The Jon Washburn and the Vancouver Chamber Choir and
composition is a major style shift from the composer’s the copyright date on the score is 2014.

CHORAL JOURNAL September 2024 Volume 65 Number 2 55