Carols of the Season

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There is a lot of good music for Christmas, including carols, and with the magic of YouTube we can sample them here!

Carols are of several varieties, and each kind has lovely examples.

• One kind is simply ancient songs and dances that come to us from ancient times; there are medieval carols that are still sung today that come to us from England, France, all the lands that are today Poland, Germany, Austria and Hungary, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, and The Netherlands.  (There are also carols from many other nations, e.g. the Czech Republic / Slovenia, Greece and Russia, not to mention the Middle East, and quite probably Egypt.)  I am not a specialist (though I play one on the Web), so I can only offer a few examples, without supplying the research that you crave for, in your ceaseless thirst for knowledge.

• The Boar's Head Carol, is actually one of the macaronic carols mentioned below.  It is a secular carol, having more to do with the midwinter celebration than Christmas as such.  (There is nothing to connect the birth of Jesus with the winter months.)  This is probably one of the most ancient carols that are still sung today.
  

• Another sort is Victorian carols, a product of the great proliferation of carols of a couple of hundred years ago in England that are essentially Christmas hymns, that simply haven't gone through the rigorous committee process that precedes acceptance as an actual hymn.  Many of these are disguised as ancient carols, and many others of these are indeed actually ancient carols metrified and harmonized in Bach style.  One is Ding Dong Merrily on High, whose tune is is derived from an old French dance called Bransle Officiel.

• In Dulci Jubilo, a so-called macaronic carol, with Latin lines interspersed with English / German lines.
  

• The justly famous and beloved O Holy Night, Cantique de Noel, or Minuit Chretiens ("Midnight, Christians!"), with music by Adolphe Adam, who happened to be Jewish, resulting in the carol being proscribed for decades before it was finally allowed in Catholic churches. This utterly sentimental song has beautifully idealistic words.  This is a delightful performance.  The carol is also lovely sung in French by a tenor.  This is Enrico Caruso, and if you've never heard him, here's your chance.
  

• One of the most interesting and popular modern Christmas hymns is O Little Town of Bethlehem.  This one is very much an Anglo-American collaboration.  The words are by Boston (Philadelphia?) pastor Philip Brooks, who wrote them evidently inspired by a visit to the Holy Land, and the town of Bethlehem, the legendary birthplace of Jesus.  The music is, as it happens, provided by a fascinating variety of composers, because there are actually close to a dozen different tunes to which this hymn is sung.
  
  • Probably the most common tune in the USA is apparently the original one composed for the hymn by one Lewis Redner: St Louis. Here it's sung by Connie Talbot, about whom I know absolutely nothing.
  • The most common tune in Britain is Forest Green, to which in the USA many other hymns are sung, and hardly ever O Little Town.
  • A tune that found some favor is Walford Davies's Christmas Carol.
    
  • A lovely alternative is Bethlehem, by Joseph Barnby. (There was only a horrible MIDI available on the Web, so I put together this file. Unfortunately, there are some clumsy mistakes in my arrangement of Barnby's harmony, which I should have left alone...)  The original tune and harmony is available at the site The Hymns and Carols of Christmas.
    

• Another sort is broadly derived from Christmas hymns, which in turn have many sources, many of them German: e.g. Hark the Herald Angels Sing, whose tune, attributed to F. Mendelssohn, was simply a hymn-tune from one of the many hymn collections he knew, with his wonderful harmony (subsequently improved by David Willcox, and the usual suspects).  
  

•  The poster boy of Christmas Hymns, at least where I grew up, is of course Adeste Fidelis: O come, all ye faithful, words adapted from Prose for Christmas Day, by John of Reading, a British Monk of the fourteenth century.

• Also well known:  Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.

• Let all mortal flesh keep silent  I haven't found a decent recording of this on the Web, but I'll provide a link when I do.  This hymn is intended to be sung unison, and the tune is variously called Picardie, or French Carol.
  

• There are also modern carols, simply compositions by known composers, to supplement the musical diversity available for church and university choirs. 

• One beautiful example is "The Little Road to Bethlehem", by Michael Head.  This performance is exceptional.  (The performance depends critically on the soprano soloist, as well as the treble line.)

• Here's another one: The Three Kings, by Peter Cornelius.  The chorale that weaves through it is Wie schoen leuchtet der Morgenstern, "How brightly beams the morning star", a hymn beloved of Johann Sebastian Bach. (In fact, J. S. Bach's opus no. 1 is a cantata based on that carol.)
  

• Another one: A Spotless rose, by Herbert Howells.  The singing is good, despite all the coughing.  I love the moment when the baritone sings: "The blessed babe..."  Gorgeous!
  

• Here is the little door, sung by Chanticleer, a wonderful American male voice choir.  Words evidently by G. K. Chesterton.
  

• The most famous Christmas carol, arguably, is Silent Night (Stille Nacht, in German), composed by Francis Xavier Gruber. I have written about it earlier, last year.
  

• The Blessed Son of God, music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a carol with very modern harmonies (redolent with major sevenths, and lovely suspensions). The video is a little annoying; just don't look at it.  (If you search on YouTube, there is a beautiful recording sung by a Dutch quartet, where the lines of the harmony are very clear.  Unfortunately it seems a heavy bandwidth is needed for it, for whatever reason.)
  

• Modern carols that derive from folk songs from 'foreign lands', e.g. India, Japan and Korea.  

•  An instance is "Sleep in my arms", created by Malcolm Sargent from a Korean folk song Arirang.
  

• Carols that are metrizations of chants.

• A well-known instance is Veni, veni Emmanuel, which is the source for our well-loved O Come, O Come Emmanuel.  The metrization succeeds is preserving the beautiful modal tune.
  

• Finally, songs that are not carols at all, but simply Christmas songs, that are essentially modern popular songs with a holiday theme, e.g. Jingle Bells, and Feliz Navidad, not to mention Grandma got runover by a reindeer.  (This can be easily converted into a bona fide carol with a few glorias and hallelujas inserted into it.)One of my personal favourites is the Christmas Waltz, by The Carpenters.  (There is an unfortunate fleeting emphasis on "things", entirely unintended, I'm sure.)
  

Archimedes

Another gorgeous aria by J.S.Bach: Wohl euch, ihr auserwählten Seelen

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I'm always rediscovering these arias, aren't I!

This one (I don't know what the words mean) is available on YouTube in several versions.

The first one is by Bach Collegium Stuttgart, conducted by Helmut Rilling, and in this recording sung, I believe by Helen Watts.  The Stuttgart uses modern instruments, in contrast to other orchestras that more increasingly use original instruments.  As you can hear, modern instruments (which, most significantly, use steel strings on the violins and violas, etc.) sound fine on Bach arias.  The flutes are regular silver flutes, in contrast to original instrument ensembles, which use recorders.  (I'll try to put in a picture of a recorder sometime.)  Unfortunately, sister Helen seems to be simply singing the piece without much real feeling.  But Bach certainly can be performed like that.

Another version is by The English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, with Magdalena Kozena singing the aria.  Magdalena manages to inject a little more conviction into her interpretation, but it is still still cool singing for Ms Kozena.  (Perhaps the words mean something fairly neutral, such as The Sun Rises In The East.  Wait; euch means y'all.  It means "Y'all should jolly well auserwählten yourselves.")  Here you can clearly hear the recorders, which have a lovely limpid sound, particularly attractive to romantics and antiquarians such as myself.  This version, at least, goes all the way to the end (grumble-grumble).

The photo (a composite from Google Images) shows three different sizes of recorders.  The young fellow seems to be playing a soprano, the woman with him an alto, and the lady above is playing a particularly ornate tenor recorder (probably at a renaissance fair somewhere).  There are also bass, and sopranino recorders.

[Added later: I have just found out that Helen Watts died on October 9, 2009.  This great Welsh contralto has given us a great many wonderful arias in the oratorio repertoire.  May she be remembered long.]

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Growing up Male or Female in America

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Thomas Bartlett recently wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about being a boy: The Puzzle of Boys.  (The title of this post links to the article ---at least I hope so.)

The fascinating thing about gender differences to me --certainly in humans--- is that they're so hard to think about objectively, and yet they're so fascinating when someone does write about them.  After thirty years, since feminism was first given the stature of a popular movement in the seventies, it seems that bringing up girls to be the way they had been for millennia: pretty and nurturing, is still going on in quite ordinary homes all over the world, and bringing up boys to be willful and aggressive (and "mission-oriented") is also taking place.  There was a limited movement towards a more gender-neutral approach to child-rearing, started as early as Benjamin Spock, but declining greatly during the more conservative times in the US, though enlightened conservatives must certainly be aware of the dangers of too enthusiastic gender-reinforcement in early childhood.

I suspect that there may be a subconscious belief in most Americans that the gender differences, even reinforced by feelings of discrimination among both genders, is what provides the tension that makes the social-cultural-economic dynamics of this society work.  There might be a suspicion that since it is Sex that drives the marketplace, too much unisex anything is bad for business.

I'm determined to write at greater length on this topic, but I'm going to close for now.

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The Irish Dance to "Mr Blue Sky"

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Quite by accident, I got interested in a song by Electric Light Orchestra (ELO):  Mr Blue Sky, which was 'performed' during a recent rally in Ireland---having to do with some funding for the Arts issue.  ELO seem to have recorded this song before I got to be aware of them as the band that was featured in the eighties musical Xanadu, starring Olivia (what a babe) Newton-John (and, of course, Gene Kelly, of "Singing in the Rain" fame).

ELO originated in Birmingham, and perhaps it's this fact that causes their dialect to be so thick; even the Beatles at their worst would sing quite clearly.  (In fact, when singing, the Beatles seemed to mimic American pronunciation.)  From Gerry & the Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits and the Monkees, for instance, you got very thick dialect.  (I realize these other bands were not from Birmingham!)

The song, Mr Blue Sky has all the innocent delight of Here Comes the Sun.  (Someone evidently loved the four opening chords of Paul McCartney's Yesterday, and used them to open Mr B.S. to good effect.)

On YouTube, there is a delightful cover of MrBS by the British artist Lily Allen, who has a very charming voice, remarkably suited to this particular song. But  I wonder whether that pounding beat can't be replaced by something just as energetic, but perhaps a little more sophisticated?  [On second thoughts, Ms Allen wreaks her own kind of havoc on the lyrics, with those glottal stop things they do over there.  Perhaps there's something about the song that requires a sort of strong regional accent...]

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December Named National Awareness Month

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The Onion reports that December has been named National Awareness Month.  All the details are at their site (just click on the heading of this post).

Well; there doesn't seem a lot more to be said; the old Onion seems to have said it all.  Also look on this site for reported alternatives for President Obama's war plan.

Arch, very worried

Beatles, After the End: More Great Stuff

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[This was a post started in 2009, and never published!  Here it is, warts and all:]

Not only did the Beatles disappoint their many fans by revealing their group to be shockingly mortal, they went on to pursue creative solo careers, almost the first really big rock 'n' roll band to get a posthumous life of this sort.

John Lennon, one of the Senior Beatles, made albums with a couple of backing groups: The Plastic Ono Band, with his most characteristically angst-filled solo album, at a time when he was in counseling.  Imagine was made with a big studio band with many big names among them.  Some time later came Mind Games, and many years later, he made Double Fantasy, shortly before he was killed by a crazed fan.  (BTW, an album I have just been acquainted with this minute is Walls and Bridges.)  For my money, Shaved Fish, a compilation of Lennon's greatest post-Beatles hits, is a winner from first track to last.

Mother, and Working Class Hero are notable tracks on Plastic Ono Band.  On Imagine, apart from the title track, there is Jealous Guy, and Oh Yoko, both well known, but not favorites of mine.  I should mention Give Peace a Chance, and So this is Christmas, and Watching the Wheels. Here are two favorites: Mind Games, and Aisumasen. Another is Whatever gets you through the night, with Elton John.

Paul McCartney, soon after the demise of the Beatles, formed a successful group called Wings, and released a sequence of highly successful albums through the seventies and eighties.  His style now diverged dramatically from the joint Lennon-McCartney style of their Beatles compositions, and most fans would consider that the whole had been far greater than the sum of the parts, certainly as they survived the breakup of the group.

Before Wings, Paul recorded McCartney with his wife, Linda, which contained the songs Junk, and Maybe I'm amazed. Admiral Halsey, Live and Let Die, and other songs from McCartney and Wings were heard all through the seventies, and it was clear that at least 50% of the charm of the Beatles was the disarming whimsy of Paul McCartney, which combined with the anger of John Lennon, which was transformed by his humor (and sometimes directed inward, at himself) together gave the Beatles the magic formula.

Ringo Starr released a couple of albums which contained a few tuneful songs, and was helped enthusiastically by George Harrison.  Ringo himself, despite his frustration with John and Paul, never held back when called upon for a special event, for charity or for the sheer fun of doing something creative. He continued to hold the Beatles banner high, even when it was almost certain that no project could possibly attract the support of all the surviving Beatles, after John's death.

George Harrison, in my estimation, was the one who surprised us all. Heading in a new direction with music which had its roots in country music and southern rock, George wrote a sequence of a half dozen songs that should earn him a place as one of the great songwriters of the century: My Sweet Lord, Give me Love, What is Life, All things must Pass, these songs are almost painfully tuneful, and they deserve to be re-sung and rerecorded for a long time to come. Forgive me for giving a link for Paul's rendition of All things must Pass; I prefer his more rhythmic version to George's slow, philosophical performance. There are tons of other Harrison songs: those written for Concert for Bangladesh, a number of them performed at Concert for George.

McCartney is developing into an even better live performer than he used to be with the Beatles (John was probably the weak link there; in most of the video clips he looks very much under the weather), and some of Paul's live performances of Beatles songs compare well with the original studio versions.  It's heartbreaking, in 2009, to be left with only McCartney and Starr, but we must learn to be thankful for all that recorded treasure of the Beatles in their time.

Archimedes

The End: The Last Three Beatles Albums

The purpose of these posts is to focus on the music, and only secondarily to talk about the musicians themselves, though to some extent their personalities intrude into a discussion of the music.

All three of The Beatles, (the White Album), Abbey Road, and Let It Be were worked on concurrently; if not concurrent, their creation periods overlapped considerably. Abbey Road is more explicitly a valedictory album, consisting of an effort to cooperate in producing one last piece of work together. Let it be --the movie and the album taken together, documents the struggle to stay together, and its failure, while The Beatles (White Album) must have started out being a straightforward album, in the course of which it became clear that things were going horribly awry. I have no documentation of these claims, so you have to take them for what they're worth (which is: not much).

The White Album ("The Beatles") consisted of two discs, and contained a number of gems; I shall mention only a few: Back in the USSR was a satire of California Girls by the Beach Boys,  While my guitar gently weeps practically invented heavy metal, a genre that is hard to define. George Harrison's stature as a composer was now undeniable.  The guitar solos included work by Eric Clapton. Rocky Raccoon is a hilarious spoof on Wild West ballads for children's TV, presumably.  Obladi-Oblada is a song much admired in some quarters.  Blackbird, Why don't we do it in the road, and Julia are three more interesting songs on the first disc.  Blackbird is a lovely piece of guitar work by Paul McCartney, while Julia is an ode to John's late mother, featuring John on guitar.  There are many instances of Paul McCartney reemerging as a serious rocker, e.g. Helter Skelter.

The second disc contains Mother Nature's Son (also recorded by John Denver, of all people), Sexy Sadie, and Revolution.

Abbey Road seems to me what the Beatles wanted to be their farewell album.  There is a song, The End, which has each of the three guitarists playing a guitar solo (I can't remember which segment is by which), and a drum solo (or solos, who knows?).  Most interestingly, the album was created with never more than two Beatles in the studio at the same time, possibly even only one of them at a time.  All the combining of tracks was done at the engineering stage.

Before the heartbreaking last tracks, they managed to squeeze in a pile of terrific songs: Come Together, a Lennon song on the lines of Walrus.  It goes way beyond simple entertainment into a defining experience; Something, by George Harrison, possibly the most effective song he ever wrote, and performed incomparably by the Beatles (despite the obvious dysfunctionality); Maxwell's Silver Hammer (Paul McCartney), silly black humor; Here comes the Sun (Harrison), a startling ode to the Sun in the midst of all the negative 'vibes', a truly sunny song, one of my all time favorites; Because, an eerily beautiful song featuring something like 8 tracks of John, layered.  A little later comes an amazing medley of fve songs: Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, the first two by Lennon, the last three by McCartney, all seamlessly stitched into an amazing compound song.  It may not be great art, but it is great entertainment, made all the more poignant by the fact of being created piecemeal.

Let it Be: in my mind, this will always be the soundtrack of the movie.  The uncharacteristic production was by Phil Spector, but by now it is so familiar that I don't miss George Martin's hand at the controls.  To mention only the songs that have become extra well known: Don't let me down (the B side of the Get Back single); Across the Universe, by John Lennon, with an Indian flavor, more recently released in a more unplugged recording; Let it Be, by Paul McCartney; One after 909, a song written when they were still in school; The Long and Winding Road, McCartney; and, of course, the famous rooftop performance of Get Back.  (I love this particular clip!  Apparently they performed it 3 times on the rooftop.)

[Added later:] I had to add something more; I felt I had short-changed this album.  Let It Be, though surrounded by tragedy, in that it depicts the four Beatles in an almost constant state of disagreement, does present a completely different Beatles sound.  I, Me, Mine, a strange song sung by John in a peculiar voice, I dig a pony, also a Lennon song; Two of Us, a duet by John and Paul,  One after 909, another duet; all of these seem utterly relaxed, and back away from the heavy metal sound in some of the albums immediately preceding.  Further, the songs in this album, in particular, even ones where John and Paul sing together, manage to present their contrasting characters and personalities simultaneously.  Is it the genius of Phil Spector (the Motown producer and arranger responsible for the sound of Diana Ross and the Supremes, whom Beatles fans loved to malign for having produced Let it Be), or was their sound evolving towards Let it Be all along?  In any case, it seems to me that the Beatles could not have made a whole lot of albums with the Let it Be flavor; it was possible because it was the only one of its kind.

There were other songs: Hey Jude, The Ballad of John and Yoko, not to mention the songs for Yellow Submarine; obviously we're not going to talk about all the Beatles' songs.  What I've presented are my favorite songs, and the ones that were --and are-- heard most often.  For those who want to immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of the Beatles on the eve of the breakup, the four Anthology DVDs are wonderful.  They are presented by Paul, Ringo and George in such a way that one can choose what to believe, and what to disregard based on what one knows of the character of each of them.

Four such talented individuals, with such unique personalities; what were the chances that they would get together, and find that they were compatible?  What were the chances that their different musical instincts could remain convergent for so long?  But it happened, and the result was a hundred amazing songs that influenced popular music for half a century.  They influenced harmonic styles in pop music, lyrics, the sophistication of bass lines and guitar themes, studio recording techniques, their responsibilities towards their fans, the media, the development of the idea of a pop musician as a multi-dimensional person with many interests.  They expanded their middle-class values to embrace many liberal ideals that were developing in society with grace and a fair degree of patience.  They were arrogant as youths, but learned humility in some measure, not an easy thing for such successful individuals.  And their music is worth preserving, and keeping before the public.

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