Two weeks out! I hope your shopping is done. And if it isn’t, well, you have time.
Anyway, here’s something just outstanding. I usually feature the full soundtrack album of A Charlie Brown Christmas at some point during this series, and this year is no different…but it’s not the original. Apparently there’s a jazz trio called The Commercialists, based in Milwaukee, who get together in December to go around performing…the entire soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. This is just wonderful. Enjoy!
In our time, the only “carols” we think about in the musical sense are Christmas carols, which seem to be a subset of “Christmas songs” in general: the carols are the traditional ones that we might have heard in Victorian England. We picture small groups of people in tall hats and heavy clothing standing outside gaslit buildings and singing old Christmas tunes: “Good King Wenceslas”, “Silent Night”, and so on. We wouldn’t envision carolers singing, say, “All I Want For Christmas”. But the fact that we have Christmas carols seems to offer two possibilities: carols are only Christmas-related, or our use of the carol form has withered to the point where the only carols that survive are the Christmas ones.
The latter seems to be the truth of the matter.
From A History of Western Music, Grout and Palisca:
Another form of English composition that flourished in the fifteenth century was the carol. Like the rondeau and the ballata, it was originally a monophonic dance song with alternating solo and choral portions. By the fifteenth century if had become stylized as a setting, in two or three (sometimes four) parts, of a religious poem in popular style, often on a subject of the Incarnation, and sometimes written in a mixture of English and Latin rhyming verses. In form the carol consisted of a number of stanzas all sung to the same music, and a burden or refrain with its own musical phrase, which was sung at the beginning and then repeated after every stanza. The carols were not folksongs, but their fresh, angular melodies and lively triple rhythms give them a distinctly popular character and unmistakably English quality.
That’s interesting…but it’s incomplete. The “carol” didn’t arrive, fully-formed, in the 1400s; like all music forms, the carol emerged over centuries of development of previous forms. In the case of Christmas carols specifically, the tradition of singing special seasonal hymns goes back almost to the very beginning of the church itself, and eventually the carol proved to be a particularly useful form for this tradition that had previously also drawn inspiration from pagan winter rituals. The tradition of carol-singing in England faded from view for several centuries, starting with Oliver Cromwell’s banning of the practice because I suppose it wasn’t a pious-enough thing for him to approve. Carol singing did not resurge in England until the Victorian era in the 1800s, at which time old tunes were paired with new lyrics. The words we have now for “Good King Wenceslas” date from the 1800s, but the tune is at least half-a-millennium older than that.
I have to note that as much as I love Christmas and its music, I wish it wasn’t the only time of year that was this overtly musical…but if you find yourself singing Christmas carols at some point, take a second to reflect on the fact that you are participating in musical traditions that date back nearly two thousand years.
And now, courtesy English composer Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols.
Continuing our exploration of classical music that is inspired by water, in one context or another, we have a monumental masterpiece by Claude Debussy.
I’ve never had the easiest relationship with Debussy’s music. His approach to music from a place of tonal color-painting, with less emphasis on melody and on form, has generally kept him at arm’s length for me. I’ve generally found it difficult to engage with Debussy’s tendency to create musical mood through orchestral effect and color alone.
But…as I’ve engaged more and more with the visual arts in the last bunch of years, and engaged more and more with the abstract in the visual arts–even in photography!–I’ve found myself drawn more and more to the abstract impressionism in Debussy’s music. (Debussy famously disliked the label “impressionist” being applied to his music, but it seems to have stuck.) So we have this piece: La Mer, a three-movement tone painting in which Debussy paints in sounds and tones and chords his feelings regarding the sea.
Arnold Schoenberg seems to have a reputation as having been more intellectually interested in tonal experimentation than actually writing beautiful music…and by that I may well mean, “That’s how I thought of Arnold Schoenberg for many years.” Well, that’s unfair, and here’s why. This is as lovely a piece of chamber music as I have ever heard. It’s simply titled Weihnachtsmusik (“Christmas Music”), and it’s scored for two violins, cello, harmonium, and piano.
(And if you’re wondering what a harmonium is, it’s basically a keyboarded squeezebox instrument that uses a bellows to push air over a set of reeds.)
In addition to music and photography and literary content creators, the last couple of years I’ve been following a bunch of “cozy content” creators on YouTube and Tiktok. These are almost always women (seriously, I have yet to find a man making this kind of content; if they’re out there, the algorithms have yet to serve them up to me) who make pleasant, calming videos of them doing everyday stuff like cooking and decorating their homes and walking in the woods and that sort of thing. And this time of year, a lot of these creators are making holiday or winter-themed content. So, here are a few of those!
This creator is a photographer, filmmaker, and nature conservationist living in Sweden. She specializes in squirrels, and a warning: her content is beautiful and addictive.
This next is a bookseller in France!
I love this kind of content, and I love the notion that people are out there making money by just making content about their daily lives…especially at Christmas.
This video is fourteen years old, and the YouTube algorithm only decided to show it to me…today.
This is the same algorithm where if I hear the words “how to use hearts of palm in cooking” in a dream, the next day I’ll see a dozen videos on that subject.
So, what makes a Christmas song a “Christmas Song”, anyway? Does the lyrical content have to be specifically relevant to Christmas? Obviously not, as many of the most accepted and beloved songs for this time of year don’t mention Christmas specifically at all (“Jingle Bells”, “Winter Wonderland”, and so on). But the ones that don’t mention Christmas do tend to be at least Christmas-adjacent, with their focus on wintry stuff…but even those can feel strange at times. When we were in Hawaii at Christmastime a few years ago, hearing “Winter Wonderland” in a tropical paradise really messed with our heads.
I saw a rant video online the other day, maybe it was on Tiktok, about “My Favorite Things” and how it is NOT NOT NOT a Christmas song! Not only does it have nothing lyrically to do with Christmas, it’s not even a winter song (though it does mention a couple of wintry things in its roster of “favorite things”). How can it be a perennially-heard song this time of year then, with many cover versions? Is it just that it mentions wrapped packages “tied up with strings”? Can that be all?
Well…yes. Yes, it can. And the answer to “Why is it a Christmas song?” is clearly very simple: Someone decided early on that it was, and now it has many decades–over six of them now!–of momentum and tradition behind it. And what people who perform a lyrical dissection of “My Favorite Things” every year in hopes of finally proving beyond doubt that it is not a Christmas song completely miss is that human tradition often makes things into Things even though there’s nothing inherently Thingy about them, and that human tradition is formed more by repetition of emotion than by cold logic. Now, will more recent efforts to turn, say, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into a Christmas song be likewise successful? I somewhat doubt it…but I don’t rule it out, either. Human tradition is strange and it does strange things. Who among us doesn’t have a specific family tradition that makes zero sense to people outside it?
Somehow I never knew that Franz Liszt wrote a suite of piano pieces called Weihnachtsbaum, which translates to “Christmas Tree”. It’s definitely not one of Liszt’s famous pieces; apparently its partially-seasonal nature combined with its general lack of virtuosic fireworks (well, comparatively so, for a piece by Liszt) have led to its obscurity in Liszt’s output. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating and lovely listen. Liszt wrote the work for his granddaughter Daniela, who apparently gave the first performance; as she was a quite young pianist at the time, this may explain why Liszt didn’t write the piece to be as demanding for the soloist as his general work would have seemed to prompt. (Liszt, if you are unfamiliar, was one of the greatest pianists of all time, and he wrote music that is fiendishly demanding of the soloist, which in his time was usually himself.)
The suite is not entirely Christmas-based, with several of the pieces apparently being autobiographical in nature, but that’s fine, because after all, a big part of Christmas is remembering, isn’t it?
Unlike many in the Western world, for some reason “Fairytale of New York” has only been on my radar for a few years. I’m not sure how it so thoroughly eluded me, other than to note that this kind of music doesn’t generally form the backbone of my music listening. It’s not the easiest song in the world to love, that’s to be sure, but I always think it’s important to acknowledge the difficult emotions that Christmas always makes us feel, in the dark moments when we’re alone with our memories.
This is a lovely cover I found while looking for Christmas music featuring Uilleann pipes.
