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.

A repost, because I have nothing new to add about this wonderful piece!

Today, a suite from an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov! The opera is called Christmas Eve, and its plot involves a scheme by the Devil to steal the moon. Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas have suffered an unusual curse: they are well-loved and highly regarded by those who know them, but because they’re in Russian, a language that most singers don’t learn (and because singing operas in translation is out of fashion), they remain shrouded in obscurity, only known if at all through orchestral suites and excerpts like this.

David Dubal writes, in The Essential Canon of Classical Music:

Some of the best of Rimsky-Korsakov is contained in his fifteen operas, with their supernatural, pan-Slavic, mythological, and pantheistic symbolism. Unfortunately these operas remain unfamiliar to the vast majority of music lovers. They form an encyclopedic source of a lost, legendary, wild, and exotic Russia. According to the writer V.V. Yastrebsev, Rimsky-Korsakov confided, “You would scarcely find anyone in the world who believes less in everything supernatural, fantastic, or lying beyond the boundaries of death than I do. Yet as an artist, I love this sort of thing above all else. And religious ceremony? What could be more intolerable? But with what love have I expressed such ceremonial customs in music! No, I am actually of the opinion that art is essentially the most enchanting, intoxicating lie.”

It does surprise me that Rimsky-Korsakov, with his often beguiling melodies, magnficient orchestrations (few composers have ever wielded the full palate of the modern orchestra like Rimsky-Korsakov), and enchanting subject matter in many of his compositions nevertheless does not command a stronger position in the classical canon. I always enjoy listening to him, whether it’s something less familiar to me or a return to Scheherazade, one of my favorite classical works of all time.

So here’s a bit of Russian Christmas lore, depicted in the music of one of Russia’s great masters.

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.)