‘Everyone Wants to Hear’ This One Chord in a Christmas Carol
“It’s a startling moment,” David Hill, the musical director of the Bach Choir, said in a telephone interview. “I remember being a boy of 10 playing it in my church in Carlisle, and loving every moment of it, thinking: ‘What is this? This is outrageous!’”
When I was growing up, our Lutheran Hymnal did not contain this arrangement but it does seem to be what our organist was playing. I knew nothing of half-diminished sevenths, of course.