Christmas

In “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear,” What’s “It”?

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Image by b0red from Pixabay; I like this image because the angel isn’t doing anything not included in the biblical story.

I classify this carol along with “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” as having a very confusing title. In order to understand the meaning we’ll have to dive into a little grammar wonkery, with some biblical doctrine along the way.

Okay. Everybody got that? The lyrics were written by an American Unitarian Universalist minister, Edmund H. Sears, and, notably, they do not mention the actual birth of Christ at all. Let’s look at the first two lines of the carol itself:

It came upon a [or the] midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,

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Did the lyricist of the famous song actually get to go “walking in a winter wonderland?”

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

In a word: No. Why not? Because he was in a tuberculosis sanitarium. How weird and sad is that? Very.

So, back in the winter of 1934, 33-year-old Richard Smith was sitting in his room at the West Mountain Sanitarium after having a recurrence of his TB, trying to keep himself occupied by entering jingle contests for ad copy. (He actually won the Maybelline eye shadow contest with the slogan “The Eyes Have It.” Clever!) He could see children playing in the snow outside his window and was reminded of how much he’d enjoyed those same activities when he was growing up in the small town of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. A powerful nostalgia was at work here, but, given the actual wording of the song I think there was something else going on: he missed his wife, Jane, whom he’d married in 1930.

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Z. Randall Stroope, Heritage and HODIE

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image accessed via zrstroope.com

A Rich Vein of Influence

The “Z” stands for “Zane.” Just in case you’re wondering.

Now that we have that out of the way we can get to the real stuff, notably the great compositional heritage embodied in the work of this very-active American composer. A look at his teachers and their teachers and their teachers shows a line going all the way back to the great French composer Gabriel Fauré, who lived from the mid-1800’s until the 1920’s and who in turn had been taught by none other than Camille Saint-Saëns. Wow. Ancestry.com should do a family tree on this.

Fauré had a long and varied career as a performer, composer, and teacher. The next step on the ladder of Stroope’s influences came from Fauré’s student Nadia Boulanger. It’s fair to say that while no one today is going to program a concert featuring her own works, she has permeated American music to a surprising degree, with pupils including Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, Quincy Jones and Burt Bacharach. Two pupils relevant to Stroope were Cecil Effinger and Normand Lockwood, both of whom became Stroope’s teachers and mentors.

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Was the Singing of the Angels on Christmas Night “Soft,” “Sweet,” or “Faint”?

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Image by falco from Pixabay. Kind of a cool contemporary stained-glass depiction of the angels and shepherds.

Let me start out by questioning the very supposition in the above title: did the angels in the Christmas story actually do any singing at all?

Here’s the relevant text from the translation I know best, the King James Version:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, . . . And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. (Luke 2:9-10, 13-14)

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Who were the Magi?

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Image accessed via Pixabay.

So, to begin, let me just say, once again, with feeling, that the Magi did not show up on Christmas night with the shepherds. The Gospel of Matthew 2:11 says, “On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him.” At this point it makes sense to think that it’s been at least a year since the Magi set out from their home. I know that those colorfully-bedecked camels (which are never mentioned in the biblical narrative) add quite a splash to the manger scenes we set up every year, but they weren’t there.

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What’s the Historical Background of “Do You Hear What I Hear?”?

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Note the nicety of the double question mark, please!

Okay. If you’ve ever thought about it at all, didn’t you assume that this Christmas carol was along the lines of an old folk song? I certainly did, at least partly because the words don’t make a lot of sense—to me, anyway. But when I googled “Do you hear what I hear meaning” I found something quite different, and rather surprising, about its source.

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Is the “Bell Carol” Only About . . . Bells? Not By a Long Shot!

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Yet another of my many posts that starts out with the words “I assumed,” as in “I assumed that the ‘Bell Carol’ was a traditional Christmas folk song.” Well, it’s always helpful to read the info on the sheet music itself. Over the title are the words “to D. V. W., seventy years young,” and at the bottom of the first page is the statement “This carol was commissioned by the Bach Choir in celebration of the seventieth birthday of Sir David Willcocks.” The composition date is 1989, and Willcocks would indeed have been 70 that year since he was born in 1919. Was Willcocks especially fond of Christmas music, or bells, or both? The answer to that question is lost to history, I’m afraid. The author of both words and music is William Mathias, who lived until 1992 and seems to have been composing right up until the end of his life.

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Mendelssohn’s Farewell–Three Sections from His “Christus”

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Image by marian anbu juwan from Pixabay

O-o-o-o-h man! Are there ever going to be some deep theological highways and byways in this post. So hang on and let’s get started with this wonderful choral piece which was tragically truncated by Mendelssohn’s early death in 1847 at the age of 38. He had apparently planned to write an entire oratorio, Christus, following the same trajectory as Handel’s Messiah, but left only a few finished sections and a number of fragments. A set of three excerpts dealing with the birth of Christ is well suited for use at Christmas, and consists of a soprano recitative, a male trio, and a chorus.

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What’s with the Twelve Days of Christmas?

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I remember back in elementary school being teased a bit by some Jewish classmates about the superiority of Hanukkah over Christmas: “You only have one day to get presents, but we have eight.” I’m sure I wasn’t quick-witted enough to mention the plethora of gift-giving in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with its extra days of celebration. So here’s the information I didn’t have back then.

But first, before you read any further, you must watch the absolutely definitive performance of this song by none other than John Denver and the Muppets. Here’s the link (sorry about the horrible low-res quality):

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The Wild and Wacky World of Wassailing

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no image attribution given on the website https://www.manmadediy.com/

Oh my goodness! If you’ve read many of my posts on this site you’re probably familiar with my saying, “Well, I thought this was a simple song . . .” But nowhere would this phrase be more appropriate than it is here, as I attempt to explain the concept of “wassailing” and then apply those ideas to two traditional Christmas songs that are often performed during the holidays, “Gloucestershire Wassail (Wassail, Wassail, All Over the Town)” and “Here We Come A-Wassailing.”

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