It’s the Winter Solstice today—the longest night and
shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. After tonight, night
retreats day by day until balance is achieved at the equinox, and then the tide
turns again at the Summer Solstice.
Probably since the origins of humanity, people have
celebrated this annual event, giving thanks for the return of the sun,
gathering around bonfires, singing, banging on things, eating and drinking.
Before the domestication of fire to candles, followed by gas lights and then by
electricity, knowing that the hours of darkness would not in fact continue to
grow was comforting in a world full of perils.
The festival we know as Christmas was overlaid on older
traditions; the birth of the Son of God has perhaps more dramatic impact if
it’s celebrated around the Solstice rather than sometime in Spring, which makes
more meteorological and astronomical sense. The early Church accomplished two
goals with the coopting: subsumed pagan sun worship into Christian rites and
gave themselves license to feast away the longest nights of the year. It’s not
a bad deal, really.
The English poet Christina Rossetti wrote “In the Bleak
Midwinter” in 1872, although it wasn’t published until 1904. A couple of years
later it was set to music by Gustav Holst and became the carol we now know. It’s
an apt piece for marking the Solstice. The imagery of the first stanza just
makes you shiver—earth hard as iron; moaning, frosty wind; water like stone;
snow piled deep on itself. It’s a frozen world, an absolutely perfect
description of the Winter Solstice.
I thought about that last week when we had overnight
temperatures in the 20s (Fahrenheit). On my morning walk I came across some of
that stony water. It was beautiful, actually.
As Rossetti goes on to describe the mother and child, the
stable beasts and the angels, you can just about see their breaths billowing
misty into the night air. But then she walks us back, just like the sun does,
starting tomorrow.
It seems appropriate for today, and here’s one of my
favorite a capella groups, Chanticleer, singing it.
I feel rather like I need a big anthem for today’s Advent
piece. As you know, I’m a big fan of Catherine Winkworth, the extraordinarily
accomplished 19th Century English feminist who gave the
Anglophone world some of the best translations of German Lutheran hymns. Earlier
this month I gave you her Isaiah-based “Comfort,
Comfort Ye My People”, which is among my all-time favorites.
Today let’s have another of her translations, “Lift Up Your
Heads, Ye Mighty Gates”, set to the tune “Truro”. This hymn urges us again and again to open
wide the portals of our hearts to receive the waiting King of Glory. That’s
what the season of Advent is, although we’re often told that it’s a period when
we’re doing the waiting, not the other way round.
Also—perhaps if we fill our hearts with love and joy, there'll be less room for the fear, hatred and vindictiveness currently swirling about us. Just a thought.
Here's the First United Methodist Church in Houston giving it their all.
Michael Praetorius is one of my favorite composers; I don’t
think I’ve ever heard anything of his that I don’t like. He makes the
transition from medieval/Renaissance-sounding things to a more modern—or maybe
a more universal—feel, that touches me every time. He was one of those court
composers—like Bach or Handel or (sort of) Mozart, which perhaps gave him the
freedom to set his hand to whatever struck his fancy. Masses, motets;
experimenting in surround-sound (by placing mini-choirs in different areas of the
space)—these days, in the Valley They Call Silicon, they’d dub him a
paradigm-shifting, disruptive-tech, game-changing thought leader, and venture
capitalists would throw money at him.
In those days he served a succession of German princes,
ending at the court of Dresden.
“Es ist ein Ros entsprungen” is my all-time favorite
Christmas carol. I first learned it in a German class and I still only know the
words auf Deutsch. You probably know it as “Lo, How a Rose E’er
Blooming”. The intricate polyphony of this piece always speaks to me of voices
echoing in huge, candle-lit Gothic spaces, merging together on the final note
of each verse. I love it.
There are so many exquisite performances of this; I'm giving you the British a cappella group VOCES8.
I think it’s time for something substantially traditional
for Advent today. Hardly anything is more traditional than “God Rest Ye Merry,
Gentlemen”. (Note the comma placement; the song is telling us to lighten up/be
at peace, not commenting on our existing state of jolliness. It’s reminding us
that our burdens are about to be eased by the birth of the Savior.)
The carol dates from the 17th Century, when
it was associated with recusant (Roman) Catholic families in England. This was
a time when "celebrating" Christmas (the word means "Christ's
Mass) was dangerous; Puritans did not hold with such frippery. The melody we know
was hooked up to it about a hundred years later.
It was a bit of a palaver to find a version not by
Pentatonix; here are my pals at King’s College, Cambridge, singing it, with the
congregation during the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols recorded ten years ago.
Eighty years ago yesterday, the Germans launched their
last-gasp attack on the Western Allies, sending Army Group B through the
Ardennes Forest against American troops in Luxembourg and Belgium. The Allied
advance across France since the D-Day landings had gone much faster than
anticipated, and the mostly American soldiers were tired, had stretched their
supply lines to the max and were in fact short supplied.
The Germans were aided in their plans by a massive Allied
intelligence failure to pick up on the transfer and massing of infantry and
armored divisions ahead of the attack. The surprise was complete, and in war,
surprising the enemy is a good thing. Especially if they’re tired and poorly
supplied in the middle of winter.
(Also—may I just point out that I’d have liked a word with
those Allied commanders who did not think it possible that the Germans would
attack through the dense Ardennes region because it had not happened for
<checks notes> for all of less than five years. Dudes—they still
had the discarded mess kits and petrol cans from May 1940.)
Well—we know the resulting campaign as the Battle of the
Bulge. The Germans pushed a salient into the Allied front, all but surrounding
the Belgian town of Bastogne; the Americans rushed troops to the area and—despite
bad weather (preventing air support or supply)—held the line. Within a month,
the Germans were in retreat, leaving tens of thousands of casualties, as well
as hundreds of tanks, assault guns and aircraft behind, none of which they could
afford to lose.
Today’s Advent piece honors that first day of engagement in
the frozen forest. It should come as no surprise that “I’ll Be Home for
Christmas” was written in 1943 (first recorded by Bing Crosby). Its lyrics
encapsulate the longing of every soldier on every side in every war for the
past millennium to be with family and friends for the quintessential
family-and-friends holiday. By December of 1944, with parts of Europe having
been at war for more than five years and vast swathes of it reduced to rubble,
I’m betting that any equivalent of “I’ll Be Home” would have people in floods.
Eighty years on, with kinetic wars in Ukraine (going on three years), Gaza (more than a year) and Syria (I think for most of this century), you don't even need the Christmas part. Just the home.
How is it that in all the years (this is the tenth) I’ve
been posting Advent music I’ve never had anything from Nutcracker?
Worldwide, the Tchaikovsky ballet competes only with productions of A
Christmas Carol (and variants) for stage time during December. I don’t know
how I missed it.
Nutcracker was pretty much the
only cultural event I experienced as a child; every year my mother would take
us to the performance at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, and that was The Arts
done for the year. And then I read E.T.A. Hoffman’s original in a German class.
Well, and of course there are those bits in Fantasia.
But my strongest connection now to the musical confection
is hearing “The Russian Dance” as my sister Penny smashed ornaments in one of
the activities of the Jacquie
Lawson Advent Calendar.
Every year, Lawson lets you vent your frustration and/or
aggression on controlled destruction. Basically, you’re meant to “kill” three
or more identical items lined up in a collection of items. Last year there were
two varieties—Christmas ornaments and canapés or desserts.
These games come
with banger sound effects: smashing for the glass ornaments and
slurping/crunching for the food. There’s background music, too, but that’s
across all the games, not specific to the activity.
But back in the Olden Days, the music for smashing the
ornaments was always “The Russian Dance”, and you had only a limited time to get as many as you could. (That time being the length of "The Russian Dance".) When I’d visit Penny for Christmas, I
could look forward to her playing that game. (She had a profound hearing loss,
so her computer volume would be cranked up to the max for these things. You
could also hear her doing online jigsaw puzzles because of the “click” as
pieces went into place.)
I shall never be able to disassociate that memory from this
piece of music. But since it makes me happy, I am grateful to have it. And I
think of Penny every single time I smash ornaments, which is an additional
blessing to the satisfaction that comes from hearing those things in their
death tinkle.
That’s my gratitude for today. And here’s the Cincinnati
Ballet performing it. Volume up!
Today is Gaudete Sunday. Since Advent is meant to be a
period of preparation, reflection and quiet (hahahahahahaha—no, really, that’s
what it was for centuries, but we’ve totally blown past that in the past
hundred years or so), the third Sunday is the break from all that. You add a
pink candle to the two purple ones you’ve lighted already, and you focus on
rejoicing.
Well, alrighty, then. The title of today’s Advent piece is “Rejoice
Greatly”, from Messiah. The context is that an angel appears to the
shepherds in the fields around Bethlehem to announce the birth of the Savior.
Instructing them to “rejoice greatly” seems somewhat understating the case, but
I suppose times were different, both back at the original scene and when Handel
wrote it.
I’ve been listening to a lot of sopranos singing this; my
pick this year is Mija Park, so here she is. You will note that the lyrics are not complex, so you can concentrate on her voice and technique.
Today’s Advent tune comes to us from a Welsh folk song,
dating back to the 16th Century. The English lyrics about
decking the hall(s) were added (by a Scotsman) in 1862. You will no doubt hear
it several hundred times this month, but if you for some unaccountable reason
do not actually know the words to the first verse, you at least can join in on
the chorus, which consists of “fa”, followed by about 42,736 “las”.
Easy-peasy, although it helps if you've been nipping at the
nog.
Who better to sing it for us than John Denver and the
Muppets.
Except—what is Denver singing? His lips do not
appear to be anywhere near the lyrics. And for the chorus, he seems to be saying “Blah”.
Today is the feast of Saint Lucy, a Sicilian martyr of the
Diocletian persecutions in the Third Century. When you hear the term “Christian
martyr” applied to a woman of the early years of the Church, it’s almost always
a young woman whose only defense of her virginity against pagan lechers is
death. And so it was for Lucy, also known as Lucia, who was burnt at the stake
in Syracuse. Although she did not die until given Christian
rites…
Ah, good times, eh?
Well, interestingly, Saint Lucy (whose name derives from
the Latin lux, lucis; light) was taken up big time by the Nordics. Interesting,
but not really surprising. For one thing, when you live in areas enshrouded by
darkness for months at a time, anything relating to light is highly valued.
For another, it turns out that, in pre-Christian
Scandinavia, 13 December was dedicated to Lussi, a kind of female demon, who
led her followers around wreaking havoc on everyone. In the period between
Lussi Night and Yule, trolls and evil spirits (possibly joined by spirits of
the dead) roamed the land and committed all manner of mischief. Lussi could
even come down the chimney and take naughty children away.
So you can see why folks might want to wrap a saint rumored
to have taken food and supplies to refugees hiding in caverns (wearing a wreath
of candles on her head, so as to leave both arms free for schlepping stuff)
around the Old Ones’ Lussi.
As an aside, driving back the winter darkness with lights,
fire, prayers and making a lot of noise is a major theme of holiday
celebrations. At least in the northern hemisphere. (People down under probably
do it a lot around July-August, but their PR machine didn’t get the word out
the way we up here did.) There’s more than a little blustery defiance in a lot
of these activities, although it’s not framed that way for Saint Lucy, focused
as it is on young girls.
(Although, I dunno—virgin sacrifice? I wonder about that
because of the red sashes you see on these girls’ white robes.)
The traditional song for Saint Lucy is “Santa Lucia”, a
traditional Neapolitan song, translated into Italian in the first stage of
Italian unification, mid-nineteenth century. The lyrics are about light on the
ocean, sung by a boatman and inviting Lucy to come join him on his boat .
Scandinavians have adapted that theme of light for a particular celebration—you
know, overlaid on Lussi.
Here is a typical Swedish rendition of "Santa Lucia": girls' choir, led by a girl wearing a wreath of candles on her head, processing through a candlelit church.
“It Came upon a Midnight Clear” is one of the staples of
Christmas pageants. Or it was in the days when they had Christmas pageants. I
have to say that I was never that enthused about it because it, like “O Little
Town of Bethlehem”, it always sounded to me like whoever was singing it was
drunk.
However, it turns out that there are alternative melodies
to both of them, and these, I find, are quite appealing.
In the US, “Midnight Clear” is sung to a tune called
“Carol”, by Richard Storrs Willis, but in the UK it’s to one called “Noel”,
adapted from something older by Arthur Sullivan (yes, that Arthur
Sullivan). Here it is, performed by the choir of Winchester Cathedral
(yes, that Winchester Cathedral):
If you’re interested, the alternative to the Fleet Week
version of “O Little Town” uses an English hymn tune called “Forest Green”.
Here it is from my pals at King’s College, Cambridge:
Martin Luther is generally
acknowledged to be a badass hymnist—he made congregational singing a key
fixture in the Lutheran worship service, so it makes sense that some extra
primo good Christmas music should come out of that tradition.
What you may not know is that
one of the 19th Century’s great translators of German Lutheran
hymns was an Englishwoman named Catherine Winkworth. Daughter of a silk
merchant, Winkworth was influenced by a couple of Unitarian ministers and
brought a lot of power to expanding hymnody. Not even in her 20s, after
spending a year in Dresden, she published a book called Lyra Germanica,
which was a collection of German hymns she liked and had translated. Winkworth
essentially opened up the world of Lutheran music to Anglophones, which
enriched Advent for us all.
In addition to her interests
in German and sacred music, Winkworth actively promoted women’s rights,
particularly to education. But my first introduction to her intelligence was a
delicious pun that was published in Punch when she was 16
years old. In 1844, Britain was expanding and solidifying its hold on India,
and one of its imperial coups occurred when General Charles James Napier’s
ruthless campaign to conquer the province of Sindh. In a droll play on two
languages, Winkworth remarked to her teacher that Napier could have announced
his victory with a single word, “peccavi”—Latin for “I have sinned.”
The pun has been credited to
Napier himself, perhaps by persons who could not believe a female—much less a
teenaged one—capable of such dexterity. But records back her as the author.
Today, we’ll have a
Luther-written Advent hymn translated by Winkworth. The text of “Comfort,
Comfort Ye My People” is based on Isaiah 40: 1-5. The German was published in
1671, set to a tune called “Freu Dich Sehr”, a setting for Psalm 42 that dated
about 100 years earlier. (Today it’s known as Genevan 42, from the Genevan
Psalter.)
You can hear the Renaissance
in this music—almost see glittering court dancers moving in and out in an
intricate pattern, possibly alternating with wassail. And at the same time, it
feels so contemporary, as though you might expect speakers-in-tongues dancing
in the church aisles. Yeah, a lot of dancing in this one.
Full of joy and energy; let’s
have some of that today.
Here’s the Saint Olaf College
Cantorei singing it. If you feel like dancing, that’s absolutely allowed.
Encouraged, even.
If you’ll recall, this year, I’m pulling in my own favorite
seasonal music, because I frankly need a boost. And one of my favorite
collections of said music is the 1991 A Carnegie Hall Christmas Concert,
which featured operatic sopranos Kathleen Battle and Frederica von Stade (also
two of my favorites), trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the American Boychoir.
Today I’m sharing Battle and von Stade singing “Gesù
Bambino”, magically intertwining their voices in this beautiful piece, rippling
in a swirling pattern, like water bubbling down a hillside.
Pietro Alessandro Yon wrote “Gesù
Bambino” in 1917, one of the darkest years of World War I. At the time, he was
running his music studio (which was located in Carnegie Hall), where he taught
students pursuing liturgical music. The melody was used by Frederick H. Martens
for his own Christmas carol, “When Blossoms Flowered ‘mid the Snows”, which I
confess I have never heard.
I love the refrain:
Osanna, osanna cantaro
Con giubilante cor
I tuoi pastori ed angeli
O re di luce e amor
Your shepherds and angels sang
hosanna, hosanna with jubilant heart, O king of light and love.
On Friday, my sister’s body won the fight with her brain.
By the time she died, at 0300 on Saint Nicholas Day, she’d been under sedation
for a week; she must have been exhausted from acting out all the bizarre orders
her disease had been giving her. Everyone who loved her—which is to say,
everyone who knew her—was heartsick at her passing, but relieved that the
struggle was over. She lasted just about three years after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
I am grateful that three years is all that bastard got of
her life. And I am so grateful that I had so many decades of her life to share.
Up until the diagnosis, Penny enjoyed her wine. Red or white,
many’s the glass she and I had with many, many the meal. She taught me how to
pour sparkling wine so it doesn’t fizz over the rim of the glass. (At the time
of teaching, I’d been drinking champagne for a fair few years, but clearly I still
had things to learn.) I think of that every single time I pour some bubbly, and
I’m grateful.
When we made dinners from the Time-Life series Great
Meals in Minutes, we always started out by pouring ourselves a glass of the
specified wine. That may or may not have contributed to the fact that we did
not once ever get the meal on the table in the promised “less than 60
minutes”. But we had absolutely rollicking good times, for which I'm grateful.
And the meals were pretty good, too.
(When I saw her in February, she could remember that we
used to cook together, but could not recall the one we did every Christmas we
spent together, butterflied grilled leg of lamb with a savory sauce.)
There’s one wine-related incident that I think of every
time I have a glass of red. It was the 80s and we were having dinner at a
restaurant on the fringes of Old Town Pasadena. We had a bottle of red with the
meal (I don’t remember what main course I had, but the appetizer was carpaccio,
and it was stupendous) and then we decided to have a glass of dessert (red)
wine, which was quite nice. Penny being well known to the restaurant, the manager
came by and topped up our little glasses. At this point we realized that our
tongues had turned purple, so we sat there in the trendy restaurant, sticking
our tongues out at each other and laughing like maniacs.
(Don’t @ me about the fact that Penny drove us home. It was
the 80s and we were admittedly irresponsible that night. Big gratitude that all was well.)
Two years ago, when I took her and two of her friends out
to dinner, I was drinking a glass of red. I poked her and stuck out my tongue,
asking if it was purple. It was, and she remembered the dinner. That she did is
a blessing, and I am grateful for it.
Well—back to Advent. In Penny’s honor, today we’ll have one
of the approximately 12,347 variants of seasonal songs about mobs forming to
rove villages in search of booze. This version is from Gloucestershire, because
it’s called the “Gloucester/Gloucestershire Wassail Song”. I mean, I’m taking
that as a clue.
Wassail, in case you are a little unclear, is one of the
approximately 12,347 variants on mulled cider or wine or beer or mead. Mulling
involves heating [mead, wine, beer or cider]; adding spices such as ginger,
nutmeg, cinnamon and the like; and topping it with a slice of toasted bread, as
a sop. (Sop: you know—like the toasted slices of baguette or croutons on the
top of soup. Think: French onion soup.)
Oh, and it’s drunk from one big, communal bowl. No germ
theory here.
Wassail dates back to Medieval times. I don’t know when all
the spices started to be added, because they would have been extraordinarily
rare and prohibitively expensive during that period. And I’m not sure about the
significance of the toast being white; white flour and bread were also very
expensive, and therefore only the very wealthy could afford it.
The custom of wassailing—roving around the village singing
and demanding booze—is bifurcated. In apple and cider country in the west of
England, you go out to the orchards in mid-winter to, you know, wake them up.
To serve notice that the trees will have to shake off their winter sleep in a
couple of months, and get back to work, because those apples are key to the
local economy.
Wassailing through the village focuses on a kind of
jolly-faced exchange between the peasants and the landlord class: here we’ve
come to wish you well (wassail comes from Old English, and means “be thou
hale”), oh—and have you got any food and drink on you? Great. Hand it over.
This explains all the verses in the song about wishing the
master all the best: a good year, a good piece of beef, a good Christmas pie, a
good crop of corn, blah, blah, blah. Just the slightest bit on the toadying
side, but hey—it’s Tradition.
I’m giving you a performance of “Wassail” by the Utah State
University Chorus.
I especially love this version because—even though it’s
a Concert, they’re having such fun with it. I also love the fact
that, it being Utah State, and the composition of the performers and audience
is probably heavily Mormon and therefore strictly tee-total, they’re totally
delivering on the progressively tipsy nature of the piece.
Penny would have got such a kick out of this, and I’m
grateful for that, too.
We’re at Advent II, which is about peace and preparation.
Both are critical elements of the season—stepping away from the quotidian
madness to reflect upon the gift soon to be given, and to prepare for receiving
it. It is not, after all, a blender that you can put on your pantry shelf after
politely thanking the person who regifted it to you. No, no—we’re talking about
a paradigm-shifting, bootstrapping, disruptive thought leader here; this takes
considerable groundwork for those who are part of the distribution chain.
So today let’s have “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”. It’s
the first chorus in J.S. Bach’s cantata of the same name, BWV 140. It’s based
on a Lutheran hymn that predates Bach by about 125 years, and it’s about being
both alert and prepared for the arrival of the Messiah. The text references the
parable of the wise and foolish virgins—two groups of maidens waiting to greet
the bridegroom at a wedding. Only one group has really thought through—and
prepared for—this arrival; no prizes for guessing which one.
(Also, you can take it as read that this is one parable
that’s overdue for an update removing the sexist framing. Or at least mention
all the men at the wedding who are getting drunk on beer, shooting craps and
generally getting in the caterer’s way, all the while expecting someone else
to see to the lighting.)
Here’s a performance of it by the Amsterdam Baroque
Orchestra and Choir.
I’m jumping the gun a tad today; tomorrow being Advent II
is the one focused on peace. But I’ve been thinking about peace for a while and
it is at the forefront of my mind right now.
“It Is Well with my Soul” was written in 1873, by a
lawyer-hymnist named Horatio Spafford. Spafford had experienced multiple
losses—death of his four-year-old son, financial collapse following the Great
Chicago Fire and then the deaths of all four of his daughters when the ship on
which they were sailing to England sank.
That’s a lot of grief for anyone to carry.
But we none of us get out of this life without grief. Even
in Advent. And even though “It Is Well with my Soul” isn’t Advent-specific,
this is what I’m hearing in my heart this weekend. Here is the choir of the New
Apostolic Church of Southern Africa singing it.
Today is the feast day of Saint Nicholas, when we commemorate
the Fourth-Century bishop of Myra, one of the participants of the
Council of Nicaea. This is actually the day he died, which makes a
bit of a change for celebrations.
(Although his death is kind of a thing; at least his corpse
was. Because about 600 years after he died, Italian merchants robbed his grave
in Myra and took his body to Bari. I’m not touching the issues around what
possesses a group of people to do that kind of stuff and expect to remain in
God’s favor.)
He’s the patron of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant
thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers and students. I’m trying to think of
what commonalities connect those groups, but without luck.
We of course have conflated Saint Nicholas with major gift
giving (which might explain the children, merchants and pawnbrokers; possibly
the repentant thieves, too), via the Dutch version of his name, Sinterklaas.
And today is the day (instead of the 25th) when children in a number
of countries get their gifts (if they’ve been good; if they’ve been naughty,
they get coal or switches, depending on the local custom; you might even
be eaten
by a giant cat).
To honor the good bishop, we’re having the “Little Saint
Nick”. I must confess that I don’t find this the best example of the Beach
Boys’ oeuvre, but it serves the purpose.
Today’s Advent offering should probably come closer to Christmas, because it’s about the shepherds. But I feel shepherdy now, and I want to remind y’all about how the son of God appeared to humanity: born in a cow stall, among working beasts, and first visited by shepherds. If there’s any occupation that screams “working stiff” louder than shepherd, I don’t know what it is.
(Okay, factory workers, hotel housekeepers, migrant crop pickers. But these came about centuries after the Nativity, so we have to work within context. Shepherds had lonely lives, out in the raw elements with just their sheep and dogs for company. That the Almighty chose to let this lot in first on the secret of his manifestation says something about the whole point of the exercise.)
“Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow” was sung by African-American slaves in the ante-bellum South. It was first published as “A Christmas Plantation Song” in Slave Songs of the United States, in 1867. The songs in this collection were gathered during the War Between the States, and the melody is probably from the coastal islands off South Carolina and Georgia. A lot of those songs would have been call and response, which is how “Rise Up, Shepherd” is framed.
Back in those days so glorified now by Republicans, enslaved people were property, to be used and disposed of at their master’s pleasure, like cattle and sheep. White owners, almost always professing Christians, were conflicted about converting their slaves. In one respect, it made no more sense than spreading the gospel to their cattle or sheep; property’s property, duh. But in another, preaching Christ’s teachings was downright radical—all that talk about all of us being one under the Lord kinda runs contrary to the whole master-slave thing. What if—and bear with me on this for a minute—what if all those black people got the notion that spiritual liberation should be followed by, you know, actual physical liberation? Scary stuff, right?
So it was not at all uncommon for colonial legislatures to enact laws to ensure clarity on this issue: white guys = free; black guys = not free. So ordained by both God and man; end of. Maryland was the first colony, in 1664, to legislate that baptism had no effect on the social status of enslaved people. Southern theologians intoned that slaves had no soul; ergo treating them as property was copacetic, whether baptized or not.
Just like cattle and sheep.
(For the record, there are no reports to my knowledge of plantation owners baptizing their cattle or sheep. It could have happened, I suppose, but they didn’t document it in the parish ledger.)
Generally speaking, enslaved persons were also kept illiterate; no need to be able to read to pick cotton, tend babies or shoe horses. Also—man, that Gospel; you do not want anyone in captivity to have free access to that sucker, to parse and to ponder and to come up with weird-ass conclusions like Jesus preached to the poor and had no particular love for the rich, and what do we make of that? No, no—none of that Protestant notion of putting the Bible into everyone’s hands so s/he can build an individual relationship with God. You might as well give the field hands guns.
Also, slaves were forbidden to gather in large numbers, where they might talk with one another, share information about their conditions and maybe discuss things that property owners would prefer that their chattel goods didn’t discuss.
So being unable to write or congregate, generations of men, women and children developed a musical code for communication with one another, across geographical and chronological boundaries. This code would be spirituals and gospel music. When you dig into some of these songs, they’re about as incendiary as it gets; they’re just cloaked in metaphor. “Follow the Drinking Gourd”, “Jacob’s Ladder”, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—they all sound kind of meek and pious, but they’re built on pain and anger and aspirations.
And so is “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow”. I mean, how on earth did slaveholders even hear those first two words without the hair on the backs of their necks standing up? The response to the call—twice in the verses and twice again in the refrain—is literally telling the listeners to rise up. And follow that star to freedom.
This is really clever—the star followers in the Nativity story were the wise men, the three kings, the guys who’d have been identified with the slave owning class; not shepherds, who clearly align more with the slaves. Also, the star in the song is in the East, and the one slaves followed was in the North, so a bit more subterfuge. No, no, massa—don’t worry your white head; this song isn’t about slaves escaping or rebelling or anything like that. It’s all about your blue-eyed Jesus.
The song urges the shepherds/slaves to ditch their responsibilities to follow that star. I have to admit that it seems irresponsible and unshepherdly to abandon their sheep; I feel bad for the animals. But if we’re talking tobacco and cotton fields, I can totally see slipping away and hoofing it north of the Mason-Dixon line. Massa can bloody well get up and milk the cows himself. Or pay someone to do it.
In addition to the call/response framework, I also notice that “Rise Up, Shepherd” has what I call a work rhythm to it. Like sea shanties—it’s steady with a strong beat, which you could use to coordinate repetitive labor, like swinging a scythe or pulling ropes.
I do not know why I can’t find a really good recording of this for you; all the versions out there are way too far removed from the slave quarters—all laundered and pressed, with no dirt or sweat in sight. Here’s the best I could manage, from a Belgian choir.
You have to admit that the Victorians were aces at writing
Christmas carols and songs. “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, “Away in a Manger”,
“We Three Kings” and “It Came upon a Midnight Clear” all date from the years
when that little woman reigned over the empire and set the standards for middle
class stuffiness and rectitude that still pervade the Anglo-Saxon world today.
She also jump started Ye Olde Christmas Traditions
(including the Christmas tree that her husband brought over from Saxe Coburg)
that pretty much define what the holiday should be in a the minds of millions
today. Between her and Charles Dickens, we have a lot to live up to.
“Once in David’s Royal City” dates from 1848. And since we’re
still in the first week of Advent—what I like to call the “holy moly, he’s
coming” stage—this is a good anthem for midweek. It's also a reminder to those who call themselves Christians and yet eagerly await the criminalization of the homeless and the indigent of Christ's human birth in the lowliest of circumstances, because there was "no room" for his parents.
My pals at King’s College, Cambridge, begin their Christmas
Eve service with it as their processional. The arrangement they use
has a boy chorister sing the first verse solo and unaccompanied; second and
third verses are the full choir; and the congregation and organ join in on the
fourth. It’s truly stunning, especially the last verse with the descant.
Perhaps not traditional (yet), but one of my favorite pieces
for the season is Jackson Browne’s “The Rebel Jesus”. Written by Browne
for and performed here with The Chieftains on their 1991 Christmas CD, the
lyrics pretty well cover the shift in Christianity in the past few decades.
They certainly apply to the state of Christmas and evangelical Christianity
today—where the money-changers that Jesus threw out of the temple have taken
over mega-churches to preach the gospel of prosperity. Well, prosperity for
them, at least. Guarding the world with locks and guns—check. Guarding fine
possessions—yepper. The kill shot, though, is the line about anyone interfering
with the business of why the poor are poor: “they get the same as the rebel
Jesus.”
If anything, that’s only got worse in the decades since
this song was released. That gospel of prosperity’s added an amendment: if I
can’t be prosperous, please, God, at least make someone else worse off than me.
In the case of a brown baby born in a stable in the
backwater of empire, the idea of churches spending millions to cover up
long-term crimes against the most vulnerable of their parishes, of
televangelists in $3000 suits barely visible behind the pay-by-credit-card
logos and of Bible-spewing maniacs spraying innocent people with death on
full-auto is just surreal.
Moreover, it’s not clear to me when, exactly”, “spread the
word of the good news” morphed into “convert or die.” I mean, Jesus told his
disciples to go forth and preach, but if they came to a town where the people
weren’t receptive, they should move on and “shake the dust from their heels”.
He didn’t tell them to grind the disbelievers into dust.
Maybe it was Constantine the Great’s Edict of Milan in 313
CE, which ended Rome’s persecution of Christians. Or Theodosius’s 380 CE Edict
of Thessalonica, which made Christianity the official religion of the Roman
Empire. But somewhere between Bethlehem and now, when they became the dominant
religion in Western Europe and North America, we got to a woman carrying a
non-viable fetus that endangers her life not being able to receive healthcare
because Texas Republicans and “Christianity”.
And those Republicans on the national stage have the
unmitigated fucking temerity to whine that there’s a war on (white) Christians,
and they need government protection from persecution.
Here’s Browne and the Chieftains, laying it out for us.
About 17 minutes after a very difficult conversation with my
sister’s fiduciary on Saturday, an email came into my queue announcing that
an old friend had bought me a Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Jacquie Lawson Multiverse,
she’s a British designer who’s built an online enterprise around animated
cards; the apotheosis every year is her advent calendar. Twenty-five days of
music, games, recipes and interactive activities, themed to either a location
(Edinburgh) or time period (last year was Edwardian). This year it’s
contemporary (if idealized) Paris, my favorite city.
My sister started giving me the JL Advent Calendar about 12
or 13 years ago. Around the time she stopped, Dick put me on his gift list, so I’ve
been entertained and enchanted for more than a decade. This time, it means so much to me to
have this, because I know Penny’s time is short, and I view every animation and
hear every musical piece with her eyes and ears and her sense of delight. I'm doing it for both of us.
So today’s Advent piece is what Lawson tagged for yesterday’s
activity (bluebirds decorating an outside Christmas tree): “Un flambeau, Jeannette,
Isabelle”. The carol originated in Provence some time in the 17th Century.
It’s all about two farm girls who have found mother and child in the stable,
and rush to tell the villagers of their discovery.
I learned this in a French class, and in fact I don’t know
the English words. But here’s one translation of the first verse:
Bring a torch, Jeannette, Isabelle,
Bring a torch to the cradle, run!
It is Jesus, good folk of the village,
Christ is born and Mary’s calling,
Ah! Ah! Beautiful is the mother!
Ah! Ah! Beautiful is the son!
It goes on to describe a celebratory feast, and to admonish
the villagers to hush because the baby’s sleeping.
This recording is by the choir of Nôtre-Dame de Lourdes,
Maillardville, Coquitlam, British Columbia. It is one of the very few that have
not been John Rutterized.
My gratitude today is to Dick, to our friendship and to his kindness in sending me this gift every year. My gratitude is also to how it reminds me of Penny and her capacity for enchantment.
Well, here we are: fourth Sunday before Christmas, so it
must be Advent. Time for seasonal music as we prepare for the celebration of
Christ’s birth.
It’s hard for non-Christians (and even for a lot of
self-proclaimed Christians; looking at you, evangelicals) sometimes to
understand that Advent is meant to be a quiet period of reflection,
contemplation and preparation, not a frenzy of mandatory jollity, festive
frivolities and conspicuous consumption.
Yeah, good luck with that—we’re swimming against the tide
here. But every year I do my best to pull back some, slow down (ha!) and try to
consider quietude as an option.
This, of course, does not include music, so let’s strap in
and get ready for 25 days of Christmas and other seasonal music. (You know I’m
Catholic, not parochial.)
Most of the ten years I’ve posted for Advent, I’ve mixed
old favorites with new discoveries, as I tried to expand my approach to the
season. This year, given what the American electorate unleashed on the world, I’m
feeling the need to draw in a bit, to focus on comfort and hope.
Which is appropriate today, as the theme of Advent I is
hope—anticipating the arrival of the Messiah, who will flood the world with
light.
Light was a big deal for people whose lives were pretty
much circumscribed by the rising and falling of the sun. Many of the traditions
that have become part of Advent and Christmas revolve around pre-Christian
customs of defying the darkness and cold of winter by burning things, making
noise to wake up sleeping Nature and singing rather bolshy songs about various
types of beverages. Well get to all that later.
My offering for Advent I is “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel”, whose
text dates from Eighth or Nineth Century monastic life. It’s related to the O
Antiphons, Magnificat plainchant refrains sung at vespers (evening worship) during
the final seven days of Advent. However, it seems to me it’s appropriate for
the opening of this liturgical season. It speaks of the advent of Emmanuel—the personification
of “God be with us”—to deliver the world (identified as Israel) from sin,
warfare and darkness.
“Veni, Veni” came to the English tradition via Germany (as
did so many Christmas hymns and carols). We Anglophones know it as “O Come, O
Come, Emmanuel”. The Latin “Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel nascetur pro te, Israel” has
become “Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.”
Here it’s performed by The Gesualdo Six, a small British group devoted to renaissance polyphony. I like their restraint
in a song that often ends up being a Katy-bar-the-door choral blow-out.
I hope everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday (and,
truly, you don’t have to be a US resident to celebrate gratitude) had a lovely
meal with loved ones, no fights (either about football or politics) and minimal
meltdowns from the young ‘uns.
To mark this day-after, I’m listening to Eva Cassidy. In
particular, her take on “People Get Ready” just speaks to me.
It’s Thanksgiving in the United States. Ordinarily I’d list
some of the bigger things in the world for which I’m grateful—like having four
years of a stable, sane and secure administration, run by a decent and
empathetic president and vice president, and all the benefits that has brought
the world. And I am grateful for that; profoundly.
But this year, I’m going to single out something that seems
passing strange to me.
As I may have expressed once or twice, I am not looking
forward to the next four years, when we will not have sane, decent or even
competent people running the US government. It will be a mixture of both
kleptocracy and kakistocracy; that does not bode well for anyone in the world
(except for the kleptocrats and kakistocrats). The week after the election I
was wigging out because I am now dependent upon retirement savings for my
income. Who knows what Republicans are going to do with Social Security, and
what happens to every 401(k) in the country when Cadet Bonespurs enacts
policies that tank the global economy?
So a couple of weeks ago I reached out to my financial
adviser to find out where I stand. (There was a bit of a kerfuffle about that,
but I don’t need to go into detail. It was resolved to my satisfaction and
someone is apparently getting a talking to.) We had a call, then he did some
research and we met again last Thursday.
He showed me the numbers and charts, and brought out his
sock puppets to explain to me. Basically, I’m in good shape. Even for the
upcoming chaos, I’m actually in great shape.
One thing he recommended was that I close out my money
market account and dump the cash into my portfolio account because interest
rates have gone down, and I can get a better return than the money market rate.
Me: Let me get this straight: a year ago, you recommended
that I open this account, and now you want me to close it?
FA: Yes—because the interest rates are down.
Me: Oh. Okay.
Well, when my adviser recommends something, it means I’m
going to get a call from someone else on the team to walk me through the execution
of that action. Tout de suite. I’d forgot about that when a couple of hours later, I got a call
on my mobile from a number I didn’t recognize. I swiped the reject button and
put the phone back in my pocket. Only apparently I’d actually swiped the accept button,
and now my pocket was talking to me. That was weird.
However, we got that sorted, and then the team member
reminded me that I needed to upload my latest eTrade statement to the portal,
because we’re going to move the stock from that account into my managed
portfolio. Well, naturally, I couldn’t log into my eTrade site, so I hauled out
the physical file folder marked “Investments”, which is where I’ve put every
quarterly statement of every single one of the approximately 247 401(k) plans I’ve
had in my career, to try to find something with a toll-free phone and an
account number on it.
To give you an idea—the folder (and its contents) is about
two inches thick.
Well, I found an eTrade statement, so I called the
number, got to MorganStanley (which owns eTrade, since about 2022) and then
eventually to Juaquín at eTrade. He got me in (I had to change my access email
from my work address three domains ago), then spent about five minutes trying
to get me to “take advantage of” a consultation with one of the many
MorganStanley financial advisers standing by ready to manage my investments.
(I talked with one about two years ago, and quite the
hard-sell conversation it was, too.)
Finally I got the statement and uploaded it to TIAA portal.
But—in the process of trawling through the two inches of
papers in that “Investments” file, I came across a statement for 160 shares of
GIANT SOFTWARE CORP, which I was granted after managing to last there two years
after hiring. Just.
Well, the statement was from 2010, from Smith Barney (which
was acquired by MorganStanley in 2012). I’ve moved five times since that was
mailed to me. I wasn’t sure that the stock would be around—I was talking with a
friend on Sunday and he told me it probably went to Washington State's unclaimed
property.
(As an aside: that prompted me to look at the Washington
escheatment site. I discovered that Comcast owes me $52 for a refund I was due
when I moved 14 years ago. It’s on my to-do list.)
Well, that kind of deflated my sails. But on Monday afternoon (after
going through the whole Social
Security palaver), I called the number on the Smith Barney statement and got
through to a very nice woman who walked me through everything I needed to do to
get into my atwork.morganstanley.com account, update my profile details (they
actually had my current address, because of my eTrade activity, but it’s in a separate
system, and the two don’t talk with one another). I almost didn’t call, because
I was really knackered after that Social Security exercise.
But I got into the system, downloaded the most recent quarterly
statement and then uploaded it to TIAA, emailing the three people working on my
action items about it.
Tuesday I got a call from my financial adviser, thanking me
for uploading the MorganStanley statement—with a kind of implicit invitation to
tell him more about how this came about.
Me: So, I was looking through my two-inch thick “Investments”
file, and found the Smith Barney statement on Friday. And I looked up the current GIANT
SOFTWARE CORP stock price and thought, “That much? Oh, my!” And then,
yesterday, the nice woman at MorganStanley told me how many shares I now have (because dividends),
and what the total value now is, and I thought, “Such much?”
He laughed and commented that it’s not very often that one
of his clients finds a gigantic chunk of change unexpectedly. (Well—that’s part
of my charm.)
Me: I can afford to have cheese on my hamburger!
FA: You can go all the way—get avocado. The organic stuff.
He has to do some research to determine how to cash out to
roll over (can’t move the stock, since it’s in an employee stock ownership
account) without incurring a tax liability, and then the team member will work
with me to sort out the execution.
But today my gratitude is that—despite a number of
decisions made over a lifetime of basically fiscal illiteracy—I am reasonably
secure to weather the next four years. And that I’m working with someone who’s
patient and willing to get down to words of one syllable when talking with me.
And that my years at GIANT SOFTWARE CORP yielded an unexpected, ah, dividend,
just at a time when my spirits needed lifting.
