ksedinger (Page 12)

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.) Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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 orDown the rabbit hole….

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.Down the rabbit hole….

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 forDown the rabbit hole….

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 lookingDown the rabbit hole….

I could write a lengthy intro essay for this one…or I could just write, “Here’s Mr. John Denver.” Choices, choices. Here’s Mr. John Denver. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

Somehow I made it to just the other day (as you’re reading this) without knowing that in 1983 David Bowie starred in a Japanese war film about the individuals living in a POW camp. The film’s English title is Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and the film’s score, by Ryuichi Sakamoto, is highly regarded, possibly moreso even than the film. (I only know this by reading the film’s Wikipedia entry.) The movie doesn’t appear to have any specifically Christmas subtext, except that one of the Japanese characters wishes Mr. Lawrence, one of the non-Japanese characters, a Merry Christmas several times throughout the film.Down the rabbit hole….

A lot of what I post in this series every year comes from just simple YouTube searches, which I then follow until I find something interesting. This is a case in point: I searched “Appalachian Christmas”, which yielded some good stuff! One thing I almost used was a recording of an actual cantata a composer wrote using old Appalachian melodies, but…I didn’t like the performance in the recording, which sounded oddly “commercial” in my ears. So here is this, performed on a selection of Appalachian instruments. The performer, Timothy Seaman, provides this information: I found this song, one of onlyDown the rabbit hole….