As a lover of film music for just about all my life, here are some film music selections from Christmas movies!

First, from 1984’s A Christmas Carol, the one starring George C. Scott:

Next, a suite from the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol, the one starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge. Which I have never actually seen, even though the wide-spread consensus is that Sim’s Scrooge is definitive to the point of being iconic. I don’t know about that, but the music is certainly damned good, and it should be: it’s written by Richard Addinsell, that fine English composer who is best known for another piece of music he wrote for film, the amazing Rachmaninoff-pastiche Warsaw Concerto, written for the film Suicide Squadron.

Moving into more contemporary times, but staying in the London area, we have this compilation of the three major love themes from Love Actually. This movie has sustained something of a backlash in recent years, but I will hear none of that. NONE, you hear?

Much has also been said of the Robert Zemeckis adaptation of The Polar Express, which I do in fact enjoy a great deal, even if the animation of the eyes isn’t quite…up to par, I suppose. Alan Silvestri turned in a wonderfully evocative and sweeping score for this one. Silvestri is one of those composers who probably doesn’t rank at the fore, but a second rate hack, he ain’t.

Finally, here’s one that I haven’t had the best relationship with over the years. I think my “I love John Williams” bona fides are well-established by now, but in all honesty, I have never much liked his score to Home Alone. However, I’ve given some selections from it a fresh listen this year and I do find myself warming to it, a bit. I still think he explored moods like this more effectively in films like Hook and the Harry Potter films (the ones he scored, obviously). But I do find myself appreciating his Home Alone music more than I used to. I’m still not a fan of the movie itself, but the music is good. I’ve come to hear it as Williams in “Carl Stalling” mode: he’s basically scoring a cartoon, live-action though it may be, which is loaded with gonzo action.

Earlier in the month I featured a Christmas song by The Killers, a band I’ve been delving much more deeply into this year (more to come on that in my end-of-year summation post). So now I’m thinking, “What about some of my other favorite bands and acts?” So, a tour of Christmas sounds of other bands and artists that I like! (I am limiting this to living performers.)

Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors:

Shannon Dooks:

Dolly Parton:

Kelly Clarkson:

Heart:

Blackmore’s Night:

The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra:

Here’s another annual feature on this site, because it’s as perfect a rendition of a song as I can remember. No cover has ever come close–well, maybe Bing Crosby, but that’s about it. Certainly not the more famous Frank Sinatra version in which he foisted that awful “Hang a shining star on the highest bough” lyric on the world, because he wanted it to be more cheerful.

This is not a song about cheerfulness in general. It is a song about finding what cheer you can, what joy you can, however momentary, in the midst of whatever else is going on in your life. It’s about hoping that someday soon we all can be together, but also about muddling through as best we can until that day comes, if it ever does.

Strong opinions, I know, but I cannot abide “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough”. It’s a totally meaningless lyric, crafted for scansion and rhyme and that’s it. And I cannot abide the erasure of Judy Garland that happens every time any version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” other than her original, from Meet Me In St. Louis, plays on the radio.

I was pretty thoughtful and introspective and a little sad yesterday, so here is a selection of comedic Christmas bits I feature most years. These don’t get old!

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.

Leonard Bernstein, from The Joy of Music:

BACH!

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!