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With that familiar chill in the air signaling winter’s imminent arrival, it’s time again to indulge our craving for Christmas music by Frank Sinatra, Mariah Carey, and more. But first, let’s take a step back and explore the history of Christmas music with the following facts.

• From medieval Christmas celebrations onwards, the holiday has included Christian, pagan, and secular elements. For example, American Christmas songs range from religious hymns and carols to secular songs about Santa Claus and general goodwill.
• During the 17th and 18th centuries, American colonists celebrated Christmas with mumming practices, including costumes, pranks, dancing, and musical instruments.
• Boston tanner and composer William Billings wrote sacred Christmas music in the 18th century.
• American Christmas music developed from various immigrant traditions, gaining popularity in the United States during the 19th century.
• Charles Dickens contributed to the popularity of Christmas traditions with his successful novels The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) and A Christmas Carol (1843). Celebrations during this period included door-to-door Christmas caroling, Christmas cards, and “living nativity” scenes.
• Several classic Christmas carols were produced in the 19th century, including “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” (1849), “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” (1863), and “Away in a Manager” (1885).
• The popularity of Christmas music exploded with radio, television, and film in the 20th century. Hollywood has played an important role in the popularity of Christmas music with films like Holiday Inn (1942), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), and A Christmas Story (1983). (We couldn’t resist posting this classic scene below.)

Check out our list of classic Christmas tunes below:

Headline image credit: Lighted Santa Reindeer, 2012. Photo by Anthony92931. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

The post Seven facts about American Christmas Music appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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The ringing sound of sleigh bells is all too familiar around this time of the year. It’s the official siren signaling in the winter season. While a well-known signature staple on sleighs, Santa suits and reindeer, jingle bells haven’t always been associated with Christmas. They do much more than just ring in holiday cheer.

1. Sleigh bells or jingles bells are a type of bell that produces a distinctive jingle sound. They are in the percussion family of instruments.

2. The bells are made from sheet metal bent into a spherical shape with a small ball bearing or short metal rod placed inside to create the jingle sound.

3. Small bells were known in ancient times. In Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt they were commonly suspended from the trappings of horses, mules, and camels.

4. Centuries ago, sleigh bells were fastened to horses to signal the approach of someone important or to warn pedestrians of an approaching vehicle. Sleighs were unable to stop quickly enough so they needed a warning sound.

5. William Barton opened the first US sleigh bell company in East Hampton, Connecticut in 1810. East Hampton eventually became known as “Belltown” because it produced so many bells.

6. Sleigh bells, or jingles, are rarely used to produce specific pitches. Mozart, however, prescribed this in the third of his Three German Dances K605.

7. The song Jingle Bells, also known as “One Horse Open Sleigh,” is one of the most popular and most recorded songs on Earth. It was written in 1857 by James Lord Pierpont and was originally meant for Thanksgiving.

8. Sleigh bells were one of the first instruments played in space. In 1965, Gemini 6 astronauts Tom Stafford and Wally Schirra, smuggled bells and a harmonica onto their spacecraft and played Jingle Bells for mission control as a light-hearted holiday joke.

9. The affluent ornamentally wore bells as a symbol of wealth and status.

10. In old Pagan beliefs, jingle bells are used to ward off bad luck, diseases, and evil spirits. Today, some motorcyclists strap small bells to their handlebars to ward off road demons.

Headline image credit: Sleigh Bells. Photo by Richard Wheeler. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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In celebration of the recently published biography, Elvis Presley: A Southern Life by Joel Williamson, I thought I would share some memories of Christmas past. In the 1970s we listened to Elvis on vinyl. Every December when it was time to decorate the tree you could hear the deep dulcet warbling of Elvis coming from the hi-fi. Some of my favorite Elvis renditions of Christmas songs follow.

With the tree up and ready to be decorated we’d pop on the Elvis to kick off the Christmas season with “The First Noel”.

In the kitchen we’d often hear my mother sing along to “Winter Wonderland” as she made stained-glass window cookies to hang on the tree.

One of my dad’s favorites was “Silver Bells”. He’d sing along so that it sounded like Elvis was his backup singer.

My best friend Tracy had an artificial, all-white tree bedecked in tinsel and lit solely with blue lights. In the evenings we’d just sit in her living room watching the tree as she and Elvis sang “Blue Christmas”.

Now that I am older, I still like to listen to Elvis when I decorate for Christmas. Then when I have everything just the way I want I like to get a crackling fire going, turn down the lights, plug in the tree, toss back a few slugs of egg nog, settle into a comfy couch with someone special, and listen to Elvis’s “Merry Christmas Baby”.

Here’s hoping your stocking is stuffed with Elvis this season. I find he makes the holiday merry.

Headline image credit: Elvis! Photo by Kevin Dooley. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

The post Merry Elvis Christmas recollections appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Christmas is, almost inescapably, a time of music. A lot of it is familiar and much-loved, but for those who might be looking for some more adventurous listening this year – beyond Slade, the Messiah, and Victorian carols – here are some pointers to alternative Christmas music from down the ages.

“The Sign of Judgment: the earth will be bathed in sweat”. This unlikely Christmas sentiment comes from the Song of the Sibyl, a 3rd-century Greek prophecy of the Apocalypse translated into Latin by St. Augustine and whose first lines he popularized as a form of Christmas greeting to non-Christians. The poem acquired a chant melody in 10th-century Catalonia, since when it has been a feature of the Christmas Eve liturgy in churches in Spain, Italy and Provence. This is the 10th-century Latin version, performed by Jordi Savall, the late Montserrat Figueras and La Capella Reial de Catalunya:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Song of the Sibyl could also be performed as liturgical drama, of the kind often found in the Middle Ages. The Officium pastorum of the 13th century is another example, and in its focus on the shepherds’ story one that begins to resemble our modern Nativity. This complete performance was given by Princeton University’s Guild for Early Music in 2011.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A century or two later, the Christmas carol as we have come to know it began to emerge. Its origins lay in a mix of secular and sacred influences, including the French carole, an important social dance that required the dancers to accompany themselves with their own singing. By the 15th century, the carol as a form of song usually on the theme of Christmas had begun to establish itself, and there are many wonderful examples to discover; this setting of the Christmas lullaby Lullay, lullow from the Ritson Mansucript of c1460–75 – different from the more familiar “Coventry Carol” of the same name – retains something of those dancing origins.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of praise following the Anunciation (Luke 1: 46–55) is one of the very oldest songs associated with the Christmas story, and one of the most frequently set. Great Baroque Magnificats were composed by Claudio Monteverdi (his famous Vespers of 1610 conclude with two of them) and Bach, among others. But that by Heinrich Schütz combines the Venetian exuberance with the Lutheran poise of the other to exhilarating effect.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sidestepping the familiar Christmas favourites of the 18th and 19th centuries we encounter in the mid-20th century a major instrumental work, Olivier Messiaen’s La nativité du Seigneur (1935), a suite of nine scenes from the Christmas story, for organ. Messiaen, a devout Catholic, was possibly the 20th century’s greatest composer of religious music, as well as one of its finest organists. His musical language employed a variety of systematic procedures and a sometimes obscure symbolism, but there is no getting away from the extraordinary power and often tender characterisation of his music. (The capricious baby Jesus in the opening movement, La vierge et l’enfant, is a particular delight.) Both sides be heard in the virtuoso final movement, Dieu parmi nous, performed here by one of Messiaen’s leading interpreters, Dame Gillian Weir:

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Another leading composer of contemporary religious music has been Sir John Tavener. Unlike Messiaen, Tavener has drawn widely from a variety of faiths in the creation of his personal theology, in particular the Greek Orthodox Church, of which he was a member for many years. Works like Ikon of the Nativity (1991), which draw on Orthodox chants and liturgical practice, retain a strange and ancient mysticism beneath their apparently simple surfaces.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Is John Adams’s El Niño (1999–2000) the 21st century’s answer to the Messiah? Perhaps. In this “Nativity oratorio” the composer of the so-called “news operas” Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic turns his dramatic hand to the Christmas story, setting texts from the Bible and the Wakefield Mystery Plays (more medieval liturgical drama), as well as several South American poets. This extract comes from the final two sections of Part I, Se habla de Gabriel and The Christmas Star:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally, and to bring us right up to date, I’ve opted for Schnee (2008) by the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen. A secular choice, for certain, but if I had to choose a work that perfectly captures the frozen sunshine of a cold Christmas morning it would be this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Looking for an easy way to play these in one jingle-free session? Try this Spotify playlist:

Tim Rutherford-Johnson is co-editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Music Sixth Edition, with Michael Kennedy and Joyce Kennedy. He has worked for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (now Grove Music Online) since 1999 and until 2010 was the editor responsible for the dictionary’s coverage of 20th- and 21st century music. He has published and lectured on several contemporary composers, and regularly reviews new music for both print and online publications. Visit Tim’s blog here, or find him on Twitter @moderncomp.

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The post No jingles: an alternative Christmas playlist appeared first on OUPblog.