Tag: Daily Dose of Christmas

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.

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Just a very short selection today (we were out and about, even with the snow! Yay!), but it’s cool not just because this rendition of “Jingle Bells” is a classic, but so is the equipment used to play it. Check this out!

 

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Time for some Christmas comedy!

This one is not safe for work.

Probably neither is this one.

 

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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!

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

 

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Time for some sacred music. I feature the first work here, by Ralph Vaughan Williams most years: his Fantasia on Christmas Carols is a well-known work that is heard often in classical music settings this time of year. It’s quite a wonderful work, brining chorus and orchestra together in a lovely way that honors the season. This is music that makes you think of high marble church halls.

Vaughan Williams would later write a cantata called Hodie, centered also on Christmas texts involving the nativity of Jesus. Hodie has never been one of RVW’s most popular works. He wrote it very late in his life, and it was his last major orchestral-choral work.

Hodie (which translates as ‘this day’ and is pronounced ‘HO-dee-ay’) was a product of Vaughan Williams’s old age, but it flows with a vitality, force and inventiveness. Written in 1953-4 and first performed at the Three Choirs Festival in Worchester Cathedral in 1954, it is one of the most serene compositions Vaughan Williams ever wrote, sounding at times otherworldly.

The composer had always wanted to write a large-scale Christmas work, and here he fused the religious spirit of the festival with British overtones, with associations to English countryside carols. Vaughan Williams used no specific folk tunes in this work, but by this point in his career he had so synthesized their character that his folk tune-like themes sound fully authentic.

The texts, taken in this case from the Bible, Milton and Thomas Hardy among other sources, are skilfully selected to reflect both the Christmas theme and the different aspects of the composer’s personal style. The work is linked together by narration of the Nativity from the Gospels by choristers accompanied by organ – a compositional device used by Bach in his Passions, for which Vaughan Williams had a deep love. (via)

As I write this, I am hearing Hodie for the first time. It’s striking me as vibrant at times, serene at others–and quite redolent of the RVW I’ve been listening to for years.

 

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I just saw this on Facebook:

And I thought, “What a great prompt!”

And then I thought, “That’s such a good prompt that I’ll bet I’ve used it before.” And, sure enough!

Well, I can use a prompt again, can’t I? Why, yes, I can!

Here’s what I wrote two years ago, regarding Johnny Cash’s voice:

There was always something special about Johnny Cash’s voice that I could never put my finger on. It really shouldn’t work, that gravelly baritone that doesn’t always home in on the exact pitch the way a singer should. Sliding into a pitch instead of hitting it dead on is a standard device of country singing (Reba McIntyre and Garth Brooks are canonical examples of this technique), but what Cash does is…more than that. Sometimes he sounds like he’s perfectly content to waver in the vicinity of the actual pitch without actually getting there. If you heard a young music student singing like that, you’d question their ability. When you hear Johnny Cash doing it, you know that you’re listening to a master who is doing exactly as he wishes with his voice.

I stand by that.

(I’m hoping that embeds the entire playlist comprising the entire album.)

 

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One of the most insanely busy weeks of work for me each year ends today, huzzah! Unfortunately that means that for our purposes here, all I have time for is a quick YouTube search and a couple of the resulting pieces of music. I know that I’ve featured Norwegian Christmas music in the past, and I may have checked out some Swedish Christmas music too. So: You’re up, Finland!

Here are some selections from the search results under “Finnish Christmas music”. (It’s cool stuff, actually!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG0sMzP6dbo

Hyvää joulua!!!

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