Just a very short selection today (we were out and about, even with the snow! Yay!), but it’s cool not just because this rendition of “Jingle Bells” is a classic, but so is the equipment used to play it. Check this out!
Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Sorry to be so late with today’s selection, but it was a very busy day at work. Here is the Carol Symphony by Victor Hely-Hutchinson.
We’re heading into the time of this yearly feature when I start playing more and more of the favorites I use every year…and for this I do not apologize, because Christmas is partly about old favorites!
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Here’s something interesting: a short (20 minutes) documentary I found about the kid-sized monorails that were used in some large department stores, usually in the toy sections, in the mid-to-late 20th century. These monorails–suspended from an overhead rail, as opposed to riding atop the rail–would take kids on a circular trip around an entire department store floor (or, in a couple cases, a part of a shopping mall).
I actually rode the one in Portland, OR’s Meier&Frank store downtown, probably sometime in Christmas 1979 or 1980, the last two Christmases we lived there. It was a fun ride, though short; as I recall, that floor of the store was divided into the toy section proper and then, on the other side of a partition, was something called “Santaland” or something like that, a walk-through Christmas display thing that culminated in Santa himself. The train would pass through an opening into the wonderfully-decorated Santaland area, which was kept dark and lit with Christmas lights and many trees and animatronic figures.
I am honestly not the least bit certain how much of this my brain is making up from the distance of 40-whatever years, but that thing was fun, and it’s a shame they’re all gone now.
Cool stuff! I want an adult version of that.
And because I don’t want this post to not be musical at all, here’s something that fits: the March of the Toys by Victor Herbert.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!!!
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.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
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.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
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.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
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.)
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
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!!!
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
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.)