The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
East Aurora, NY at Christmastime is one of the loveliest places I know. We were just there the other day for lunch at one of our favorite restaurants and then some shopping at Vidler’s, a onetime five-and-dime store that is now a destination in itself. I took this photo, and then applied a Prisma filter. Doesn’t this look like the kind of place where a Hallmark Christmas movie would be filmed?
This post is really simple: selections of music and/or songs from movies that may be Christmas movies directly, or may be Christmas movies even though they don’t initially seem like Christmas movies but really are, or movies that really are not Christmas movies specifically but hey, yes they are, just because.
Did that make sense? No? Well, I’m not re-typing it. Here’s some music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzMaS79TDI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V3kc56a20A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G6dd7ikrXs
One week to the big day! Wow! It’s coming, folks!
This may be the last “new thing to me” that I post for this year; usually as Christmas gets very near, I start posting all of my old favorites, including some long-form stuff and entire albums. A friend posted this today on Facebook, wondering why it never got any actual traction; I honestly can’t say, since I’d never heard it before today (unless the album it’s from happened to be in my parents’ collection when I was a kid; I remember at least a few albums by this artist in those record stacks). It’s a piece by Henry Mancini, called “Carol for Another Christmas”.
I just looked the piece up, and it turns out it comes from a teevee movie from 1964 called A Carol for Another Christmas. It was a modernized version of A Christmas Carol, and apparently it wasn’t very well received, so it basically disappeared entirely, never airing again until a cable revival in 2012. Oddly, by this time the rights to Mancini’s music were in flux, so even then the film couldn’t be aired with its original music!
Anyway, this is a lovely theme, quite Christmasy. And if you want to hear the entire album, here’s a playlist you can cue up.
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!
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.
This was an early view out a small window as we flew in the early morning from Buffalo to Atlanta. Then we flew from Atlanta to Los Angeles. And then we flew from Los Angeles to Honolulu.
I don’t know if I’ll make that specific itinerary ever again, but I’m sure as hell someday making that my final destination again.
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.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer