John Lennon's Eternal Christmas Anthem

I have been a staunch Beatles fan for close to 57 years!  (I initially wrote '67 years,' but I was off by a decade.) I have been an ardent fan of each of the Beatles for most of these years, but most definitely a John Lennon fan since he was denied immigration into the USA.

Most Beatles fans, early on, took a strong dislike to Yoko Ono; no doubt they felt that she was at least partly responsible for the breakup of the group.  I'll say what I think about that another time, but, you know, people can't go on being the same as they always were (ask David Byrne!) ... sooner or later you have to accept that, if you had to choose between what you want, and what the fans want, you can't choose the fans every time.

Yoko certainly had a huge influence on John Lennon.  She was probably instrumental in urging him to stand up for himself, and not to succumb to the group---thing.  In addition to that, she made John Lennon aware of what was happening in Vietnam---things that many of us have come to accept as being wrong-headed.  The US military and the US congress was determined to stop the spread of communism.  It wasn't our job to halt this spread, just as much as it isn't the job of the Christian Church to stop the spread of alternate lifestyles.  Thoughts and prayers will have to do.  It was the military might of the USA that prevented the Vietnamese nation from prosecuting the illegality of the war in an international court.  On a personal basis, many Americans have made their peace with Vietnamese citizens whom they have come to know as individuals, but as a nation, we have taken the principle of "Never say sorry!" too far.

Given the confluence of Christmas, the (imminent) end of the Vietnam War, and John Lennon's immigration status, I feel that the song (two songs, really: So this is Christmas, and Give Peace a Chance!) is an amazingly gentle piece of persuasion.  You can see the influence of Yoko, in the strong rhetorical points, and the gentleness, which comes from nowhere: whose is it?---that moderates the severity of the tone of the lyrics:

[John Lennon, Yoko Ono]
So this is Christmas!
And what have you done?
Another year over,
A new one just begun.

Most of my readers very likely know these words.  They're essentially an introduction to the rest of the song.  ('And what have you done?' probably comes across as a bit sanctimonious.)

And so this is Christmas,
I hope you have fun;
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young.

This verse captures an important characteristic of the feast, namely the gathering of the tribe, the old and the young!  During Covid, of course, we couldn't do the traditional thing, but in the mid seventies, we did, and Lennon / Ono embrace the full spirits of the festival.

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong

...

[chanting]
War is over over
If you want it
War is over

 

Music of the Christmas Season

All the music that floods the air during the season (especially the shopping season, gotta love it) brings out strong reactions from listeners, usually bad reactions. 

Let me start at the beginning. As a child, my earliest Christmas memories were the most common carols and hymns:
Adeste Fideles (“O come all ye faithful“, from a medieval Latin poem, evidently by a British monk during the Roman occupation);
Stille Nacht, hurriedly composed by Francis Grüber one night when the organ was out of commission, and they had to have carols accompanied by a guitar;
“Ding dong merrily on high”, played on our ancient His Master’s Voice gramophone (phonograph). [Note: “Ding dong merrily on high”appears to be sung to a French (dance) tune, Branslé Officiél.] 

There were also local carols, hardly ever heard outside a 100-mile radius of where I grew up. As I grew older, I found myself participating in actually singing these carols, and since my mother was the local musical impressario, I began to learn unusual carols, taken from the pre-eminent scholarly carol book of the time: The Oxford Book of Carols, edited by the venerable Martin Shaw. To this day, some of those carols remain relatively unknown, and as such the book remains an excellent source for ‘new’ carols. 

Eventually I got old enough to sing in the school choir, and I came under the influence of the celebrated carol festival of King’s College, Cambridge. This influence, felt throughout the Episcopal Church, had both good and bad consequences: the use of boy trebles and male altos, the use of the organ to accompany everything, the use of Victorian harmonies, and a strict metrization of the carols, and the canonical nine readings from the bible. The choir was moderately small, consisting of sixteen trebles, and about four each of the other parts. The director of the choir for many years had been Sir David Willcocks, and his personal influence over the Christmas Carol Industry has been enormous. 

The next, and final, step for me was to be given responsibility for an entire service of carols. I became interested in where the carols came from. They were medieval Christmas dances, for the most part, since Christmas had replaced the ancient midwinter festivals that kept up the spirits of the dwellers in northern climes during the dark, dismal days of December.  (Say that ten times real fast.) 

Romanticism has many aspects; two of these are exoticism and eroticism. Though in common parlance, the word romance is most often understood in its erotic sense (romance novels, etc), the exotic aspects of romanticism is almost as important (e.g. Orientalism, Science Fiction, Egyptology.) Thus, carols fascinate us especially if they are from ancient times (remoteness in time) and from far away (the East, South America), or unusual in some way (Latin rhythms, calypso) or accompanied by unusual instruments. (For instance, consider “Mary’s boy child,” made popular by Harry Belafonte, and Nina and Frederik.) So when people look for variety in Christmas music, they look at these alternatives, since the spirit of romanticism is complementary to the nostalgia of Christmas. 

This post has been influenced by my friend Ileana, who wrote to me deploring the fact that most stores and radio stations keep playing the same songs, until they sound too hacked to be tolerable. The ‘variety’ offerings in the CD market are very dull, and unavoidably so, since the variety offered is relative to the compiler, and, most of all, constrained by the necessity to be marketable.  This means that the contents of the CD must appeal to the widest possible audience, which in turn means that they must be dull, by definition. Dullness in taste is apparently a survival trait in the human species. (The individual who survives to propagate his/her genes is the one who has not been bored to death before he or she can do the propagation.) Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a Christmas collection that one could play through the season, through the quiet hours before midnight of Christmas Eve, to the first few carols of Christmas Day itself, and more lighthearted songs for later in the season? I would like to see a collection along these lines: 

(1) Traditional hymns tastefully performed: O little town of Bethlehem, O come all ye faithful, Brightest and best of the suns of the morning, etc. And let’s not forget Quem Pastores Laudavere. (A slightly more renaissance-sounding version is here.)
(2) Traditional French carols, e.g. Il est né le divin Enfant. Charpentier has immortalized several of these in his Midnight Mass for Christmas.
(3) Traditional German carols: Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (sung here by the choir of the same St Thomas’s Church School at which Bach worked when he was alive); Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (the clip is of an elaborate setting by Bach, his opus No. 1, movement 1.); Vom Himmel hoch; as well as chorales made famous by Bach: In dulci jubilo, Break forth o beautious heavenly light; modern German and German-Swiss and German-Austrian carols, including Silent Night (Stille Nacht), and German versions of lovely Latin carols: O du fröhliche, o du selige; etc.
(4) Medieval English carols: Lully lulla, thou little tiny child; He came all so still; Lullay myn lyking; ...
(5) Medieval Basque, Catalonian, Spanish and Portuguese carols.
(6) Carols from the Middle East, and Eastern Europe: the Cuckoo Carol, the Zither Carol.
(7) Modern carols from other lands, tastefully selected. An example is Arirang, a carol created by Malcolm Sargent from a Korean Lullaby, and Ariva-rararo, a carol in a collection by D.T. Niles, from a Tamil lullaby. Cantique de Noel, by Adolphe Adam (sung by Joan Baez), (sung by Roberto Alagna).
(8) Modern English carols, e.g. The Little Road to Bethlehem (Michael Head), one of my favorites. Another lovely arrangement is by R. R. Terry, of Myn Lyking, with a string accompaniment by John Rutter.
(9) Last, but not least, Celtic carols, and carols of Ireland. Searching for an Irish carol, I stumbled upon the Cherry Tree Carol, which I had always thought of as English, but what do I know? 

If I do not see you before Christmas: a merry Christmas, a happy holiday season to all my readers, and any others who happen to stumble upon these pages! 

Arch, blissfully listening to Schlafe, mein Liebster

Christmases in the Tropics

For years my family lived in the tropics, and at Christmastime, with the weather defiantly non-snowy, and for weeks preceding the season, we would join with everybody around us in the frenzy of getting ready for the holiday: music and drama. One of my earliest memories of Christmas was attending a carol service, and a performance of Adam's Cantique de Noel. Oh, how heavenly to the ears of a little person of seven or eight, who knew nothing of schmalz! I still adore that song, so naive, so earnest, so easy to ridicule! To me it still represents the season.

At school, too the choir began rehearsing in late September for the Christmas carols, patterned after the annual event at King's College, Cambridge. I first joined that hallowed group, the College Choir, in 7th grade. The choirmaster was an enthusiastic dreamer. (I later learned that he was not so enchanted with the King's College pattern as I had assumed, and was seeking something more in tune with the society around us.) That first carol service in which I sang was like a visit to another planet, a dream!

The following year, the fact that I had some knowledge of music was discovered, and I was assigned to teach the tenors and the bases their parts in Rubbra's "Dormi Jesu," a delicate and sombre lullaby that probably reflected more of Rubbra's despair than the worry of the poor Virgin herself. (The lovely song 'Sweet was the song the Virgin Sung' seems to capture the mood much more convincingly, but what do we know of the thoughts and fears of a first century child-mother?)  Thus were laid the seeds of a short-lived spell as a coach for several choirs, which I abandoned simply because I could not for the life of me keep time! But for the first thirty years of my life, at Christmas time I was totally immersed in music, both performance and appreciation.

 It was in grade nine that our old choirmaster took a year's absence, and a teacher newly returned from England was assigned the job. One miraculous day in October, we learned two chorales from Bach's Christmas Oratorio: "Break forth, O beauteous heavenly light", [Brich an, o schönes Morgenlicht], and "Beside thy cradle here I stand" [Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier]. For the first time I was acquainted with feelings and textures outside the firmly Victorian culture of King's --something that was happening at King's too, incidentally.

Years later, once my daughter left home and went on to create a home of her own, I found myself yearning for that feeling of being involved in creating the Christmas holiday. Nothing could combat the oppressive superficiality of The Holiday Season as much as being involved in making certain kinds of Christmas music. I had stopped being a believer since 5th grade, and I did not miss the religious feeling of Christmas as such. But I did miss the innocence of the central story of Christmas, which permeated the activities that I was no longer a part of.

By this time, I was well acquainted with the entire Weihnachtsoratorium of Bach. Towards the end of his life, Bach created two incredible choral edifices: the St Matthew Passion, and the Mass in B minor. The Christmas Oratorio is a more humble, human-scaled creation, more comfortable for ordinary human beings, a family-friendly miracle, possibly more musically inspired than Handel's Messiah, but equally accessible. (Don't get me wrong; Messiah is a miracle itself. Messiah is a further step towards the melody-dominated world of Mozart than is Bach's Oratorio.)

 So I listened to the Weihnachtsoratorium (=Christmas Oratorio) over and over again, and it has become a way of going once again, with the shepherds, to see the child in the manger, to paraphrase the beautiful bidding prayer of the King's College service of carols. And this year, there are for me two more upon another shore and in a greater light, as it must be for those of you who have lost loved ones.

A few years ago, I had to sit down and write a story that would keep me company through the season, but to my joy, I discovered a story that perfectly captured my feelings, and here's an excerpt. Christine is a young eleventh-grader, involved in a music festival at which the Bach oratorio is to be performed, and Maria is a German contralto soloist. Christine has been assigned to "babysit" Maria, who has turned up a little earlier than expected.

Archimedes