Category: music

“You DO remember working with Bing Crosby?”

“I’m not sure if at that time BING was aware that we were working…I think that we were both working with each other, but COMPLETELY UNAWARE that we were…in our own different ways we had an altered….”

“You had a duet together.”

“After a fashion, yeah!”

–Regis Philbin and David Bowie

Here’s the source for this quote, a very funny interview from when David Bowie appeared on Regis and Kelly in 2002. Bowie was quite a young man when he filmed that duet with Crosby in September of 1977; Crosby was not just in his 70s but was actually little more than a month away from his own death from a heart attack. In the interview Bowie speculates that by this time, Mr. Crosby was looking back on his life and reminiscing, and Mr. Bowie doesn’t seem to have felt that Crosby was terribly interested in this young guy with whom he was doing a quick one-off duet.

So naturally, that odd duet that seems so odd as to verge on the surreal, with its touchingly awkward intro acted out by two guys clearly just a bit uncomfortable with the whole thing (not to call these two men out specifically, because let’s be honest, has there ever been one of these musical Christmas specials where the little acting-bits between the music wasn’t uncomfortable?), has somehow endured to the point of being a de facto classic of Christmas music. I know that I can’t feel like it’s the Christmas season without hearing this at least once, and I know that I stand in good company herein.

Here are Bing Crosby and David Bowie. “I pray my wish will come true….” Indeed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9kfdEyV3RQ

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This isn’t my favorite tune, but I do have a particular reason for posting it THIS day. Hmmmm!!!

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It’s Sunday, which means that hopefully you’ve got some time on your hands today. If you do, may I suggest you take an hour and a half to watch some wonderful ballet? Because it’s time for Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker.

The Nutcracker is one of those things that has become so beloved in our lifetimes that it’s perhaps surprising to learn that it was not always so. The ballet was not a success in Tchaikovsky’s time, getting bad reviews for the apparently “blah” quality of its dancing and a general lack of an interesting story. Tchaikovsky’s music for the ballet was more highly regarded, but for many years The Nutcracker was one of those theatrical works that is infrequently staged, and becomes better known for an overture, an extract, or in this case, a suite of numbers pulled from the larger score by the composer. The Nutcracker could very well have gone the way of, say, the operas of Franz von Suppe, which are almost entirely forgotten as stage works but which live on, however tenuously, through the beloved status of their overtures.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that The Nutcracker, via a staging by the New York City ballet, started to cement itself amongst the Christmas traditions in the United States. George Balanchine’s choreography was essential, and the dancing of the great ballerina Maria Tallchief, combined to elevate an obscure, rarely-staged ballet by Tchaikovsky to the juggernaut that today is so beloved that many ballet companies earn a significant portion of their annual revenues through their Christmas performances of The Nutcracker alone.

I am sorry to say that I’ve never to this day seen a performance of the ballet, though I dearly want to and I hope to do so if COVID-19 ever regresses enough to allow a rebirth of the stage world. Until then, I’ll have to content myself with my memories of my four annual performances of the Nutcracker Suite when I was in college. I never hear that work without thinking, at least a bit, of Dr. Janice Wade. Not a bad legacy for her, I think!

Here is The Nutcracker by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, in a performance that is really quite wonderful. I just love the dancing and the art direction here. What magic! (I assume this particular video derives from a televised event, hence the ad-like matter at the beginning. The ballet proper starts a minute or so in.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URpn0xn5Bds

And if you’re short on time, well, here’s the Nutcracker Suite. But please try to find time to listen to the whole work, even if you can’t watch it.

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You know the drill, folks: every year at some point I mention how I don’t like “Carol of the Bells”, and then I post a version of “Carol of the Bells” that I do like. So, is it really the case that I don’t like “Carol of the Bells”? I maintain it is, because I don’t like the original or the traditional ways of doing it, but there obviously are riffs on that song that I do like.

Anyway, here’s this year’s Acceptable Version of “Carol of the Bells”.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the Jackson 5.

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I discovered this by some random YouTube searching. It’s an entire album, coded as a single video, by a Canadian composer named Wendy Jensen. Jensen’s album is a compilation of traditional songs and original works, and it’s quite a lovely, soothing listen. Here is Celtic Christmas by Wendy Jensen!

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Ever see any of these “ambience” videos floating around YouTube? They are long videos, usually multiple hours long, that you can turn on and let play in the background if you want a specific sonic ambience. There are “rushing stream in an autumn wood” videos and “engine sounds of the starship Enterprise” and more. This one might be nice for your workplace: A coffeeshop at Christmas! It has piano jazz, a crackling fire, and occasionally the door opening to let patrons in or out. There really are times I love the Internet!

 

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Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) is a composer about whom I know very little. I can’t even name a work of his off the top of my head! But maybe I should change that, after listening to today’s piece, Four Motets for Christmastime.

Poulenc isn’t alone as a subject of my general musical unfamiliarity; he comes from an era of French music about which I honestly don’t know a whole lot. From what I’m reading in quick research for this post, Poulenc was a member of a group of French composers called Les Six, and he generally wrote melodic music that was independent and yet also tinged with twentieth-century modernism. He was not a modernist in the way Stravinsky and Schoenberg were, but his music is unmistakably twentieth-century music. Apparently in his later years Poulenc’s spiritual bent reasserted itself, and he wrote a great deal of religious music.

In composing sets of motets (these are not the only such motets he wrote), Poulenc looked backward to a very old musical form indeed. The motet–a polyphonic work for mixed voices–arose in medieval times, so this work is a blend of the very old and the very new. The Four Motets for Christmastime reflect the world of stone cathedrals filled with the sonorities of liturgical voices, but they also reflect twentieth-century French music that has seen the urbane Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel.

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A longer work today, and one that I’m unfamiliar with to this point: the Christmas Oratorio by Camille Saint-Saens. Saint-Saens was one of the most gifted musical prodigies in history, ranking almost with Mozart in terms of the ease with which music flowed from his pen. Unlike Mozart, Saint-Saens enjoyed success in his life and thus was able to live to old age, dying when he was 86 years old. In fact, Saint-Saens lived long enough to see music pass him by, to a certain extent; while considered a modernist of sorts in his youth, by the time he was an old man and seeing the music of Ravel and Debussy dominate, he was considered by then a reactionary throwback. There’s a lesson there, maybe.

Saint-Saens’s Oratorio de Noel dates from his youth, six of its ten movements written in 1858 when the composer was just 23. He composed that portion of the work in just ten days, and he would add several more movements over the next few years. Like much of Saint-Saens, the Oratorio do Noel is elegant, even urbane, never heavy despite the relatively large forces the score calls for (chorus, orchestra, organ). This is a lovely work!

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OK, yesterday I featured Queen doing “White Christmas”. Freddie Mercury is one of the four faces on my personal Mount Rushmore of popular music voices, so let’s see what I can find by the other three? Here’s Annie Lennox:

Next is Ann Wilson, of Heart:

Unfortunately I was unable to find any Christmas music by the last of my four Great Pop Voices, Sam Cooke. If anyone finds any, let me know! I did find a couple songs by a group that Sam Cooke was a member of, but it’s not clear that the recordings date from when he was a member of said group, so I did not feature them here.

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