In Winter's Hour

“Twas in the Moon of Wintertime” (also known as “Jesous Ahatonnia”, or “The Huron Carol”) was one of my favorite songs for years and I had always wanted to make an arrangement of it for choir. However, I did not realize that it has a long and very problematic history. Although it is often presented as a “Native American Christmas carol,” the text was written in 1642 by Jean de Brébeuf, a French Jesuit missionary, as a tool for Christian conversion, not as an authentic Indigenous song. Over time, it has been romanticized, mistranslated, and framed in ways that misrepresent Native cultures and reinforce stereotypes rather than honoring real Indigenous musical traditions. Less often discussed is that the common English version many of us know today (words written by Jesse Edgar Middleton in 1926) is also inauthentic and highly inappropriate. His text uses stereotypical tropes and further distances the piece from both its historical context and the cultures it was meant to represent. For this arrangement, I chose to return to the source of the melody: a French folksong entitled “Une Jeune Pucelle” which is loosely based on an even older French melody: “Une Jeune Fillete”. By grounding the music in its true origins and adding secular English text about wintertime (thus removing faux-Indigenous musical tropes from the 1926 version), my goal was to present the piece with honesty and clarity. This is about being reflective, responsible, and transparent with the music we perform and teach. I hope this arrangement invites conversation, learning, and a more thoughtful approach to repertoire, especially when it intersects with cultures that have been marginalized or misrepresented for centuries.