Holiday Music


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I have already confessed to embarrassing myself (at the tender age of three) with misunderstanding the lyrics of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." Odd, perhaps, that it is one of my favorite holiday tunes. I have a special fondness for Christmas music that has that hollow, ringing sound of a group in a large room. It makes me miss the singing in choruses and choirs that I did in my teenage years.

Soloists are wonderful, and to have a solo can be a terror of a responsibility, but you can't harmonize with yourself, and I love the challenge of harmony. Listening to a group performing a difficult chord can make me hold my breath, as I would watching a ski racer traversing a difficult run. I have met people who claim they don't hear harmony when it is played to them - voices in unison sound the same to them as voices in harmony. I suppose it is a form of aural color-blindness, and it makes me deeply sad that they can't hear what I hear.

If you take my preference for choral Christmas music and harmony together, my Christmas music collection ends up being a bit more limited than the rest of my music collection. I have no affinity for most of the pop retreads of Christmas favorites (don't even get me started on Britney, Mariah, or Kenny G.), and a lot of the excesses of modern R&B leave me cold when applied to holiday tunes (even if they do have fantastic harmonies). The classics of many American holiday music collections (e.g. Perry Como, Bing Crosby, or Nat King Cole) weren't something I grew up with, so even though most people regard them as the essence of the holidays, I can take them or leave them. There are a few newer discs in my collection and I am always interested in hearing the latest, but I suspect my favorites will remain fairly set and settled in the old choral mode.

Favorite Holiday Albums?

The Singers Unlimited - Christmas
The Voices of Jimmy Joyce - This is Christmas (I believe this is now out of print, but the fabulous Mainely A Capella has five copies)
Robert Shaw Chamber Singers - A Robert Shaw Christmas: Angels On High
Chanticleer - Our Heart's Joy
Posted: Thursday - December 02, 2004 at 08:31 AM         | |

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