The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Just twelve days left to the big day, huh? Hard to believe! It still feels to me like Christmas is a month away…but it’s not.
Anyway, here’s an album: Carols from Clare, in which the Clare College Singers and Orchestra, conducted by the great John Rutter, perform a quite lovely program of traditional carols in interesting settings. You really can’t go wrong with choral performances with John Rutter at the helm.
After mentioning Ralph Vaughan Williams yesterday, let’s listen to a bit of Gustav Holst today. Holst was born a couple years after RVW, so the two were roughly contemporaneous, and the two of them form pillars in England’s great musical “rising” at the end of Romanticism and the beginning of Modernism. (Sir Edward Elgar predated them both.) Holst, unlike RVW, is known primarily for a single work, the juggernaut symphonic suite The Planets; but Holst, like RVW, wrote a great deal of fine music for orchestra, choir, and others. Holst’s two Suites for Military Band are a mainstay of wind ensemble literature…but for the average classical music listener, Holst pretty much begins and ends with The Planets.
That’s somewhat ironic, because Holst is also quoted as saying the following:
If nobody likes your work, you have to go on just for the sake of the work. And you’re in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself. Every artist ought to pray that he may not be “a success”. If he’s a failure he stands a good chance of concentrating upon the best work of which he’s capable.
It’s a pity that one work has overshadowed the rest of his output, because Holst’s music is far more rewarding than just the single work that everybody knows. Here are two examples of his settings: Christmas Day and In the Bleak Midwinter. Both feature wonderful choral writing, which you’d never know Holst could do if all you know by him is The Planets.
Time for some sacred music. I feature the first work here, by Ralph Vaughan Williams most years: his Fantasia on Christmas Carols is a well-known work that is heard often in classical music settings this time of year. It’s quite a wonderful work, brining chorus and orchestra together in a lovely way that honors the season. This is music that makes you think of high marble church halls.
Vaughan Williams would later write a cantata called Hodie, centered also on Christmas texts involving the nativity of Jesus. Hodie has never been one of RVW’s most popular works. He wrote it very late in his life, and it was his last major orchestral-choral work.
Hodie (which translates as ‘this day’ and is pronounced ‘HO-dee-ay’) was a product of Vaughan Williams’s old age, but it flows with a vitality, force and inventiveness. Written in 1953-4 and first performed at the Three Choirs Festival in Worchester Cathedral in 1954, it is one of the most serene compositions Vaughan Williams ever wrote, sounding at times otherworldly.
The composer had always wanted to write a large-scale Christmas work, and here he fused the religious spirit of the festival with British overtones, with associations to English countryside carols. Vaughan Williams used no specific folk tunes in this work, but by this point in his career he had so synthesized their character that his folk tune-like themes sound fully authentic.
The texts, taken in this case from the Bible, Milton and Thomas Hardy among other sources, are skilfully selected to reflect both the Christmas theme and the different aspects of the composer’s personal style. The work is linked together by narration of the Nativity from the Gospels by choristers accompanied by organ – a compositional device used by Bach in his Passions, for which Vaughan Williams had a deep love. (via)
As I write this, I am hearing Hodie for the first time. It’s striking me as vibrant at times, serene at others–and quite redolent of the RVW I’ve been listening to for years.
I just saw this on Facebook:
And I thought, “What a great prompt!”
And then I thought, “That’s such a good prompt that I’ll bet I’ve used it before.” And, sure enough!
Well, I can use a prompt again, can’t I? Why, yes, I can!
Here’s what I wrote two years ago, regarding Johnny Cash’s voice:
There was always something special about Johnny Cash’s voice that I could never put my finger on. It really shouldn’t work, that gravelly baritone that doesn’t always home in on the exact pitch the way a singer should. Sliding into a pitch instead of hitting it dead on is a standard device of country singing (Reba McIntyre and Garth Brooks are canonical examples of this technique), but what Cash does is…more than that. Sometimes he sounds like he’s perfectly content to waver in the vicinity of the actual pitch without actually getting there. If you heard a young music student singing like that, you’d question their ability. When you hear Johnny Cash doing it, you know that you’re listening to a master who is doing exactly as he wishes with his voice.
I stand by that.
(I’m hoping that embeds the entire playlist comprising the entire album.)
One of the most insanely busy weeks of work for me each year ends today, huzzah! Unfortunately that means that for our purposes here, all I have time for is a quick YouTube search and a couple of the resulting pieces of music. I know that I’ve featured Norwegian Christmas music in the past, and I may have checked out some Swedish Christmas music too. So: You’re up, Finland!
Here are some selections from the search results under “Finnish Christmas music”. (It’s cool stuff, actually!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG0sMzP6dbo
Hyvää joulua!!!
Nothing earth-shaking here musically–it’s just a collection of familiar Christmas tunes, arranged by Leroy Anderson (always a stalwart of light music)–but the ensemble might be unfamiliar. This is a British brass band, which is a grouping that arose in the United Kingdom before expanding around the world. It’s not a very commonly encountered ensemble, but there are places that take brass bands very seriously; in the UK there are regular brass band competitions that are really a going concern, as they say.
A proper British brass band might seem like just a brass quintet expanded to twenty or thirty players, but it’s more complex than that. There are no trumpets; the soprano voices are played by cornets and flugelhorns, and there are also no French horns! The inner voices are supplied by tenor horns, baritone horns, euphoniums, and tenor trombones. The basses come via several different kinds of tubas along with a bass trombone or two. The end result is a surprisingly complex kind of brass sound (with added percussion), without the stridency of a full trumpet section.
Here is the Whitburn Band playing A Christmas Festival. (This appears to be one of those performance videos made during COVID.)
I was much more of a classical musician in my youth than a jazz musician, so as trumpet players go, I was more aligned to the Maurice Andre and Bud Herseth types than jazz luminaries like Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis. One guy I liked, though, was Maynard Ferguson, who had an electric sound and who often played in the very high range of the instrument. If you want to really impress a young trumpet player, playing very high notes is the way to go. Every young player wants to play high notes!
I actually got to see Maynard Ferguson live when I was in high school. A friend of my parents, who was very interested in my musical upbringing and who knew some stuff about jazz himself, took me to hear Ferguson when he played in Bradford, PA. It was a thrilling concert, even though I really didn’t know much about jazz. The fellow who took me was a bit disappointed in the concert, because he wanted to hear Ferguson’s “big band” work, but by this time Ferguson was doing some experimenting with the kind of small-group “fusion” jazz that was popular at that time. Still, it was a great show and, as trumpet players will say of the greats, “Man, that guy can really blow.” (In trumpet world, “blows” is a compliment.)
Here’s Maynard Ferguson and his band, with a Christmas medley. If you’re wondering when Mr. Ferguson plays, well…you’ll know when he’s playing. He’s the guy who really blows.
SiriusXM has some interesting temporary Holiday-oriented music channels right now, if you’re a subscriber…and what’s nice about these channels (I like the “classical” one, the “classics” one with songs from the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and the “Favorites” one which covers all the typical mainstream stuff) is that they don’t simply rely on the same small-ish playlist that seems to dominate most mainstream Christmas music selections you hear these days, whether on the Muzak someplace or on stations like Buffalo’s 102.5, which switches to an all-Christmas format in November.
Case in point: here is “Winter Wonderland” by Ray Charles! I know I’ve heard this before–it’s used in When Harry Met Sally, for instance–but I never hear this via “normal” channels for holiday music.
