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.
