A light blue convertible

Today is Saint Nicholas Day, the day when we commemorate the 4^th-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 25^th) 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).

So it seems appropriate to me that today’s piece of music focus on Santa Claus, gifts and varying degrees of naughtiness. And who better to sing “Santa Baby” than Eartha Kitt?

Gratitude Monday: das Kindlein

One thing I’m thankful for year after year is peeling away all the crap associated with the holidays and finding the simple joys that kids can still muster up, no matter what’s going on around them. If you give them the least opportunity, they’ll find something to be happy about.

So here are a couple of Christmas carols that focus on the children, both from Germany and Austria.

I learned “Ihr Kinderlein kommet” in one of my German classes, and the harmonies have always struck me as just gorgeous. Basically, the song is inviting children to come to Bethlehem, to find another child in his manger cradle. It dates from the 18^th Century And here we have the Vienna Boys Choir singing it.

And since we’re speaking of a baby in his cradle, here’s a lullaby carol, from the Salzburg area somewhere in the 19^th Century. I like the notion of lullaby carols, seeing as to how the holiday's all about a baby and his mom. Last year I gave you several, including a Czech one, a Welsh one and a Swedish one. 

I did not know this Eva Lind chick, who’s singing "Still Still Still", but she’s an Austrian soprano, and evidently a big deal. This setting strikes me as being not dissimilar from a “Christmas with the Carpenters” kind of thing (if the Carpenters hung out in German Bierkeller), but I like the feeling of a soprano singing a lullaby, so I’m down with it, as long as I close my eyes.

P.S. I favor sopranos, so today I’m grateful for finding another one to add to my collection.

Or ecco ch’è nato il Salvatore!

Today’s Advent offering is a little longer than the usual.

Okay—it’s rather a lot longer: 25 minutes.

But if you’ve got a long drive, or have some time at home, have a listen to Ottorino Respighi’s “Lauda per la Natività del Signore”

You seldom hear Respighi, but I very much like the few pieces of his that you can catch on classical music stations. “Pines of Rome” and “Fountains of Rome”, the first two of his Roman Trilogy, are quite enjoyable. (I don’t think I’ve heard “Roman Festivals”.) But my favorites are “Ancient Airs and Dances” and “The Birds”.

Ah, but back to the current work, “Hymn of Praise for our Lord’s Birth”. The text is attributed to Jacopone da Todi in the 13^th Century, and the main characters are the Angel who announces the Nativity to the shepherds, Mary, and the Shepherds.

The singing and such are fine, but I just love Respighi’s integration of the instruments in the orchestra. It’s so…I don’t know. But it is.

We drink to thee

It being 3 December, and the first week after Thanksgiving, I reckon that folks are pulling up their big-boy pants and cranking up the Christmas machine. Lists, stores, traffic…

You need a break.

And probably some alcohol.

So 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.

I’ve never had wassail, to my knowledge; at least, never anything that announced itself as such. But every year around this time, I like to have a mug or two of Glühwein, which is pre-spiced red wine that’s served at Weihnachtsmärkte throughout Europe.

There is nothing like being out on a freezing December night, with a mug of Glühwein in your hand, wandering up and down aisles of stalls with Christmas gear of all types, and watching children go gaga.

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 especially love this version, by the Utah State University Chorus, 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.

I wonder if by the end of this their ale it is white and their toast it is brown…

As for me: I am not out contributing to traffic jams and jostling wild-eyed shoppers. Today is my day to hunker down and power through many batches of candy. Then I’m taking a blow torch to every surface in the kitchen to get the sugar off of it.

Achtung Hallelujah

If you don’t know by now what a sucker I am for a good flash mob, I just cannot help you. In the past, I’ve done entire series of “Hallelujah Chorus” flash mobs. I love the ephemeral nature of the musical flash mob, as people who look just like you emerge from a crowd, belt out something that sends chills down your spine, and then melt back into the crowd.

If that’s not magic, I do not know what is.

(Yes—it’s a boatload of work, rehearsals and logistics. But the result is pure magic.)

Viz. this experience at Köln-Bonn airport. Is there a less magical place on the planet than any airport during the holidays? So is this not the place where we most need it?

You listen and consider the notion.

For weak and for strong

Today we’re hauling our asses from 16^th Century France to New York in 1971, when John Lennon wrote “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”.

It’s both a Christmas song, and a protest song. Which, considering the life of Jesus, seems appropriate, not least because waving this about gets straight up the noses of the millions of evangelical hypocrites around us who like to pick and choose their Biblical guidance.

(Last year I gave you “The Rebel Jesus”, which plays on somewhat similar themes. Have a listen to that.)

At any rate—here’s the Gospel according to John, something for us to think about as we watch saber rattlers swarm into the corridors of power once more.

O let us sing Noël

Let’s move from Renaissance Germany by way of 20^th Century Vienna to 16^th Century France. “Noël Nouvelet” is a pastoral tune infused with a modal flavor from the first five notes of the Ave Maris stella plainchant.

Or so I’m told.

Both “noël” and “nouvelet” carry the meaning of “new” or “news”, although we understand the former to mean Christmas, so we have "new Christmas".

There are some versions of this piece that frankly make me want to commit ritual seppuku on the village square, they’re so slow and depressing. I prefer something lighter and livelier. So here is the choir of King’s College Cambridge to sing “Noël Nouvelet”.

Eine kleine Weihnachtsmusik

Today’s Advent piece may be a bit of a surprise—a reworking of two traditional carols by a composer you might not ordinarily associate with something calm or Christmassy.

As I said last year, Michael Praetorius’ “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen” is my all-time favorite carol. And I’m quite the traditional purist when it comes to it. Also, I’m not a huge fan of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonality.

So this is a step out of the traditional, perhaps a step into the uncomfortable, but it’s not bad. Have a listen; see what he’s put together for us:

Although born a Jew, in 1898 Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism as both a cultural and defensive move—turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Vienna had strong strains of anti-Semitism flowing through it. In 1933 he reverted back to Judaism, but he enjoyed celebrating Christmas, and he liked the music. Ergo this and other pieces that don’t entirely rip the top of your head off with musical clashes.

Schoenberg had held a teaching post at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin since 1926. With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, he left Europe for the United States, teaching at both the University of Southern California and at UCLA. He remained there until his death, and it breaks my heart to think that in our current anti-Semitic and xenophobic political climate, it’s likely that refugees like him could be refused entry to this country.

But Germany would welcome him.

Anyhow—set all that aside for now and just listen to something familiar and unfamiliar.

Gratitude Monday: Grateful praise

My seasonal music today is technically—well, it’s kind of all over the place. The Christmas carol version is sung during Epiphany, but it’s also the music for a hymn sung for US Thanksgiving. And since today I’m grateful for being able to spend Thanksgiving this year with friends (with dinner and word games), I’m playing this incarnation. Ish.

By “-ish” I mean that it’s extremely hard to find a “clean” version of “For the Beauty of the Earth”, one that’s not that John Rutter…thing. No, I want Dix, number 92 in the Methodist hymnal, preferably with a badass Methodist choir giving it their all on such lyrics as:

For the beauty of the earth,

For the beauty of the skies,

For the love which from our birth

Over and around us lies

Lord of all, to thee we raise

This our hymn of grateful praise

Sadly, YouTube has not been my friend in my search for a decent recording of this. Really.

However, I did come across this very interesting variant: “Dance Africana on Dix”, by Jeffrey Honoré. It’s meant for handbells, with optional percussion.

All I can find on this are performances at various churches, so the quality isn’t spectacular, but have a listen:

To me, it capture the sense of giving grateful praise for the beauties around us, by incorporating some of the sounds of nature—I hear rain, birds, insects. And I believe I hear thanksgiving joy.

So why not for Advent?

Redemptor omnium

Today marks the beginning of Advent, the period of preparation for the arrival of God-made-man. Many traditions mark these four weeks before Christmas with contemplation and reflection, with prayer and music.

I myself crack out the Christmas CDs and go through way too many candles, because both help me through this dark period.

Let’s have a definitive Advent piece to start us off, “Veni Veni Emmanuel”. Veni is one of the “O Antiphons” sung at Vespers during the during the octave before Christmas (17-23 December). So technically, it’s a little early for it, but it’s my blog, my rules.

Here it’s performed by The Gesualdo Six, a small, recently-formed 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.

The Gesualdo Six are singing it in Latin, which I think flows with more grace than the English translation. They skipped over several of the verses, including one we could really, really stand to consider this year.

Veni, veni Rex Gentium,

veni, Redemptor omnium,

ut salvas tuos famulos

peccati sibi conscios.

O come, Desire of the nations, bind

in one the hearts of all mankind;

bid every strife and quarrel cease

and fill the world with heaven’s peace.