Christmas music

Considering that there's a month, tops, that I can play it without looking too much of a loon, I own an awful lot of Christmas music. So I'm going to talk about some of my favorite songs and "albums" (what do we call these now? Do we still call them "Albums" in the CD age? And yes, I realize that the fact that my music is in CD (or tape) form and not MP3 form puts me a bit behind the curve, but whatever).

Sacred music (hymns or songs explicitly mentioning Christ's birth):

Silent Night. This is my all time favorite. I love this song dearly, for two reasons: first, even someone who's a non-singer (like me) can sound fairly good singing it; it doesn't require too much vocal calisthenics and there are really no "not in this lifetime" high notes, even in the soprano part). I also love it for the legend of how it came about: a mouse had eaten part of the leather bellows of the pipe organ in the church Father Mohr served, and so he and Gruber composed a song that could be performed on guitar. (Some sources doubt the veracity of this legend). But whether or not the legend's true, I love this song. My two favorite versions are the Bing Crosby version (straightforward and traditional) and a more recent song by a group called the Thorns, about whom I know next to nothing, but their version of it was on a compilation album I have. And it is beautiful - three or four male voices, singing in harmony, with just an acoustic guitar accompanying. Pretty close, I guess to what Gruber and Mohr intended. It fills me with great peace to hear the song, particularly the Thorns version.

Hark the Herald Angels Sing - another old one I love. I like the melody (by Mendelssohn) but the words (by Charles Wesley) are the real treat here: the theme of reconciliation, of good news, of glad tiding. My favorite version, probably, is the one at the end of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" - a youth choir, it's not perfect (it goes a bit off key at the end), but to me that's the version of the song I first think of.

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day (link provided because it's a less-familiar carol). I love a lot of the "old" carols - the pre-1900s ones, the pre-Victorian-sentimentalization-of-Christmas ones. This particular carol is so old (I presume) Wikipedia provides no time period for it. It basically tells the story of Christ's life. Presumably it is Christ "narrating" the song. I love it for these lines:

"To call my true love to my dance;
Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love"

I love it because of the image of dancing (which I spoke about once before); also the image of Christ calling us all his "true love."

Someone somewhere made the comment that this song takes the traditions of the ballads of troubadors - about courtly love and such - and adds the whole extra layer of faith on top of it - that it's no more about the sort of love that takes place in aristocratic courts, but now the sort of love of the Heavenly court.

The version of this I know best is on a CD (one of my favorite Christmas CDs) called "What Cheer" by the Gloria Dei Cantores. It's mostly Medieval and Renaissance carols, mostly a capella or with a little bit of accompaniment that would be appropriate to the time period.

I'm also fond of "Ding Dong Merrily on High." That's another fairly old carol (or at least the tune is; it apparently came from a dance tune). It's written in a self-consciously archaic style (until I looked up some information on it I thought the text was much older than it actually is), and you know? I like things that feel kind of archaic, that carry a tiny whisper of Christmas-in-the-manor or cold dark castles with choirs singing.

Another ancient-sounding carol: "Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel." In my experience this is the typical first-Sunday-of-Advent carol - it is not yet time to rejoice over Christ's birth, and although this song alludes to it, it's also kind of minor-key and meditative and plaintive.

Another old, old carol I love - that's kind of in the plainsong mode - is Of the Father's love begotten. It's heartcrackingly beautiful when it's done the way it was one year at my church - a couple of men with good strong voices, standing up in the balcony, and singing it, a capella, in unison, as a sort of prelude. (It's another carol that you don't have to have a particularly broad range to be able to sing fairly well).

I'm also deeply fond of a lot of the traditional British carols, like the Sussex Carol. Part of it is that they were on albums I grew up listening to, but I also sometimes wonder if part of it is some kind of "genetic memory"? (Most of the ancestors on my Mother's side were British and Scots). I like the Sussex Carol, though, in part, because of its lilting tune. And because the words are joyful and true.

"Good King Wenceslaus" is another favorite, but it occupies an odd position: it's not really a Christmas hymn, as it doesn't really explicitly speak of Christ's birth (King Wenceslaus was, I guess, a Czech or Bohemian king who exemplified Christ's love and service). St. Stephen's day is the day after Christmas (Dec. 26), also known among the British as "boxing day" (the day gifts were given to servants). Again, it's a carol where I thought (when I was a kid, at least) that the text had to be incredibly old, but it's really just from the 19th century (the tune, though, is older). I like this one because I remember singing it and wondering at it as a child.

I think I'll save my commentary on my favorite "secular Christmas songs..." for later.