Some Christmas music

Well, except for one person who was out sick for my machine-graded exam, I'm done with exams for this semester.

(I'm glad I'm done. This was a tough semester, mainly because of the overload).

Some music for Christmas. One of my all-time favorite pop Christmas songs is, in fact "The Christmas Song," and I tend to prefer the Nat King Cole version. (I know, I KNOW I have heard a version of just him singing and playing the piano, and I prefer that over the more sweetened versions ("mit Orchester", you might say - kind of like the old Viennese phrase, mit Schlag. In some cases, the "Schlag" is a bit too much, a bit too sweet)

But I can't find that version on YouTube.

(Okay, I searched some more. This one is CLOSE, but is not quite the arrangement I'm thinking of):



As it turns out, Cole did not write the song. (I always thought he had, when I was younger, because his version is the one everyone knows, and frankly, I think it's the best version). Mel Torme was the one who wrote it. (I cannot think of Mel Torme without thinking of the old sitcom "Night Court," it was a running gag that Harry Anderson's character was a huge Mel Torme fan):



There are lots of other pop Christmas songs I like, but I think that one's my favorite.

I also like "Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas," at least in the slightly-less-cheerified format (where they sing, "someday soon we all will be together, if the Fates allow, until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow") as it was in the earlier versions. I like that version because there's the gentle understanding (or so I interpret it) that Christmas ISN'T always perfectly merry; some years the people you love are away (my understanding is that it was big in the waning years of WWII, because of course many, many families were separated by that war - really, a very large proportion of US families, more than we might realize, had sons or husbands or brothers serving overseas). Or circumstances prevent having a "big" Christmas, so you have to have a "merry little" one.

I will admit that when I'm in a bleaker mood this song can make me cry a little. Especially some years, when I find myself thinking back over the year and the people I knew who departed in that past year.



Among sacred songs or hymns....well, I have too many favorites to count. There are so many I love, some of which you almost never hear outside of specialist recordings. All the old British "Cathedral carols" (like the Essex carol*)

(*I confess, I find the original version of the Coventry carol a little difficult emotionally, as it references (pretty strongly) the Slaughter of the Innocents.)

And the wonderful John Rutter stuff, both the genuinely old pieces, and the new-pieces-written-in-that-tradition.

If I had to choose one, though, it would be Silent Night. I've heard many versions of this - sung accapella by untrained voices, sung by choirs backed with an organ, sung to piano accompaniment, sung with a lone guitar - and it works all those ways. I do prefer it played a bit faster than some churches do it; it has a nice, graceful waltz tempo that playing it just a bit faster brings out.

And I've heard it adapted: made cajunesque, or country, or, as someone I know says, "churched up" (that is: given sort of a southern Gospel style). And it works in all those ways.

I also love it because of the legend (which is probably not true but I still love it): that the first Christmas Franz Gruber played it, he had to arrange it for guitar, because the organ in his church was out of order (some versions of the legend say a mouse chewed the leather bellows of the organ and it sprang a leak). I still think it sounds good sung to guitar.

A story about it that has historical backing: during the Christmas Truce of WWI, one hundred years ago this year, this was a song that the "Tommies" and the "Jerries" sang during their brief truce: the British singing in English and the Germans in German.

Here's a slightly "country" sounding acoustic version of it, by the acoustic rock group The Thorns. I like this version:



I think I like this version because, again, it's simple: just the singers and the guitar, no orchestration, no sweetening, what seems like minimal afterprocessing. I tend to feel like with things like Christmas songs and hymns, the song should be about THE SONG and its lyrics, what it means, than about vocal acrobatics on the part of the singers. (That may be why I generally prefer the Nat Cole or Bing Crosby versions of the popular carols - or at any rate, the slightly older versions, from the days before it was so much about how many high notes the singer could hit or how many strings could be packed onto the tracks.)


And here's a Cajun version, because why not?