December 13, 2009
Bah, Humbug: It's an Old Refrain, but There Are Better Holiday Songs
By Peter Monaghan
Each December, holiday music saturates public spaces and the airwaves and can seem inescapable, interminable, intolerable.
You may at times find yourself empathizing with Oliver Cromwell, who in 1647 barred Christmas carols as sinful and pagan.
Even if yours is less pinched a judgment, you might get better advice on how to help your ears through the holiday season by consulting scholars of music and musicology.
What do they propose as antacid for overconsumption of the old chestnuts?
Many favor vocal music of the centuries of great musical expansion, from the late Middle Ages on. In that so-called early-modern period, composers produced musical sentiments of the season in abundance—optimistic, rousing, earnest—rendered not by jolly ensembles like the Ray Conniff Singers but in lofty strains of Latin or various vulgates, intoned by angelic choirs.
"Since my area of study is Baroque music, and particularly French Baroque music, I think about the 'Messe de Minuit' by Marc-Antoine Charpentier," says Deborah Kauffman, an associate professor of music at the University of Northern Colorado. The work is a setting of the Latin mass, but incorporates French Christmas noëls, Gallic variants on the carols that became popular in England in the 13th century.
Like many of his contemporaries, she says, Charpentier used popular forms to produce a folklike character in his music—recorders to suggest heaven, Elysian fields, and shepherds tending their flocks by night.
"He borrowed melodies from carols, and people hearing it would have recognized those tunes," she says. "I don't, myself, but they have a simplicity that's very lovely."
Of course, says Ms. Kauffman, who is the editor of the Journal of Musicological Research, what many listeners most respond to, around the holiday season, is lofty magnificence, a perfect accompaniment for holiday hopefulness and a panacea for midwinter gloom.
Lush vocal works can handily provide that pick-me-up. "The Christmas music I enjoy most is just about anything sung by the King's College Choir of Cambridge," which has issued many acclaimed holiday recordings, says Hans C. Boepple, a professor of music at Santa Clara University and a distinguished pianist. "Not only do they offer a good mixture of the familiar and the rare, but their sound is uniquely beautiful and haunting."
Among more modern works that exhibit those same qualities is a rarely heard but glorious suite by Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), "Laud to the Nativity," says Michelle Roueché, a professor of choral music at Brenau University. Influenced by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), the musical revolutionary who ushered in the Baroque period, and by medieval religious poetry and song, the work tells the nativity story against a rustic backdrop of woodwinds.
Ms. Roueché remembers well her introduction to it: "I heard the most spellbinding, breathtaking music. I fell in love with the work immediately, and it was one of the first major works I ever conducted."
That occasion was, she adds, all the more memorable because the mezzo-soprano who sang the role of Mary, was eight months pregnant at the time and due to deliver on December 25. "I told the audience that she took the role of Mary much too seriously," says Ms. Roueché.
When it comes to music that evokes the spirit of the season, "I think of choirs and brass, organs, high clear voices, things like that," says Andrew Glendening, dean of the School of Music at the University of Redlands. He recommends classic Christmas albums such as those of the Robert Shaw Chorale. He has orchestral favorites, too, like Johan Sebastian Bach Christmas Oratorio, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner (Archiv). But he comes back again and again to the season's great choral work, such as on A Christmas Celebration: Kathleen Battle (EMI Classics) because the great lyric soprano reminds him of attending carol services on Christmas Eves while growing up in rural Indiana. "Our church had a strong tradition of such music, with a real organist, and choirs," he recalls.
His university boasts one of the great seasonal musical celebrations. This month sees the 61st annual Feast of Lights, a worship service held four times each Christmas and attended by thousands, with songs, instrumental music, spoken word, and dramatic tableaux, all centered around the theme of the meaning of the star that is said to have led the Magi to a stable in Bethlehem.
Not that all Christmas music has to be grand, says Mr. Glendening. He ranks as his personal favorite a true curiosity: A Toolbox Christmas, by Woody Phillips (Gourd Music), where the old faves are spruced up by an orchestra of hammers, saws, drills, ratchets, nail guns, and other hand and power tools.
Novelty can enliven concerts of holiday music—that's the advice for choirmasters from Barbara M. Jazwinski, head of the composition program at Tulane University. Sure, a Bach cantata always serves well, and some George Frideric Handel, but how about less-familiar pieces, all easily found in recording and sheet-music catalogs, such as a choral masterpiece by Sergei Rachmaninoff, "Bogoroditse Devo" (Hail, o Virgin Mother of God), or Alexandr Pascanu's arrangement of the Romanian folk dance, "Chindia," or Neil Ginsberg's arrangement of the lively Hanukkah song, "Hanerot Halalu"?
Speaking of Hanukkah, it has, certainly, far less copious a musical tradition than Christmas. So, suggests Karen Zorn, president of Longy School of Music, why not try a "delightful blend of Christmas songs performed in Jewish musical style," a "delectable treat"?
She is speaking of Oy to the World: A Klezmer Christmas, by the Klezmonauts (Satire), on which the usual Christmas hits are rendered in the minor keys of klezmer music, "which is kind of funny," she says.
Does having that kind of fare help to lighten a week that can produce some of the year's most intense family melodramas? "Does it ever," she says.
If it is religion that strains family relations, you might want to gravitate to ecumenism. Each year, at or about the winter solstice, Michael Brockman, a University of Washington music lecturer, along with Clarence Acox, a local jazz legend, leads the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra in a performance of selections from three programs of "sacred music" that Duke Ellington devised and staged hundred of times during the last years of his life, 1965 to 1973.
Ellington did not present the music during the holiday season, as Mr. Brockman and his colleagues do. For the great bandleader, the concerts expressed his philosophy of nondenominational universalism. "He was addressing the spiritual views of all people everywhere, or at least trying to do that," says Mr. Brockman, an alto saxophonist who has transcribed many Ellington works for his big band. "So for all the people not involved in a traditional Christmas concert or some other faith's high holidays, this can serve as a nice celebration."
As the Seattle orchestra's two-CD set of concert recordings, Sacred Music of Duke Ellington, demonstrates, the Duke's music—joyous, swinging, and polished, and performed by big band augmented with vocal soloists and sometimes a choir—soars as high as a low-swinging chariot. If audience members at times forget they're in a church, they nonetheless probably emerge sanctified.
Sublime oratorios, simple carols, orchestral gems … all these timeless pearls of seasonal sanctification aside, perhaps the most burning musical question of the end of 2009 is this: What to make of Bob Dylan's Christmas in the Heart? Billed by the Sony label as "a collection of traditional holiday classics" such as "Little Drummer Boy" and "The First Noël," long before its release it prompted reviewers to ask: Would even diehard Dylan fans have anything good to say about the album, dominated as it is by what some call his worst-ever vocals?
Turns out, academic analysts and fans certainly do. At least, they praise parts of it, in particular Mr. Dylan's polka-inspired, accordion-accompanied rendition of "Must Be Santa." It has been released as a music video; on it, holiday revelers dance and prance around Mr. Dylan, who appears at times under a Santa hat, with long locks half-concealing his face as if, perhaps, he's not quite ready to come out fully as a holiday-season partier himself.
"Imagine yourself maybe in Hibbing, Minn., Christmas 1953, where the 12-year-old Bob doubtless heard many Yuletide tunes, even to the tune of the accordion, which is big in Minnesota," says Richard Thomas, a professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard University who has also written about this year's most surprising Santa enthusiast and teaches an undergraduate seminar about him. "It's all part of Dylan's roaming through time since Time Out of Mind [a 1997 album], particularly the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries."
Another Dylan watcher, Keith Negus, a professor of musicology at Goldsmiths College of the University of London, agrees. Of "Must Be Santa," he says, "It works as Christmas music because it's irreverent and daft and charitable … and it is a typically Dylanesque blend of the authentic and the absurd."
So Mr. Dylan's academic fans are not withholding praise until any patina of embarrassment at some of the album's music wears off. Considered academic attention may well come later. Certainly the album should attract more scholarly ink than some of this season's other albums by popular-music icons.
What, after all, would musicologists say about the discs from Rob Halford of Judas Priest, Sting, Tori Amos, Andrea Bocelli with the Muppets and Mary J. Blige on backup vocals, and Neil Diamond, whose A Cherry Cherry Christmas includes a cover of Adam Sandler's "The Chanukah Song," a lament for how few songs there are with lyrics like "Put on your yarmulke, here comes Chanukah"?
