Category: On Music

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas

This post is a straight-up copy-and-paste repost from last year, because I’m already seeing the “DIE HARD Christmas movie” debate firing up on social media.

It’s that time of year again: the annual debate over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie!

My personal opinion is that this one’s easy: yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. But a friend on Facebook made an interesting argument against Die Hard‘s Christmas status the other day, and I want to tease it out a little more. Basically his view is that there is nothing intrinsically Christmas to Die Hard, at least not in the same way that Christmas is intrinsic to Miracle on 34th Street (his example). Basically, my friend argues that you can’t have Miracle on 34th Street take place any other time of year, where Die Hard actually can take any time of year.

Now, I’m honestly not sure about my friend’s argument. I mean, Miracle on 34th Street does seem to require Christmas, but I’m sure you could tell pretty much the same story at some other time of year, though it would definitely require quite a bit of heavy lifting in the writing department to make it work. And could Die Hard take place any other time? Sure. Obviously it could. Hans Gruber and friends could just take over the building on Easter Sunday, or July 4. As I noted to my friend, I’ve seen Die Hard set at another time of year. It’s called Die Hard With a Vengeance.

My problem with my friend’s argument is that it’s deeply limiting as to what constitutes a “Christmas movie”. Does a Christmas movie have to involve Christmas to such a degree that it literally can’t take place any other time? I don’t think so. Die Hard isn’t just set at Christmastime; it intrinsically involves a lot of emotions that come to the fore at that time. Family concerns. Redemption. Getting home for the holidays, safe and sound. Are those ideas unique to Christmas? No, but they are most certainly central to Christmas. So, could Die Hard take place at some other time? Sure. But the Christmastime setting gives it a subtext that engages the emotions, doesn’t it? Die Hard has a lot going for it as a movie: it’s extremely well-made, a virtual masterpiece in its genre, but a lot of action movies are well-made. It’s the emotions that keep it so re-watchable now, 35 years or so after it came out; the Christmas setting is part of how Die Hard gets us to care about its characters.

So I would argue that yes, Die Hard is most definitely a Christmas movie. I also argue that the first Lethal Weapon movie, also set at Christmas, is a Christmas movie, for similar reasons, even though LW doesn’t push the Christmas subtext quite as hard as Die Hard. Still, LW makes Martin Riggs’s redemption and his finding meaning after his wife’s death one of the major emotional subplots, and that is very much informed by Christmas.

Now, how about Die Hard 2? It also takes place at Christmas! It’s also about getting home, and all the other stuff, isn’t it? Well, that one I think has less of a claim as a Christmas movie than the original, but for me that’s more because in that respect it doesn’t do much new with the Christmas theme from the first film. And that’s interesting to me, given how inventive and fresh Die Hard 2 actually is. That movie does not get enough credit for not repeating the first movie.

There’s another way for a movie to be a Christmas movie, but it’s a more nebulous one: it’s our own associations. Ultimately it’s up to us to decide what’s a Christmas movie, isn’t it? The Sound of Music has become a Christmas tradition, even though its story has nothing to do with Christmas at all. (On a more limited note, “My Favorite Things” has become a staple of Christmas songs, and there’s nothing about it at all that’s intrinsic to Christmas.) For me, My Fair Lady is a Christmas movie, because I watched it the first time right around Christmas and that’s just the association I have with it. And my beloved On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which takes place at Christmas, is absolutely a Christmas movie. And I’ll bet there are a lot of families who always watch some completely non-Christmas movie every year at Christmas, because of one tradition or another, so for them, that movie is a Christmas movie.

There are many ways to be a Christmas movie, and I think that’s a good thing. So: in conclusion Your Honor, I insist that Die Hard most certainly is a Christmas movie, and that therefore the score to Die Hard, composed by the wonderful and dearly-missed Michael Kamen, is by extension Christmas music. That being the case, I close with this suite.

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas

“What? The Nutcracker already? You usually don’t share The Nutcracker until much later in the month!”

Well, yes. But there’s a difference this time, and I can’t believe I never knew about this until just this year. Apparently Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn took Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and re-arranged it for jazz band. So that’s what we’re hearing today. And don’t fear, we’ll get back to The Nutcracker proper later on in the month. But this is fantastic!

(By the way: You’ll notice that this is a “score” video, so you can track the music along as you go. Music for jazz band is as tightly scored as is music for any other ensemble, but it’s still jazz and there needs to be room for improvisation. At the 5:00 mark, when we’re in the second movement, the “Dance of the Reed Pipes”, you’ll hear the clarinet going into an improvised solo. Note that the clarinet part at that point in the score isn’t written out; the measures are marked with a symbol indicating an improv is to happen there, with the piece’s chords noted so the clarinetist can improv in the right key as the piece goes on. I remember my high degree of confusion the first time I saw that in a trumpet part back in jazz band. I asked the person next to me, who was more experienced, what I was supposed to do there. She looked at me and basically said, “You don’t do shit there! She does.” And she pointed to the lead player, who got all the solos. That bugged me for years: Why did she get all the solos? It wouldn’t be until college that I realized that I simply wasn’t a terribly good jazz player. Best to let someone else do the solo work.) 

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Longtime readers will know that I fill this blog with music each December, starting on the 1st and going all the way to Christmas Day. This year will be no different. In dark times I tend to find myself leaning in music harder and harder. Music can be the candle lighting the way, a flame that reminds us what humans can do when we’re not being awful by choice.

So, as the kids say, “Let’s f***ing go!”

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Tone Poem Tuesday

I featured this piece years ago, reflecting on the fact that I performed it in the concert band at a music camp that I attended as a teenager. But in that post I didn’t write much about the piece itself. It’s called Chorale and Shaker Dance, and it was written by John Zdechlik. Zdechlik was a composer and bandmaster who wrote prolifically, and this particular piece has become a staple work in the literature for concert band and wind ensemble. It blends two main ideas–an original Chorale theme by Zdechlik himself, and the familiar tune “Simple Gifts”, comprising the “Shaker Dance”. The two melodies come and go, neither ever seeming to really settle in, as the mood seems to shift from light to dark, from open to mysterious, and back again, before everything comes to a triumphant conclusion.

Chorale and Shaker Dance was one of the first contemporary works for band I ever played. My high school band director, Mr. Roosa, was much more interested in marches and classical transcriptions than in original compositions, to the point that I do not think we ever performed a single contemporary work under his direction. Chorale and Shaker Dance was one of several pieces that first year at Bristol Hills Music Camp that really pushed open a new musical world for me. It’s always been a special piece to me for that reason.

Here is Chorale and Shaker Dance by John Zdechlik.

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Something for Thursday

I had no idea what to say last week, and I find I still have no idea what to say this week. Yes, I have thoughts on the decision this country made. No, I do not know when–or even if–I will write them up in this space. I’m not sure any of it matters.

In such times I retreat to the greats who produced great human art in times that were objectively worse. In his 41st and last symphony, Mozart produced an astonishingly optimistic and universal view which amazes all the more when I consider that he was already well into the health issues that would shortly kill him at the age of 35.

In times like this I have to remind myself that the world persists, that beauty and wonder are still things, and that humanity is still capable of things better than the statement about itself that this country made last week. Yes, I’ll be posting again soon, if not starting tomorrow…but more likely after the coming weekend. Meanwhile, here is Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, sometimes called the “Jupiter”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XG4H5dikeo

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Tone Poem Tuesday

This week’s selection is stretching the definition of “tone poem” probably past the breaking point, as this piece is not orchestral at all; it was originally written for harpsichord but we’re going to hear it on piano. It’s by Jean-Philippe Rameau, a French Baroque composer and musical writer who lived contemporaneously with J.S. Bach. And with that, you now know as much about Rameau as I do.

I heard this piece on the Open Ears Project podcast (which I highly recommend!). The Open Ears Project is kind of like my “Something for Thursday” series, only it’s a different notable person each week describing a particularly meaningful musical work. In this particular episode, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson discusses his experiences with Rameau in general and with this piece in particular. I really do recommend listening to the podcast for his thoughts. For this post, right here, suffice it to say that the piece is very fast, and very quick; it’s over in about two minutes and it really does seem to capture the energy, if not the exact sound, of a bunch of birds squabbling. There’s even a moment when the music stops, completely stops, for a second, as if the birds have just happened to all stop squawking and chirping at the exact same moment.

This is a tone poem, even if it comes nowhere near an orchestra. Here is Le Rappel des Oiseaux by Jean-Philippe Rameau.

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Something for Thursday

The other day I featured an instrumental medley of tunes from the Lerner-and-Loewe Broadway show Camelot, and since then I’ve had the music of Camelot on my brain, so I’ve been listening to the songs quite a bit–both from the movie soundtrack and from the Original Broadway Cast recording. As I noted, the songs are much better than the book (in Broadway lingo, “book” is basically the “screenplay”: all the spoken-word stuff that takes place around the songs and creates the dramatic settings for the songs). Some of these songs lodged in my brain as soon as I heard them way back when I first watched the film of Camelot, but a few others had to wait to work their magic. This is one of those.

If you’re familiar with the Arthurian legend, basically King Arthur forms a glorious realm centered on his castle of Camelot, from where he and his Knights of the Round Table keep the peace. But a truly great knight named Lancelot comes along, and Lancelot and Arthur become best friends immediately, forming what we might now call a “bromance”. All should be well, only…Lancelot falls in love with Arthur’s wife, Queen Guinevere, and she with him. They try to keep from acting on it, but that turns to secret attraction which in turn becomes secret trysts and eventually they can’t hold back anymore, and the exposure of their affair becomes the event that drives a wedge into Camelot and destroys Arthur’s realm forever. (Depending on which version you read, there might be a Quest for the Holy Grail in there, and some stuff about Arthur having children slain, Herod-like, to avoid a prophecy, and evil sorceresses and…it can get complicated.)

In the show, there finally comes a deeply sad song as Guinevere sings to Lancelot about the love that should never have been allowed to flower. It is called “I Loved You Once In Silence”, and it is honestly a heartbreaker of a song. Secret and forbidden love can be ruinous…but that doesn’t mean that revealing the secret and forbidden love can be any the less ruinous, as this song demonstrates.

I’ve posted both the Original Broadway Cast album version of the song and the film version here. It may seem an unfair comparison at first: Broadway had Julie Andrews, after all, and it’s perhaps axiomatic that nobody can sing something better than Julie Andrews. Vanessa Redgrave is cast as Guinevere in the film, and she makes a game effort but nobody is going to confuse her with Julie Andrews, whose voice in her singing days was golden perfection.

But I’m not going to sell Redgrave’s work short. No, she’s not anywhere near the singer Andrews is…but I think she does capture more of Guinevere’s anguish and pain in this song. She genuinely sounds like someone trapped in a horrible emotional situation that offered nothing but suffering at each turn. Andrew’s performance, while gorgeous, sounds to me like a performance. (Now, that’s not to say she performed it like this on stage. Original Cast albums are hardly good vehicles by which to approximate the affect of an actual production.) I conclude that these are both excellent versions of a heartbreaking song, but in very different ways. 

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