Two Stay-At-Home Mothers Decided to Make Some Music. You Won't Believe What Happened Next.

...Actually, you will believe what happened, because it's not all strange.

We spent the weekend with Elizabeth Duffy and family and her brand-new gorgeous kitchen. Elizabeth's husband is a craftsman by avocation, and he and Darwin spent many productive hours out in his barn on Sunday working on a spur-of-the-moment project, a custom screen door to replace our barbarous aluminum thing in our kitchen, with gaps in the panels so large the cat escapes through them. Saturday night Darwin talked about the difficulties he'd had trying to find a replacement at Home Depot for our oddly-sized door, Joe said he had wood that size out in the barn, and on Sunday they set to work planing, routing, and dry-fitting poplar pieces into a frame that we'll finish at home. Darwin loves woodworking when he has a chance to do it, and it was a real pleasure for him to work with a friend who has such a mastery of his craft, not to mention an amazing complement of tools and machinery.

While the fellows were building in the barn and the kids were charging around playing baseball, Elizabeth and I sat on the patio with our nursing babies and our drinks and talked writing shop, and discussed how to revive the quality of the blogging community against the cheap controversy-mongering of the Facebook and Twitter, and delighted in our mutual discovery of Anne Kennedy, and sighed at how the big boys and girls are still on this side of childhood, unconscious of each other except as team mates and Monopoly adversaries. And we had our own spur-of-the-moment artistic moment: "Hey, let's play some music!"

Both of us had years of music lessons, Elizabeth on cello and me on piano, so we passed babies to the fathers, who were all sawdusty from the barn, and hitched up chairs and tuned instruments. And then, the music. It wasn't the heavenly choirs, but it was a moment of adult artistic collaboration. It was practice, and error, and "Let's take it from this measure," and "What if we played it this way?", and "Hey, do you know this piece?", heedless of the chaos swirling behind, and occasionally on top, of us. It was honing and trying it one more time to get it just right, and laughing when I inevitably played the major chord at the end instead of the minor.

ANd meanwhile, the life of the house when on. The kids were happy, and we were happy, even as we tried take after take to get a good recording. And in the end, none of them really took because either there was too much commotion in the background, or I played the wrong thing in the more complicated sections, or the sound was off, or the baby's head was in the way of Elizabeth's bow. Whenever we watched a take, we had to laugh at our desperate expressions as we focused on just hitting the notes in harmony, being amateurs out of practice. But oh, was it fun, and the Darwins ended up leaving about three hours later than we meant to because it seemed like the perfect take was just within our grasp. As we left, Elizabeth and I were wishing we could convene a regional mothers' chamber orchestra for everyone who still remembers the thrill of the ensemble.

Anyway, here's a snippet of us playing Handel's Sarabande. Cello, piano, chorus of howling children.

Tune sans Tune

For the past two weeks, I had a tune in my head, and I couldn't remember where I'd heard it. It was from something I had watched, the theme to a miniseries maybe, but which series I didn't know. There it was, thrumming over and over again in my brain, something kind of Irishy with a martial drum beat, and fading away to some quick whistley notes. Darwin and I watch all the same stuff, so I hummed it to him, but our musical sensibilities weren't aligning and I couldn't get across the beat and the whistley notes.

And still I heard the tune. Friends online must have seen the same series, but how was I to ask them? The internet is still mainly a medium for written communication. If you remember a scene from a movie, you can describe it. Throw out a quote, and somebody will come back with the next line, the movie it's from, and a link to the IMDB page. Describe a painting, and likely someone will recognize it from words alone. But how can you ask about a tune in writing? "Something kind of Irishy with a martial drum beat, and fading away to some quick whistley notes" isn't much to go on, and could describe any number of tunes.

About ten years ago, when I was still playing the violin, I ran into a form of notation called ABC. I'd thought it was simply a way to transcribe traditional Irish tunes (see: 12 variations on The Irish Washerwoman written in ABC), but it turns out to be a whole programming language. Though it seems like it would be too tedious to write out anything much longer than a traditional 16-measure jig or reel, you could presumably program out Beethoven's Fifth without the benefit of a single staff.

So, here's my mystery tune in characters:

X: 1
T: Unknown
M: 4/4

DF3-|F4|FG3-|G4|Ac3-|c2d2|FG3-|G4-|
G2f2|e2d2|de3|c4|cB3-|B4|f2d2|c2G2:|

where X = reference number (required first field), T = title, M = meter, caps = the octave of middle C, lowercase = the octave above middle C, number = beats held, - = tie, | = measure, :| = repeat

The problem is that dropping this into a blog post or in a Facebook status is not going to garner you much help unless your audience understands the language, knows music well enough to apply it, and either has access to an instrument or has the ability to sight-sing.

(For the sake of cheating, here's the ABC notation translated into a different, and more recognizable, code.)

In both of these, I've already communicated the tune. But can you convey a tune without a tune?

As an experiment, I used the vaguest of descriptors in referencing movies, books, and painting to Darwin to see if he could figure out what I had in mind, picking common works and not making any inside jokes.

1. It's that movie about a girl, and she lives in a big house, and there was a war, and she had slaves.

2. A painting of a guy holding his face.

3. A book about this animal, and he goes into a garden, and he can't get out.

Then I tried the same thing with a tune, without singing the tune.

4. First it starts, and then it goes down and down again, and then up and up again, and that note repeats twice. Dah dah dah dah dah dah daaah.

He answered 1, 2, and 3 correctly. 4, not so much. Perhaps I could have described it this way:

4. Note, whole step down, whole step down, whole step up, whole step up, repeat, repeat and hold.

That wouldn't mean much to Darwin, who is not conversant in the technical terminology of music, but it's informational enough that the musically-inclined might guess the answer pretty quickly.

Trying to convey a rhythm with words sometimes works, if the rhythm is distinctive enough:

dah dah dah DAAH, dah dah dah DAAH

As it happens, I didn't have to post any code to solve my problem. After being driven nearly to tears by the tune, yesterday evening I startled Darwin by shouting, apropos of nothing, "John Adams!" And sure enough, it was the title theme to HBO's miniseries John Adams, composed by Rob Lane. I had remembered it in pieces: my mystery tune starts at 0:50, and the whistley bits come at the end. 

I wasn't very eloquent in trying to describe a half-remembered piece of music, but how would  you put a tune into words? Here's a reviewer on Amazon summing up this piece: "The agitated fiddle dirge that forms the counterpoint for the main title is, perhaps, the most stirring, distinctly American title score I've heard since "Ashokan Farewell" in Ken Burns' THE CIVIL WAR." Very elegant and apt, but without having heard the tune, could you hum it from this description? Can you convey a tune without the tune?

Bad Music Worth Listening To

I imagine everyone has some guilty pleasure music: music you know is not actually very good, but which you sometimes enjoy listening to more than good music.

Christmas ranks high in this area for me, and so I might as well go ahead and confess right off that I'm listening to Trans Siberian Orchestra while working today. Sure, there's the excuse that I haven't got around to loading the fairly heft Darwin collection of Christmas music onto my iPhone yet (not because I'm a stickler for not listening to Christmas music during Advent, but because I simply haven't got around to it.) But truth be told, I'd probably be listening to Trans Siberian Orchestra anyway. Sometimes one craves utter bombast over quality.

What are your musical guilty pleasures? The guiltier, the better.

The Heavenly Choirs of Crickets

These guys sing better than you do.

Your moment of beauty for the day: the sound of crickets, slowed down. They sing in full ethereal harmony, with descant and basso profundo, and they rise and swell and have dynamics and sound like the music of the spheres. Glorious!

h/t Simcha Fisher.

Music for Saturday: God Only Knows

Some weekend tunes for you: here's me and the siblings singing some barbershop harmonies at my sister's wedding.




See that tall guy with the beard? That's my baby brother. He's turning 20 today. Nothing makes me feel old like my siblings getting old.

And now for something a cappella

Here's something fun for you.



It earns style points for taking a familiar song and making it sound new by barbershopping it.

And here's a piece from the archives, with 2/3 of the siblings making a joyful noise.

Fish Heads, for fun and mental profit

I know that there are philosophical songs and then there are philosophical songs, but around here few pieces of music have occasioned as much discussion as Fish Heads, by Barnes and Barnes.


The list of conditions for what is or is not a fish head have led to great speculation as to which of our acquaintance may actually be a fish head in disguise.

For example, here are some of the conditions of fish headery:
a) they don't wear sweaters;
b) they don't play baseball;
c) they're not good dancers;
d) they don't play drums.

Some of the youngsters were a bit worried that Daddy might be a fish head, then, until it was pointed out that he does, occasionally, wear sweaters. In fact, most of us make the non-fish head category by virtue of our positive association with sweaters, although Julia is a good dancer, Jack has played the drums, and I have played baseball. Any one of these is sufficient to establish non-fish head status, but we like to be doubly protected.

What are the positive conditions of being a fish head?
a) roly-poly;
b) in the morning, happy and laughing;
c) in the evening, floating in the stew;
d) get into movies free;
e) can't talk.

Fortunately, c) bars Baby from being a fish head, although her dinnertime habits make one question.

But now, examine this statement: "Roly-poly fish heads are never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women (yeah)." There's a lot to unpack here. Do fish heads never drink cappuccino, or is the cappuccino ban only in effect when they are at Italian restaurants? What if they're at an Italian restaurant with Polish women? Or Oriental men? We're not given enough information to make broader statements, but with the help of Graph Jam, we put the statement into the form of a Venn diagram.

Let me anticipate correction by pointing out for myself that yes, I misspelled "cappuccino".

So we can say with certainty that if one meets all three of these conditions, one is definitely not a fish head. But wait! What happens if one meets all these conditions invisibly? After all, non-fish headery is contingent on being seen doing all these things.

Obviously, there are layers of richness here that we have yet to unpack.

Easy Listening

As we headed off on the first evening leg of last week's ten-hour trip to Wisconsin, we anticipated a ride eased by the dulcet tones of a British narrator reading about mayhem and bloodshed in rabbit warrens. Yes, Watership Down was on the menu: eleven cassettes promising enough listening hours to keep the back seat pacified for most of the drive.

And then I put in the first tape. The player whirred, clicked, and spit it out. I tried again. Same routine. I tried a different tape. I tried several different tapes. It was of no avail -- the tape player had gone on strike, perhaps permanently.  I rummaged around, but I'd cleaned the van so thoroughly before my brother's wedding that there were no random CDs on the floor or shoved into various compartments. The back seat was getting restive, waiting for their promised book. Faced with the onrushing prospect of the long haul with no trusty audio to soothe the riotous masses, I almost went tharn.

So we tracked radio stations all across the midwest. The oldies station has become very popular with the ladies, so we followed the Columbus station as long as we could follow the signal. Then we said the rosary, and no one went to sleep. Then we threatened. Then we got to Toledo and people were quiet, but we had to drive the beltway around the whole city because we missed our exit because I was reading to Darwin. We knew we were going the wrong way when we saw that the highway was headed to Detroit.

Day two was harder. We listened to The Globe across Northern Indiana, which was the sort of awesome eclectic station I wish I could find at home. My listening pleasure was impeded, however, by a certain someone attempting to hold the car hostage by throwing a huge screaming tantrum in which she repeatedly demanded that she be allowed to sit in the middle seat on the second half of the trip. You think someone would get bored yelling, "I want to sit in the middle seat of the car on the second half of the trip!" for an hour at a time, but the young have an intensity and staying power that eludes their elders.

Digression: I tell you what, my dad is a mild-mannered guy, but if he had ever had occasion to pull this car over and tell me that if I didn't stop it, there would be serious consequences, I would have listened and piped the heck down. All I can say is that it really is better to be feared than loved sometimes, and on this trip it felt like we the adults were neither.

It was time to take measures on the trip back. We stopped at Barnes and Noble in Madison, WI and fortified ourselves for the journey with 4.5 hours of dramatized Sherlock Holmes stories (Sir John Gielgud as Holmes and Sir Ralph Richardson as Watson), 2 hours of Aesop's Fables, and the two-disc collection of Dr. Demento's Greatest Hits.

Dr. Demento, host of the novelty hit radio show! You all know his signature song: They're Coming To Take Me Away, by Napoleon XIV.



This very same Dr. Demento collection, which I listened to (on tape) fifteen years ago, features a song I first heard on a carefully preserved 45 lp of my dad's: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, by Allan Sherman. The tantrummer listened, laughed, and pronounced it good.



One song which amused my children but was fairly inexplicable to them was Star Trekking (Across the Universe) by The Firm. I saw a lot of Star Trek in my time, but since we don't have broadcast TV, they've never had occasion to see old episodes while flipping through channels. Star Trek is rather a dying cultural phenomenon anyway, mostly remembered through parody.



One of the most weirdly catchy tunes on the album was Fish Heads by Barnes and Barnes, featured here in their own music video as seen on the Dr. Demento show on MTV. It's pretty delightfully demented.



Eat them up, yum!

And we rode peacefully all the way home. Thank you, Dr. Demento.

Immortal Beloved

In these degenerate days of "sexting", the love letter seems to be a lost art. But there were once men who could set a page aflame. Today marks the 200th anniversary of the beginning of Beethoven's letter to his Immortal Beloved, an incendiary missive to a mysterious lady.

Wikipedia has the text of the letter as well as some context.

The entire letter is written on 10 small pages, in Beethoven's rather inconsistent handwriting. The first section occupies four pages. In the following, the dashes and underlined words are as in Beethoven's manuscript, crossed-out parts are enclosed in “{...}”.

6th July, in the morning.
My angel, my everything, my very self. – only a few words today, and in pencil (with yours) - I shall not be certain of my rooms here until tomorrow – what an unnecessary waste of time - why this deep grief, where necessity speaks - can our love exist but by sacrifices, by not demanding everything. Can you change it, that you are not completely mine, that I am not completely yours? Oh God, look upon beautiful Nature and calm your mind about what must be – love demands everything and completely with good reason, that is how it is for me with you, and for you with me - only you forget too easily, that I must live for myself and for you as well, if we were wholly united, you would not feel this as painfully, just as little as I would – my journey was terrible. I did not arrive here until 4 o'clock yesterday morning. As there were few horses, the mail coach chose another route, but what a dreadful one this was! At the last stage but one I was warned not to travel at night; attempts were made to frighten me about a forest, but that only made me more eager. – I was wrong. The coach broke down on the awful road, a road without a proper surface, a country one. If the two coachmen had not been with me, I would have remained stranded on the way. Esterhazi travelled the usual road here and had the same fate with eight horses that I had with four. – Yet I did get some pleasure out of it, as I always do when I successfully overcome difficulties. – now quickly to the interior from the exterior. We will probably see each other soon, only, today I cannot convey to you my observations which I made during these few days about my life – If our hearts were always close together, I would have no such thoughts. my heart is full with so much to tell you - Oh - There are moments when I feel that language is nothing at all - cheer up - remain my faithful only darling, my everything, as I for you, the rest is up to the Gods, what must be for us and what is in store for us. –
your faithful ludwig -

The following section continues on pages 5 and 6 through half of page 7. The struck-out portion below is heavily crossed-out in the manuscript.

Monday evening, 6th July.
You are suffering, you my dearest creature – only now do I realize that letters have to be posted very early, on Mondays – Thursdays – the only days when the mail is delivered to K. - you are suffering - Oh, wherever I am, you are with me, I talk to myself and to you[,] arrange [it] that I can live with you, what a life!!!! as it is!!!! without you – Pursued by the goodness of mankind here and there, the goodness that I wish to deserve as little as I deserve it. – Man’s humility towards man – this pains me – and when I consider myself in relation to the universe, what am I and what is the man who is called the greatest? – And yet, – therein lies the divine element in man. I weep when I think that you will probably not receive first news of me until Saturday. However as much as you love me - I love you even more deeply, but - but never hide yourself from me - Good night – as I am taking the baths I must go to bed. {oh go with me, go with me} Oh God - so near! so far! Is not our love a true edifice in Heaven - but also as firm as the firmament. –

The final section of the letter resumes after a horizontal line on page 7. The handwriting on the last page is much larger and more difficult to decipher, showing a marked difference from the relatively more orderly page 9. The entire tenth page is thus taken up by only a small amount of text (beginning with "life - my everything" in the translation below).

Good morning, on 7th July.
While still in bed my thoughts turn towards you my Immortal Beloved, now and then happy, then sad again, waiting whether fate might answer us - I can only live either wholly with you or not at all, yes I have resolved to stray about in the distance, until I can fly into your arms, and send my soul embraced by you into the realm of the Spirits - yes unfortunately it must be - you will compose yourself all the more since you know my faithfulness to you, never can another own my heart, never – never – O God why do I have to separate from someone whom I love so much, and yet my life in V[ienna] as it is now is a miserable life - Your love makes me at once most happy and most unhappy - at my age I would now need some conformity[,] regularity of my life – can this exist in our relationship? – Angel, I have just heard that the mail coach goes every day – and thus I must finish so that you may receive the letter immediately. – be patient – only through quiet contemplation of our existence can we achieve our purpose to live together – Be calm; for only by calmly considering our lives can we achieve our purpose of living together.- be calm - love me - today - yesterday - What yearning with tears for you - you - you my life – my everything - farewell - oh continue to love me - never misjudge the most faithful heart of your Beloved

L.

Forever thine
forever mine
forever us.

This letter was never sent, and was found among Beethoven's effects when he died.

The mostly likely candidate for the Immortal Beloved is Josephine Brunsvik. Beethoven had given her piano lessons when she was a teenager, and a passion seems to have ignited between them. However, Josephine was married off to an older count and their relationship was apparently harmonious enough. The unfortunate man was carried away by pneumonia in 1804, leaving Josephine a widow pregnant with her fourth child. Although she and Beethoven visited regularly, a marriage to a commoner was out of the question because Josephine would have lost custody of her children. Her second marriage was extremely unhappy and her financially incompetent husband ruined the family. In the summer of 1812 Josephine traveled to Prague (through which Beethoven had to travel to reach the spa at Teplitz where he composed his letter); nine months later her seventh child, Minona, was born. Her husband had been gone since the beginning of the year and did not return until 1814.

Josephine's life was full of sadness and hardship: estranged from her older children; separated from her younger children, she died in 1821. Wikipedia says: 

During this year, Beethoven composed his very last Piano Sonatas Op. 110 and Op. 111, believed by many musicologists to be clearly like requiems, with discernible reminiscences to "Josephine's Theme", the Andante favori.

The "Immortal Beloved" letter is a powerful testament to a misbegotten yet flaming passion.

Music for the 4th of July

As American as motherhood, apple pie, and a good rousing tune! Here's what we've been listening to around the Darwin household in honor of our country's birthday.

The fabulously stirring theme from the HBO series John Adams:



John Phillip Sousa -- a capella! The outfits may be 1995, but the harmonies are 1910. As one commenter says: "The only thing that would make this sound better would be a fly-by from 2 F-14's on the last chord."



And a reminder that the tune for our national anthem started off as a drinking song. The Georgia Tech Glee Club sings "To Anacreon in Heaven".



Enjoy the fireworks tonight!

In Which I Consider Engaging with The Hunger Games

I have a slight reactionary streak that protests against paying too much attention to big Pop Culture deals. Often this saves me the unnecessary loss of brain cells (no one was ever hurt by ignoring Jersey Shore), but occasionally I come late to the party everyone else has already discovered, and I feel silly for sitting so long outside with my back to the door. (Ex.: Downton Abbey.)

I've paid scant notice to the phenomenon of The Hunger Games ever since it's been a phenomenon, but now I'm trying to figure out whether I'm on the wrong side of the fence here. Really, I blame Brandon for this, because he posted this video.



At first I didn't pay much attention to it, because, I mean, Taylor Swift! But the next day, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal (my source for What's Happening Now) about "soundtrack compilation albums", those pieces of "inspired-by" marketing designed to trap crazed movie fans who hunger for just one more piece of arcana. The article was about the success of the soundtrack compilation album for The Hunger Games.

One cut from the album, Ms. Swift's "Safe and Sound," went on sale online in late December and has sold 735,000 copies, according to SoundScan... 

Mr. Lipman says that the theme of soundtrack meetings was "What does music from the Appalachian mountains sound like 300 years from now?" 

To that end, director Gary Ross enlisted music producer T Bone Burnett, whose "O Brother Where Art Thou?" soundtrack was a smash hit in 2000—an unlikely feat for a collection of old-time favorites like "Keep on the Sunny Side" and "In the Jailhouse Now."

Now I had to confront my prejudices, because I like T Bone Burnett's work on "O Brother Where Art Thou?", and I was curious what his concept of futuristic Appalachian music might be. So I had to go back and watch Taylor Swift. And then watch it again, and then hum the song for the rest of the day. And then go to iTunes and listen to clips from the rest of the album. And the long and short of it is, now I'm considering buying an album (which I never do) based on a movie I haven't seen, based on a book I've never read.

We probably will read The Hunger Games, but seeing as the wait list at the Columbus library is almost 1000 deep, it might be a while.

Tear-Jerkers

This week, the WSJ ran an article on the anatomy of tear-jerking music, featuring Adele's song Someone Like you.

Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an "appoggiatura."

An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good." 

...Chills often descend on listeners at these moments of resolution. When several appoggiaturas occur next to each other in a melody, it generates a cycle of tension and release. This provokes an even stronger reaction, and that is when the tears start to flow.  Chill-provoking passages, they found, shared at least four features. They began softly and then suddenly became loud. They included an abrupt entrance of a new "voice," either a new instrument or harmony. And they often involved an expansion of the frequencies played. In one passage from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488), for instance, the violins jump up one octave to echo the melody. Finally, all the passages contained unexpected deviations in the melody or the harmony. Music is most likely to tingle the spine, in short, when it includes surprises in volume, timbre and harmonic pattern. 

I don't happen to care all that much for this particular song, but I do have two examples of music that reliably move me to tears, or at least chills.



I always choke up at the last section of Stravinsky's The Firebird, where the thematic chords build up and then resolve into the cadence (about 2:56 in this video). There's something so beautiful and thrilling about the way the music grows more and more insistent and dramatic and then suddenly drops in volume at the beginning of the cadence. And the swell of the ending can draw tears, too.


The article explains:

When the music suddenly breaks from its expected pattern, our sympathetic nervous system goes on high alert; our hearts race and we start to sweat. Depending on the context, we interpret this state of arousal as positive or negative, happy or sad.

Here's another of my misty favorites:



Anyone who remembers "Beef: It's What's For Dinner" knows Hoedown, from Aaron Copland's Rodeo. One hears the main melody several times before Copland throws some dissonance under it, first heard here at 1:09 and then more powerfully at 2:52. Maybe the telegraph-like rhythm at the end throws my heart rate off, but I love it.

You're Gonna Make Me Lonely When You Go

More Anna, more music from Christmas. She and my younger brother play at coffeehouses under the name The Lonely Oranges, and here's one of their standards, a cover of a Bob Dylan song.

Music for Angelico

Per Angelico's request, here are some carols.

The Wexford Carol (bell courtesy of Eleanor):

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The Coventry Carol, with outtakes:

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WWII-era? Well, it's a cappella, anyway. Sh-Boom:




And for good measure, my brother Will's funky guitar on Embraceable You:

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The Return of Anna

Happiness is having all six siblings in the same house.

And here's the sort of thing that happens when we all get together: music breaks out. Here's the famous Anna Egan singing Lied Der Braut at 1 AM.



Featuring Pidge and her expressions.

Six of us, plus my brother-in-law and his twin. There will be Irish music and Christmas music and standards and my brother singing "Don't Stop Believing" in a very creditable falsetto.  Put in a request, and maybe we'll record it and post it for you.

One Horse Open Sleigh

I'm not generally a fan of "Jingle Bells", but this version (going under the title "One Horse Open Sleigh", under which the song was originally published in 1850) I have always really loved. Sadly, it's hard to get hold of. It appeared on an album entitled A Victorian Christmas by the Robert DeCormier Singers and Ensemble back in 1984, and it is currently out of print. Some used copies are at times available on Amazon, but they can be pricey. (According to the above link, there are currently none below $20.)

However, it seems sad not to have such a good version available, so I've ventured to put it up on YouTube, hoping that this somehow constitutes fair use since there's no way to currently buy the album in a way that benefits the artists.



Enjoy. And a Merry Christmas to all our readers.

The Christmas Music Post, Radio Version

The good, the bad, and the random from the girls' favorite easy listening station, which has been playing Christmas music since before Thanksgiving, I kid you not.

Here's what I like this year: Michael Buble singing Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You". I can't stand the original, maybe because Mariah sings it, and she can't leave the vocal acrobatics alone long enough for anyone to hear the sound of her voice. But Michael Buble transforms it into something I actually want to listen to, again and again.

 

 Carrie Underwood and her Christmas music seem to be all over the radio these days. It could be that she has a pretty voice, but pop-style belting seems an odd choice for some of the more classical carols.

 

Here, Carrie, let a master show you how to lilt a carol. Allison Krause sings the Wexford Carol, with Yo Yo Ma.



Josh Groban has a fine voice, and I appreciate listening to someone with good training, but I'm saddened that he's whoring out his talent by singing sugar-laced dreck like this "Believe" song. Yes, I know it's from the movie Polar Express, but I only heard it this year, and I barely restrained myself from shouting, "What the hell?" in front of my children.



It's too bad, because he seems like a genuinely funny guy, as evidenced by his send-ups of his own persona. Here he is, hosting an episode of a British music game show. (I honestly do not remember how much content is in this video, but it's late-night BBC, so be warned.)

And finally, for those of you who need to kick it like it's 1987, here's RUN-DMC with "Christmas in Hollis" (h/t to the Korrectiv Office Party playlist).

Mary, Did You Know?

 Perhaps I'm the wrong person to be weighing in on this, because I simply don't like the song very much, but I was pleased by Jake Tawney's line-by-line analysis of the pop worship anthem "Mary, Did You Know?" at Roma Locuta Est.

The Charge Mary, a faithful Jewish girl, was guilty of ignorance regarding the facts about the coming Messiah… her own Son, Jesus the Christ.

The Prosecution Your Honor, I call Mary to the stand.

Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water?

Mary Yes, I did. The Old Testament foretold that “He alone stretches out the heavens and treads upon the crests of the sea.” (Job 9:8)

The Prosecution Did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters?

Mary Yes, I did. The Lord told our prophets, “Say to those whose hearts are frightened: be strong, fear not! Here is your God, He comes with vindication; With divine recompense He comes to save you.” (Is 35:4)

The Prosecution Did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new… that this child that you’ve delivered will soon deliver you?

Mary Yes I did. The angel Gabriel greeted me saying, “Hail, full of grace (kecharitomene – Lk 1:28),” so I knew I’d already been delivered, actually. I then told my cousin Elizabeth that, “My spirit rejoices in God, my savior.” (Lk 1:47)

It's a Protestant song, and so it's no surprise that it reflects an incomplete Marian understanding, but it does seem a bit twee to suggest that Mary might have been surprised by the divine origin of her son, considering the circumstances of His conception. ("How can this be, since I do not know man?")

(Darwin was recalling last night how in his Confirmation program, the teachers were very fond of the "They Didn't Know!" school of theological speculation. "What would Jesus think if he could have seen 2000 years into the future? He didn't know there would be this huge church!"

"Well, yes he did," the teenaged Darwin replied. "I mean, he is God."

There was silence. "Yes, but did he really know?" insisted the teacher.)

Melanie Bettinelli feels that Jake is taking things too seriously, though, and comes through with an interesting defense of the song.

The rhetorical questions don't really imply that Mary didn't know the answers. Sure, on a literal level they are directed to Mary; but I think the listener isn't so much meant to linger on the state of Mary's knowledge so much as be drawn toward contemplation of the mystery of Incarnation. It reminds me of the list of rhetorical questions in Pink Floyd's "Mother". The "mother" character isn't really the point of the song, we're not meant to think about who the mother is or what she will think or how she will answer; she's just a rhetorical device. 
The song moves the listener away from the iconic scene of the Mother and child in the stable and toward the rest of the Gospel story. In a post-Christian culture where most people never move beyond the Christmas card picture to think about Who that little baby is, this song tries to get them to do that. 
I don't think the song needs rebuttal because it isn't really making the claims you say it's making about Mary. The one detail that I agree is off is the line about "the child you've delivered would soon deliver you" and yet I can forgive the bad theology. First, because it's a pop song and not a hymn. Second, because the focus of the line is a play on the word "deliver" not on the "soon". And last but not least, Christ's sacrifice on the cross did happen in time, a specific moment that fell after the moment of Mary's conception, obviously. The grace of that act saved Mary outside of time. I think it is well within the bounds of poetic license to juxtapose the moments and is a bit tendentious to impose rigorous theological language and categories upon a song.

I don't think there can be any conflict, however, that this is not an appropriate song to play at Mass (and yes, I've heard it there), because it is not at all "tendentious to impose rigorous theological language" upon the words sung during the liturgy, especially when they conflict with a Catholic understanding of basic doctrines of the faith.

Seven Quick Takes

1. Hate you, Blogger.



2. Thanks for all the music advice. I'm going to check out Mumford and Sons and the Wailing Jennys. Bernard mentioned Dave Matthews, which took me way back to my sophomore year, when I listened to almost nothing else.



3. Here's another example of a song I liked right away:





I guess this is a cover, but the other versions didn't grab me at all. So I went to look up this band, but they've drifted off the scene. This version of this song isn't available on iTunes, and the album it's on costs about $30 used. I considered buying it, but as I Googled around, I found the band's old page on which some impassioned but silly political opinions were bandied about. Nope, I'll listen to it on youtube.


 

4. Here's a video for commenter Mandamum:





If my brothers hosted a talk show, this is how it would go.

Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake can come dance in my living room any day.

 



5. Do you think the neighborhood minds that three out of four panels of the screen door are ripped and flapping? Because it's not getting fixed any time soon.


 

6. We've been talking about going on Parents' Retreat: going away just by ourselves (shut up!) for a weekend, to talk about family, about schooling, about plans, about anything. By ourselves. Without, for example, a two-year-old sitting on my lap trying to push the space bar. Of course, we've been talking about this for almost a year, but it keeps getting put off due to the demands of... the family.


 

7. This was not really the day you want to have right before The Rapture. Maybe I'll be whisked up into Purgatory, or does it work that way?



Vacation next week!

The New Music Post

Last Saturday I drudged, cleaning the kitchen, slogging around doing dishes, scuffing across the floor I'd just mopped a few days before, and getting increasingly irritated at the radio. I don't know the stations around here well yet, but everything sounds the same. If there's a classical station, it's never playing music when I flip around the dial. If there's an oldies station, I can't find it. I'm weary of the pop songs that all sound the same, and the easy-listening station that has a rotation of the same 100 tired hits, and the greasy alternative whiners with their canned angst. I wanted something fresh that would get into my blood. More than anything, I wanted to sing.

As I pushed junk around the counters, the DJ crooned, "And here's that number by Adele that's been climbing the charts," and I heard this, and it was as if I suddenly woke up.



I was instantly addicted, and I did something I haven't done in years: I bought a CD. For one song.

And finally it arrived, and I popped it in, and how deflatingly right I was: I bought the CD for one song. I'm not so young and impressionable that any ditty of love and longing can hook me in. I won't fault Adele as a singer: her voice continues to resonate with me. I think it's amazing that she can drive a music video by simply sitting in a chair and singing her heart out. But it's not enough. The producers seemed to know they had a good thing on their hands with "Rolling in the Deep" and poured all their creative powers into that one song, leaving nothing for the rest of the album. Everything else was... kind of boring, frankly.

But now I want more. Where is the good new music? Who are the compelling new singers and songwriters? What is interesting and fresh and compelling? And -- this is key -- what is singable?