Sing in exultation

Ah, the Big Day at last. Let’s pull out all the stops, open our hearts and throats, and fill wherever we are with joyful sounds. What better to do it with than “Adeste Fidelis”?

I associate this one with midnight masses, the anthem that sends folks out bundling up into the cold night toward whatever their Christmas celebration entails. What is love most about it is the descant on the verse that starts out “Sing, choirs of angels.” That sucker just makes my chest tighten, whether I’m singing it or hearing it.

Here are my pals at King’s College, Cambridge, doing it for you.

Happy Christmas to us all.

Sleep in comfort, slumber deep

My, how Advent has flown past—Christmas is almost upon us. So let’s have another carol about the baby, another lullaby.

There are plenty of songs about Mary, about the shepherds, the king-magi, etc. Even one about some freaking drummer boy, which I never understood, because what the hell is some kid doing out in the middle of Judea in the middle of the night in the middle of winter (or early spring, if you’re some kind of killjoy purist) with a damn drum? Like any parents would have put up with that nonsense for a New York minute.

I like today’s because it’s from the perspective of the animals in the stable. They respond to the notion of a newborn in their midst by offering their warmth, literally. I can see their breath as they snuffle and snort around the manger in that cold night. I confess that I don’t know that much about the large animals, but having a cat next to you pushing out the KTUs (Kitty Thermal Units) at a rate of knots can make all the difference in nippy weather.

I also don’t know that much about the history of this one. “Hajej, Nynej, Jezisku” is Czech, possibly from somewhere between the 14^th and 16^th Centuries. We know it in English as “The Rocking Carol”, and it does indeed give you that quiet sense of being gently rocked. It’s very comforting musically as well as metaphorically.

I’m giving you Chanticleer’s version of it. I had the great good fortune to attend one of their Christmas concerts this week, held in the perfect venue for their voices (including their kickass countertenors)—Mission Santa Clara. I have many of their CDs, and I love how they put together a Christmas carol. Especially this one.

He come from the Glory

Today’s Christmas song is a blast from the past. Long past? No, my past. I can’t recall how the Chad Mitchell Trio came to my attention, but I remember “The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy” from the start.

It wasn’t on a Christmas album; I don’t even know if they made a Christmas album. But even if it’s not Christmas-specific, it’s about baby Jesus, so I say it’s in. It’s not quite a lullaby; well, maybe a Calypso lullaby. Belafonte has a version and he’s fine. But I prefer the Mitchell arrangement.

The kingdom of this world

You can’t have a Christmas season without a rendition of “Hallelujah Chorus”, can you? And you know what a sucker I am for flash mobs singing it. I’ve done entire Decembers with a different one every week.

For this year I’m going back to one of my favorites, at a Calgary shopping mall food court. There have been plenty of them in the five years since this one surprised unsuspecting mall rats, but I like this one right much. For one thing, the acoustics are better than a lot of the ones in multi-level atria. (There’s one from the Paris Opera Society from a couple of years ago. I wanted to share that, but it just doesn’t sound good enough, even though I’m sure it was a spectacular experience.)

And for another—they were the pioneers in “Hallelujah” flash mobbery. They set the tradition.

Gratitude Monday: On the sidelines

 Having popped in to Trader Joe’s last Friday to pick up enough milk to see me through the next week, let me devote today’s Gratitude Monday to expressing my relief and thanks that I have no call to go grocery shopping before Christmas.

Because the normally idiotic drivers of the Valley They Call Silicon have upped their game by an order of magnitude, and my own bandwidth has narrowed somewhat, so I don’t want to put it to the test.

Not needing to be anywhere that shoppers are likely to congregate frees me up to focus on other things, like observing and commenting, for which I am also grateful.

Con giubilante cor

Let’s stay around the same time period as yesterday’s piece, but move to the Mediterranean area for our Christmas music today.

Pietro Yon wrote “Gesu Bambino” in 1917. Imagine the drive to pull yourself figuratively out of the fourth year of a war that was strangling Italy (and France, and Germany, and Russia, and Britain…) to write a carol about angels and shepherds rejoicing over the birth of the Savior.

I like the way the melody ripples in a swirling pattern, like water bubbling down a hillside. As per usual, it’s about the baby Jesus (well—that is the title, after all), to whom it refers as “The Christmas Rose”, which is kind of pretty.

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.

And here are two of my favorite sopranos singing it at Carnegie Hall:

In the midst of the earth

My offering today is new to me, although it’s about a hundred years old. Technically, it’s not about Christmas, but it is sacred and how can something titled “Salvation Is Created” not be about Christmas?

The preponderance of Pavel Tchesnokov’s compositions were sacred, until he was forced by the Soviets to concentrate on secular music. He was a triple threat—composer, conductor and choirmaster (kind of like Bach). This one, published in 1913, was one of his final sacred works.

The words are pretty simple; in English it’s “Salvation is created, in the midst of the earth, O God, Our God. Alleluia.” So, yeah—pretty Christmasy, in my opinion.

Here’s a choir from Yale singing it in Russian:

Teach my feet to fly

We listened to a couple of Quebecoises yesterday, so today we’ll feature another Canadian songwriter. The first time I heard Joni Mitchell’s “River” (on a compilation CD) it absolutely stopped me in my tracks. Yes—that’s what Christmas is like, when you’re not aligned with your expectations, when you’ve screwed the pooch in a relationship, when you just can not get into the rhythm of the season—whatever that might mean to you.

I love the imagery of a river not as something that lets you sail, but something that you can skate away on. It captures the dislocation that a Northerner feels in an environment like Los Angeles. Even though that’s my native land, I understand fully the sense that it’s not quite real, more façade than substance, and how that adds to the alienation.

There are many covers of “River”, but I like Linda Ronstadt’s the best, so that’s what I’m sharing with you.

Mitten im kalten Winter

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.

Here to sing it for you is the Dresdner Kreuzchor, as seems only appropriate, it being the home team for Praetorius.

Cet heureux temps

Today’s carol dates from the 19^th Century, but across La Manche from Britain, where a lot of the other music I’ve been sharing comes from. It first appeared in a collection of carols called “Airs des Noëls lorrains”, meaning Christmas songs from Lorraine.

As with yesterday’s offering (and a whole lot of them, really) it’s about Jesus’s birth in a stable, and it has a rustic feel to me. I almost expect to see frost on the breath of the singers, and bits of straw flying about in the air.

This rendition by The Chieftains (coupled with another carol, “Ça bergers”) with Kate and Anna McGarrigle reinforces that notion for me. (This is from the same album that has Jackson Browne's "The Rebel Jesus".) The song makes mention of the bagpipes, so it seems appropriate that what’s in essence an Irish ceilidh band (with uilleann pipes) should be singing it with a couple of French Canadiennes.