We’re about a week out from Christmas. For those who have been around my site for a while, this is when I generally start revisiting old favorites, maybe with new versions or videos, or maybe not. This song is required for me this time of year. I know that some people find it cheesy or corny, and some others don’t think it’s particularly a Christmas song other than the fact that its events are said to happen on Christmas Eve, but for me this song is absolutely a part of Christmas–or rather, the emotions it captures are deeply wound up with the season.
I don’t know if it’s Christmas or the fact that the year is ending, but the season always seems to include moments of looking back and wondering about the roads we didn’t take, the dreams that we deferred and ultimately lost. Maybe it’s the old lover who got away, the one about whom you often find yourself wondering even though your life since then has gone pretty well, even if the “touring is hell”. Or maybe it’s something else entirely: realizing as you accumulate years past 50 that you’re not the writer you once hoped you’d be, or thinking about how you once thought there would be more than one kid with you at Christmas. Maybe it’s wishing for one more Christmas with one of both of your parents. That is what this song is about: the maybes that pile up through our lives, and the fact that once in a while life conspires to give us the smallest glimpse of what the maybe might have been, had we said this or done that at a particular moment, way back when.
But that’s all we ever get, isn’t it: just a glimpse, and it’s not even that, really. And somehow, when we turn to go back home, the snow has always turned to rain.
Every year, at some point while gathering pieces for this feature, I go to Google and type in “[nationality] Christmas music”, which usually turn up something interesting. This year I searched “Russian Christmas Music”, and I found a piece actually titled Russian Christmas Music. It’s a work for wind band (or wind ensemble, or concert band, whatever) by Alfred Reed.
The piece is apparently crafted to reflect the sound of liturgical choral music of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and thus is highly lyrical with a singing quality throughout. Four distinct sections are heard: “Carol of the Little Russian Children”, “Antiphonal Chant”, “Village Song”, and “Cathedral Chorus”. From what I can tell, the piece is very popular and is performed often by advanced concert bands and wind ensembles. To my knowledge, I had never heard it before this. And what a find it is!
Had I realized that Dick Van Dyke was going to turn 99 the other day, I would have timed this better. Alas! I truly hope I can revisit this properly next year when we’ll be celebrating his centenary. The man is truly a treasure.
Here are two clips: one from The Dick Van Dyke Show from years ago (I have no idea what the context here is, other than it’s a Christmas episode because Santa is there–or rather, a guy playing Santa is there–but you can watch the entire episode here!) and a more recent number pairing Mr. Van Dyke with Jane Lynch, who I never expected to turn out to be this awesome when I first saw her doing good work in a supporting role in 1993’s The Fugitive.
A colossal syllable, one which makes composers tremble, brings performers to their knees, beatifies, the Bach-lover, and apparently bores the daylights out of everyone else. How can this be? How can vibrant, thrilling music like that bore anyone? Still, it’s true; many of you find Bach dull. No–don’t deny it; there’s nothing to be ashamed of, because the boredom comes only from the fact that it’s not very easy music to know, and you must know it to love it. (…) And knowing Bach doesn’t mean knowing that he died in Leipzig in 1750 and that he had two wives and twenty-one children. It means knowing the music…and that’s also the challenge, because once you do get to know Bach well enough to love him, you will love him more than any other composer. I know this because I went through the same process myself.
I have to confess that I have never actually done the work to really get to know Bach and his music, and that’s my loss, not Bach’s. But it’s not that I dislike Bach; to dislike Bach is simply a bizarre kind of thought that I can’t believe anyone actually entertaining. It’s that he exists beyond my general understanding of music and how I respond to it. What Bernstein says above, in that excerpt from the teleplay to one of his Omnibus television programs back in the day, is really true: Bach’s music is sufficiently beyond what modern ears are accustomed to, in terms of sonics and the way emotional content in the music is presented, that his music for many requires real, sustained effort.
Today’s work, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, is a giant work of liturgical music. And it is truly giant: a performance lasts over two and one half hours, longer than any Mahler or Bruckner symphony, and approaching operatic length. To my ears the sound is definitely that of a church setting, which may be unfair as Bach did not only write sacred music in his lifetime. In fact, to that end he actually incorporated bits of earlier compositions of his into the Christmas Oratorio, including several previously secular works. I spent time yesterday listening to the Christmas Oratorio in its entirety, and I found myself–as I do whenever I listen to one of Bach’s longer works–drawn into a sound world that I admit I do not fully understand. But it’s such a fascinating sound world indeed, one that puts me in mind of other great sacred works like Handel’s Messiah (which I refuse to associate with Christmas–for me, that work is all about Easter). The liturgical exaltation of the Almighty pervades the entire work, and I found myself wondering, as I always do when listening to Bach’s sacred music, what it must have been like to attend services in those churches of his day and hear, as part of the worship liturgy, music written by one of the greatest geniuses in the history of human art.
Here is David Dubal, from The Essential Canon of Classical Music:
As the vast quantity of [Bach’s] work was finally published [Bach’s music was mostly forgotten for decades after his death, until Felix Mendelssohn and others began shining new light on him in the early to mid-1800s], it became apparent that this humble craftsman lived in the climate of the sublime–not at rare moments or in a few masterowrks but throughout a lifetime of boundless creation. No other composer celebrates human potential the way Bach does–potential that is, for him, ruled by the eternal presence of God.
The performance featured below is a compromise, because the live performance I wanted to feature is not embeddable. Stop doing that, music folk of YouTube! Sheesh!
like the blue-and-white striped overalls paired with it
(Apologies to William Carlos Williams)
There used to be a store in the malls, back in the 1990s, called Britches Great Outdoors. I didn’t shop there often, which I kind of regret because the two things I own from that store, I like a great deal. One is a pair of overalls that is among my favorite pairs of overalls ever, and I periodically look on eBay to see if any are hitting the market (no dice so far, ever). The other is this red cableknit sweater.
Sweaters are always amazing and wonderful, and everyone should own a few, as far as I’m concerned. Sweaters are kind of a “workhorse” article of clothing, in that they serve multiple functions, being both warm and usually looking good. But an old cableknit sweater is a special pleasure. In truth it may not be so warm as it used to be, as the sweater ages and the knit starts to loosen ever-so-slightly, so more air gets through it than before. And maybe there are starting to be a few fraying spots, only really noticeable if you’re the one who has worn the sweater a lot and you know how it used to be. Maybe around the bottom it’s given way a bit and maybe the collar and the cuffs aren’t as tight and neat as they used to be. But that’s OK.
And maybe the sweater itself fits a little bit strangely on you now. Mine certainly does: let’s just say that I filled it out quite a bit more tightly back when I bought in the 1990s. I suppose, by definition, the sweater is “vintage”, and it feels it: there is certainly a lot more room in it, and when I wear it under a pair of overalls, it balloons out from beneath the denim more than it did years ago.
Come to think of it: there’s something to be said for your soft and aged cableknit sweater being a bit too large, too. After all, one of the under-remarked qualities of overalls is that they can give new life, through covering and restraint, to tops that might otherwise not work as well on their own anymore.
If you don’t have a slightly oversized and old cableknit sweater, get one. And if you have a cableknit sweater that you’ve been considering getting rid of because it’s not what it used to be, maybe wait out that instinct a bit. It might just age itself into a new life…especially if you’re inclined to wearing overalls.
(I wanted to take a photo for this post of me holding a poetry book open to William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”, with the sweater and the bib of my overalls showing beyond, but it turns out that I only own one poetry book with that particular poem in it, and that book splits the poem between two pages. Alas! Betrayed by kerning!)
A longer work today, by one of my favorite composers ever. In fact, I used to consider him my singular favorite composer of all time, and my esteem for his music has not lessened one bit. If I no longer claim him as my definite favorite, it’s because Sergei Rachmaninoff has managed to carve out an equal claim to my heart. That’s how it goes, really, and one need not love anything less in order to love something else more. It doesn’t work that way.
Anyhow, we’re talking about Hector Berlioz.
This work probably isn’t exactly a Christmas work, as it is specifically set after the Birth of Christ. Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ centers on the childhood of Christ, following the events of Joseph and Mary’s flight into Egypt after Herod’s intent to find the Christ child and kill him became known. It’s an important story, though, and Berlioz’s treatment of it is fascinating, both on its own merits and also in the context of Berlioz’s own output.
The work is gorgeous and dramatic, in the best French Romantic way, without sacrificing its overall tone of sacredness. Berlioz was not a religious man in any way, despite his Catholic upbringing. But he did not allow his personal spiritual beliefs to dissuade him in any way from composing sacred music, because some of his earliest and most formative musical memories were the sacred music of the church of his childhood. Late in his life, then, he produced this oratorio (which, in typical Berlioz fashion, he called something else: a “sacred trilogy”, since Berlioz was always one to write what he wanted, traditional formal “requirements” and “rules” be damned). Also in typical Berlioz fashion, he wrote the work for a pretty large company: full orchestra, chorus, organ, and seven vocal soloists.
But something interesting happens here: for all those forces Berlioz puts on the stage, L’enfance du Christ is surprisingly tender, lyrical, and intimate. Anyone coming to this work expecting the kinds of pyrotechnics Berlioz could sometimes bring to bear will be nonplused by this work. Berlioz is always seen as a Romantic given to high degrees of excess, but in all of his work he strived for proportion and rarely pursued the fireworks for their own sake; people coming to his Requiem because they dig the idea of the brass bands placed at the ordinal compass points in the church will be surprised to learn that that moment comes fairly early in the piece, doesn’t last very long, and is never repeated.
Most histories of Romantic-era music will play up the contrast between the Brahmsian and the Wagnerian approaches (while allowing the Italian operatic approach to develop on its own from Bellini to Verdi to Puccini), with the Russians off to one side pursuing their own stylistic assumptions. All of this left Berlioz to follow his own instincts, creating no “school” of his own. Berlioz’s music stands alone in the 19th century pantheon, very unlike just about everything else that was going on at the time, and he left no direct disciples to carry on his approaches. But somehow this made him even more influential in the end, even if his music had to wait until the mid-20th century to start reaching its full and rightful appreciation.
Here is L’enfance du Christ by Hector Berlioz. The performance below is the classic London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Colin Davis recording (Davis was one of the biggest drivers of the Berlioz resurgence in the latter half of the 1900s). I was going to feature this superb live performance from 2018 (Orchestre Nationale de France/James Conlon), but the video is not embeddable, so go visit it!
I’ll have more to say about the Las Vegas band The Killers in a few weeks when I write my annual Yearly Summation post. For now, I’ll just note that while I’ve enjoyed The Killers for years, this was a year in which I did a lot more active listening to them. And yet, for all that, I had no idea they recorded a Christmas single (in 2006) until I spotted it in a “Rock and Roll Christmas” playlist on YouTube Music (my streaming service of choice).
The song, “A Great Big Sled”, is basically a paean to the idea that we, as adults, wish for nothing so much as a return to the simpler, more magical view of Christmas that we had as kids. The chorus is particularly evocative:
I wanna roll around like a kid in the snow I wanna relearn what I already know Just let me take flight dressed in red through the night on a great big sled
I love that: “I wanna relearn what I already know.” What did he already know? I’m thinking he already knew about the magic and wonder in the world that we all seem to lose once we end up “working our fingers to the bone”, as he says elsewhere in the song. That’s a very real feeling, isn’t it? We all know people for whom Christmas is anything but a time of wonder, but a thing to dread and grit our teeth as we just try to get through it. I’m not there yet–and I pray I never do get there–but I can’t help noticing that the bittersweet and sad parts of Christmas never get any smaller, do they? But there is the part of me that wants to roll around like a kid in the snow, and I most definitely always want to relearn what I already know.
I’m glad I found this song. It’s gonna be a keeper. Here are The Killers (joined by Toni Halliday).
Today, several musical takes on sleigh rides! First, Mozart:
Next, here’s Leroy Anderson’s classic, played by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra:
Finally, here’s the Leroy Anderson again…but this time with the Three Tenors. Remember when that was a thing? You couldn’t get through a PBS pledge drive without those guys.
Yeah, I don’t know about that last one either, but they gave it a shot, didn’t they?
NOTE: If you’re wondering why this is running so late in the day, it’s because I forgot to change the ‘PM’ to ‘AM’ when I scheduled the post, and I’m now leaving it that way because…well, no reason, since changing the time and publishing would take less time and effort than typing all of this out…but maybe it’s just so I can ramble a bit longer in a post for which I don’t have much to say other than presenting the artists. So…here are the artists.
Growing up, there were musical artists who always turned up on teevee commercials hawking an album of their greatest hits for just $19.95! Call the 1-800 number, and allow 6 weeks for delivery. One of these artists was a guy named Zamfir, who played a strange instrument that looked like a series of single-pitch flutes flipped on end. Well, this instrument is a real one, called the Pan flute, and it turns out that Zamfir himself is a respected master of this particular instrument. Who knew! Certainly not me at the time. There was a sense back then that a recording artist who showed up on those commercials wasn’t to be taken seriously, but honestly, that’s not the case at all. I wonder sometimes how that marketing strategy came to be, though.
This selection doesn’t feature Zamfir himself (he did record Christmas music, but…honestly I didn’t like it all that much), but I do like the Pan flute, which has a slightly other-worldly sound to it, so here’s someone else: Fabian Salazar, a Native American musician. It is a lovely instrument, if somewhat limited.
