This struck me while I was driving around NoVa a while ago: some
sort of stealth contact system:
I mean—no direct/mobile, no office and no website.
Maybe you’re meant to stop them in traffic and strike up a conversation. Or send up the bat light. I’d imagine that it’s hard to drive lead generation this way, but I could be
wrong.
Let’s cap off this Advent season with the really big gun of
Christmas music. The Christmas Oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach.
“Unser Mund sei vol Lachens”—“Let our mouth be full of laughter”
is the theme, which seems appropriate. Mary and Joseph made it to Bethlehem,
they found a place to spend the night, the prophecies have been fulfilled. The
final chorale is “Gelobt sei Gott”, “God be praised”, which says it all.
Here we’ve got the J.S. Bach Foundation of St. Gallen,
Switzerland, performing the oratorio in a church in Trogen. I do not know why
they feel obliged to point out that it’s a Protestant church (all their videos
on YouTube seem to be so designated), but it’s a good recording nonetheless.
It’s time to pull out the stops, crank up the volume and rejoice.
As I mentioned yesterday, Hanukkah began at sundown on Sunday. I
missed a Hanukkah post because the 22nd was also Annunciation
Sunday, and the yahrzeit of my friend David’s death. But the beauty of Hanukkah
is that it lasts for eight nights, so I’m still in the bracket.
So my music today is “Ocho Kandelikas”, which is a Ladino Hanukkah
song. Ladino is the language of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. (We’re
more familiar with Yiddish, which is the language of Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern
Europe.) Just as you can limp along understanding Yiddish if you speak German,
if you speak Spanish, a lot of Ladino words will make sense.
So, “Ocho Kandelikas” means “Eight Candles”.
The song was written in 1983 by a Bosnian named Flory Jagoda, who
fled with her family following the Nazi invasion of then-Yugoslavia. She
married an American soldier after the war and lives somewhere in Northern
Virginia (according to Wikipedia).
The lyrics are not rocket science; I think a lot of the attraction
is the energetic tempo. Although I cannot argue with the line, “We’re going to
eat little pastries with small almonds and honey.”
Here is “Pink Martini” performing it. Crank up the volume and let
loose a little.
My friend David, who died
two years ago yesterday, despised religion. But he also had two young sons,
so I know he celebrated Christmas, after a fashion. Well, his partner was
Jewish—maybe the light sabers the boys got one year were for Hanukkah (which
also began last night). I dunno.
Regardless, I think David would appreciate today’s Advent piece, “The
Rebel Jesus”. Jackson Browne wrote it for the Chieftains’ 1991 Christmas CD, The
Bells of Dublin.
The lyrics 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.
David understood that acutely.
Well, here’s the cut from that Chieftains album.
And I’m still grateful for my friendship with David. What a grace that was.
Well, we’re rounding the turn into the final stretch of Advent.
Today is Annunciation Sunday, the night we light the fourth candle in the
wreath and consider what it might have been like for a very young woman in
Nazareth to be paid a visit by one of God’s biggest guns, the Archangel
Gabriel.
Gabriel was one of the guardians of Israel. In the Old Testament,
he appeared to Daniel, to interpret his visions. He also was sent (as recounted
in the Book of Ezekiel) to destroy Jerusalem. In the New Testament, he appeared
to Zacharias, to tell him that his wife Elisabeth would bear a child (John the
Baptist). Elisabeth being Mary’s cousin, I suppose it’s possible she’d heard
about Gabriel’s visit, so maybe she wasn’t completely laid out by having an archangel
show up in her room and telling her that she’d been chosen to bear the son of
God. Without any kind of sexual activity.
Well, maybe, but I think it must still have been quite the BFD back
in those days, in the backwater of civilization, and it must have been overwhelming.
“Gabriel’s Message” is a Basque carol that’s based on a 13th
Century Latin carol. I’m giving you Sting’s take on it.
It’s the Winter Solstice today—the longest night and shortest day
of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Humans have been marking the turning
back of night around this time for millennia—celebrating the resurgence of
light and hope over darkness and despair. Because no matter how black and cold
it might seem at this moment, they know that the seasons will revolve; spring
will follow winter; there is life beneath the frosted landscape.
Advent is very much a period of banking the fires, focusing inward
and holding out through the dark time, knowing that light will return, good
will bloom and hope provides the continuo.
The English poet Christina Rossetti wrote “In the Bleak Midwinter”
in 1872, although it wasn’t published until 1904. 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. 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.
I’m giving two versions of this one, both performed by the choir
of Kings College, Cambridge. The first set to music by Gustav Holst:
This one’s by Harold Darke:
They’re not markedly dissimilar. With both versions done by the
Kings College choir, this is like A/B testing. You can decide on your
preference to help you through the longest night.
The English composer John Rutter has pretty much got a lock on modern
“classical” Christmas music. I am not a fan, but he certainly doesn’t miss me.
Seems like every concert in the world has at least one of his carols, or arrangement
of an existing carol.
Rutter composed “The Shepherd’s Pipe” while a student at Clare
College, Cambridge. He was 18. Maybe that accounts for the lyrics not even
rhyming, I dunno. (Frankly, I got tired of the "On the way to Bethlehem" schtick.) But here are the Batavia Madrigal Singers with Macau
Orchestra performing it. I told you everyone in the world puts on his stuff at
Christmas.
As an aside, when I went searching for this, Google kept trying to
serve up shepherd’s pie. That old algorithm knows what I like.
The
focus of today’s post isn’t really Advent or Christmas related, but the subject
certainly is.
“Dona
Nobis Pacem” comes from the part of the Roman Catholic Mass (or Episcopalian or
Lutheran service) where congregants ask Christ to be merciful and bestow peace.
Agnus
Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus
Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus
Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
Lamb
of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
Lamb
of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
Lamb
of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, grant us peace.
The
song is a canon—a single line of melody, where different voices join in at a
different duration of time, thus forming a polyphony of sorts. “Dona Nobis Pacem”
is a repeating canon, so it’s a round. Like you used to sing at camp. In fact,
you may well have sung this at camp, because it’s not Christmas-specific.
A
friend of mine performs in the Washington
Revels most Decembers. Revels are put on in several cities in the US, each
year the local group decides on a theme. I went last year, when it was a French-Canadian
story, with a flying canoe and everything. During the show, there are a few
pieces that invite audience participation, and “Dona Nobis Pacem” is one of
them. The audience was divided into three parts and we sang the round, each led
by a section of the cast.
Here I’m
giving you a rendition by a children’s choir that may or may not be called “Funny
Voices” of the Children’s Exemplary Choral Studio “Kamerton”, of Saint
Petersburg, Russia. (Google Translate was not my best friend on this.)
But I’m
also giving you a version sung by some happy campers. It’s a little rougher,
but that’s the beauty of the piece: it’s very forgiving.
In my
opinion, we can all do with some divine peace.
“God
Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” dates back at least to the 16th Century.
It’s pretty straightforward. The “merry” doesn’t really refer to merry-making
or excess; it’s reminding people that their burdens are about to be lightened,
so they should likewise lighten up. You know, don't be so worried.
Here’s
a rather different take on the old standard, from Barenaked Ladies, with guest
Sarah MacLachlan. See what you think.
You know, I don’t think in all the years I’ve been doing music
posts for Advent that I’ve had anything from Africa. I don’t know why that is,
but it’s changing today.
I confess that I don’t know anything about this piece, “Bethlehem”,
and only marginally more about MozuluArt. They’re a group of three African guys
generally accompanied by a pianist, who fuse African traditions with classical
music. Zulu meets Mozart, see? Seems appropriate, somehow, for the day we believe
Ludwig van Beethoven was born, to pay tribute to expanding the parameters of
music.
From their website, the lyrics translate to:
Jesus Christ is born in Bethlehem
He lies in a manger
He is a friend to us all
And he has come here to give us salvation
On this particular piece, they’re accompanied by the Ambassade
String Quartet. Not a lot to tell you about this, but I love it, and I love
them. Here’s how much: I’ve just ordered their African Christmas CD,
which includes this, from Amazon, and I’m paying $3.99 for incredibly slow
shipping, because this seems to be the only option.
