It’s amazing how much more bittersweet each Christmas gets as we get older, isn’t it? Like this: as part of this feature, for a number of years I’ve devoted a day to finding new versions of my mother’s favorite Christmas carol, “Bring a Torch Jeanette Isabella”. I continue doing this, even though she’ll never hear them.

But…maybe there’s some magic in the universe and she can hear them. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

I love the vocal group Voces8. Here they are with two selections, one serious and one less-so.

When He is King we will give him the King’s gifts,
Myrrh for its sweetness, and gold for a crown,
“Beautiful robes”, said the young girl to Joseph
Fair with her first-born on Bethlehem Down.

Bethlehem Down is full of the starlight
Winds for the spices, and stars for the gold,
Mary for sleep, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.

When He is King they will clothe Him in grave-sheets,
Myrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown,
He that lies now in the white arms of Mary
Sleeping so lightly on Bethlehem Down.

Here He has peace and a short while for dreaming,
Close-huddled oxen to keep Him from cold,
Mary for love, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.

(I reserve the right to return to Voces8 later in the month, if I deem it necessary.)

In 2020, during the fiery days of Black Lives Matter protests all over the country, I devoted a lot of time to listening to music by Black composers, under the expectation that I’d find a lot of fantastic music that nobody much knew anything about. This expectation was more than met, and I find myself needing to get back to those composers and more.

One composer I “discovered” was Florence Price, whose music has enjoyed something of a Renaissance over the last few years, which much study, preservation of scores, and ultimately performance and recording of her works. She was a deeply gifted composer who, like many composers, produced music that was hardly deserving of being hidden under the proverbial bushel…but in her case there is an added racial element and also an added gender element. I continue to wonder how many more Mozarts, Beethovens, and, well, Florence Prices humanity would celebrate if we hadn’t insisted on devoting so much of our time to idiotic prejudices.

But anyway, here’s a lovely little work–it’s all of two minutes long!–for chorus and piano, called “Song for Snow”. The text is by poet Elizabeth Coatsworth:

The earth is lighter than the sky,
The world is wider than in spring,
Along white roads the sleighs go by,
Icily sweet the sleigh-bells ring.
The birds are gone into the south,
The leaves are fallen to the ground;
But singing shakes each sleigh-bell’s mouth,
And leaf-like ears turn towards the sound.

I suppose it’s more of a winter piece than a specifically Christmas one, but that’s fine.

Scottish singer-songwriter Dougie Maclean is one of my musical heroes. He is a huge name in Celtic and Folk music, and I adore his work. His song “Caledonia” is one of the greatest songs about homesickness ever written. So of course he’s written his own Christmas song, and here it is.

“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.) 

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!”