Christmas

Journey of the Magi: or the Wise Men were following a star, not four stars

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Are blogging and social media as much about complaints as they are about praise? I can’t say for sure on that. One reason there: my personal appetite for a good rant or jeremiad has limits. But sometimes — even when the subject is something you’re fond of— within a negative review, you might see something new you never appreciated.

The Christmas season ended yesterday with Epiphany, the Christian church calendar date on which the Three Wise Men, kings or soothsayers from the East, legendarily visit the newborn infant god-head.

It’s a favored event for painters of Christian religious scenes, since it has the rich aroma of an Incarnation appearing in a rude stable, and yet at the same time it allows the depiction of exotic, wealthy, well-attired prince/priests bringing gifts to the child. The Renaissance artists often loved depth of detail, and this gives them so much to depict.

For the holiday season at the end of 1921, T. S. Eliot wrote a poem for this last day of the 12-days of Christmas. In his “Journey of the Magi”  he exercises one of his youthful talents: flavorful disjointed poetic dialog expressive of different human aspects infused with sound and high and low cultural references. His poem is a poetic monolog by one of the Wise Men — but it omits the moment in the paintings: the worshipful giving of gifts to the baby Jesus. You can read the full text of the poem at this link if you’d like to follow along.

Instead, the poem opens with a bad review of the travel to Bethlehem. To paraphrase, the first stanza: look, we had it good in our temperate-zone palaces, servants bringing us cool sherbet treats, and now we’re out here where it’s either too hot or too cold, in a place no one knows how important we are.

In the poem’s second stanza we do get in words some of the matter of those Renaissance paintings — you could see the brush-hand of a Bruegel in it. We smell the landscape, there’s a little stream, a water-mill, a singular white horse, a tavern with the (later post-mortem) pieces of silver being gambled for, drinker’s feet tripping over wine-skins, There should be a saint, and angel, or the Holy Family in this painting too, resplendent in the foreground — but our speaker leaves any of that out. I love the Yelp review that ends this stanza: not the max-stars that everyone is urged to leave: “(you may say) satisfactory.”

In the last stanza Eliot’s monologist gets to hint at the piety that would later take over that poet’s outlook. After all, the Three Priests or Kings or Sages that have traveled so far are not believers in the story, only esoteric knowers. Their testimony is that they know the Christian incarnation is important, but they don’t know or believe why. Our speaker says, recalling the trip on the sore camel’s back across the desert, moor, and mountains, just that he has some sense that his former comforts, his kingdom, his belief, his place in things, his magic, has been changed some way. What comes next after the death of his homeplace belief? He doesn’t know, but somehow he senses it’ll be better.

That’s often a good story isn’t it — that kings are just a convention, a shared or temporarily-enforced belief?

Anbetung_der_Könige_(Bruegel,_1564) 800

Speaking of Bruegel, here’s a painting of the Adoration of the Magi by him. Looking at the king in crimson on the left: from the expression on that face, I think we can imagine he’s the speaker in Eliot’s poem.

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Even though today’s poem is written of events remembered in the past, I’m late with this piece. I performed it yesterday, on the suitable date, but it was nearing the stroke of midnight when I laid down the last track. This morning after breakfast and grocery shopping I mixed the version you can hear below. I thought about putting in caroling bells or angelic voices in the arrangement, but as I worked with Eliot’s words I figured it might be better to decorate it with some Silk Road instruments, ones that might have been heard in the better stops on the Three Kings’ journey: the oud an the santoor. But there’s also a drum set, a piano, and an electric bass — and I can’t figure out how a camel could carry those! You can hear my performance of “The Journey of the Magi”  with the audio player below. No player seen? You’re not too late, it’s just the way some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing that, so I offer this shining star, or rather highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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The Oxen

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

As stories go, the Christmas birth story as it has been accumulated through the centuries is quite the thing, isn’t it? Let me be honest with you: the overall theological interjections, who Jesus is, what he means, what is his relationship with what is a godhead are philosophical questions. Perhaps they are of supreme importance (some believe this so), but philosophy makes my head hurt. I may be an indifferent singer, but as a poet or poetry audience it’s the song that attracts me. Music, even small music, is sensory, it resonates. And if one takes all the things that have been added to the Christmas story, it’s the shepherds in the field, not the big angelic hosannas or even salvation — it’s the details that grab me.

One of my favorite Christmas posts by this project was my adaptation of Longfellow’s “Three Kings”  from three years ago. My adaptation focused on a new mother watching the breathing of her infant while the wisemen wizard’s gifts are explained in eschatological terms. What a contrast that is!

This year I decided to set this decidedly rural Thomas Hardy poem “The Oxen.”  which deals with one of the miracles that have been added as details to the Christmas manger scene. Hardy brings a novelist’s gift to his poem. His Christmas birth story is told as a story within a story within a story: countryside English children of Hardy’s youth’s era being told around a fireside that since there were stabled oxen in attendance to the Incarnation on the first Christmas, they and their kin were struck then, and ever after on its anniversary, with the need to kneel and worship the babe.

The speaker in the poem, telling us of being told this story is savvy. He recalls that no child on that hearthside wondered if the elder telling the tale had made it up. Those workaday adults seemed to have no time for authoring fantasy tales — and, in point of fact, they didn’t make it up. Like all great folklore, it’s a miracle of which we don’t know the author of.

So, the poem closes with two Christmas miracles: the cattle bowing in worship every Christmas Eve as midnight comes, and the miracle of plain, ordinary folks telling a joyous tale. Hardy closes by saying he wants the continued promise of those miracles.

Manger 6

The ox may be worshipful, but the donkey may just be asking when baby Jesus can get out of the hay supply

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As so often with things these days I had to set this poem to music quickly. As quickly as I wrote the music, I then had to wait for a couple of days for when the unscheduled time came that I could record it. I had trouble fretting the guitar that afternoon. I had had to scrub my hands hard to remove grease and dirt from doing some bicycle maintenance earlier that day, and my fingertips were still softened, a bit raw, and not ready for the wires. Still, I managed to get the basic tracks down. I added the rest of the parts you can hear in the performance below with my Little Plastic Keyboard which didn’t challenge the fingers so much. The sound I wanted to add, even in the drum parts, was bell-like — Clarence-angels getting their wings — but listening back to the result I think, unconsciously, I was recreating some of the sound of “Tim Hardin 3 Live in Concert,”  a document of a gig the addicted singer and guitarist performed so high, despite it being a recorded date, that the skilled Jazz musicians playing with him had to dance en-pointe to try to follow him. That tension, that seeking concord, that going to the stable expecting a miracle and dealing with what one finds instead, is to me the very spirit of Christmas.

You can hear my performance of Thomas Hardy’s “The Oxen”  with the audio player gadget below. No player to unwrap? This highlighted link is another way to hear it, as it will open a new tab with its own audio player.

The House of Hospitalities

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s Christmas morning, and besides spending time with my little family, I spent Christmas Eve wrapping a little present to myself and to you, reader and listener. It’s a poem by British poet Thomas Hardy, who has supplied several texts for pieces by this Project. “The House of Hospitalities”  is wistful, even melancholy, but I think its heart is in memories — which after all, each Christmas gives and becomes. That’s what we seek out, make, and gift wrap: memories of each other, of each other’s gifts and presents.

Hardy writes using some older words and phrases, a few seeking the rhyme here, and the nostalgic sentiment in his poem might remind us that he lived, and lived past, the Victorian age in Great Britain when some of the Christmas traditions that are still part of observances of this day emerged. There’s hearth, food, company, and music in this Christmas memory, but like a good 20th Century Modernist Hardy tells this story in things, not labels. Note the absence of words naming emotions in this old man’s poem. Oh, “tired” appears in Hardy’s second stanza — but I can testify as a fellow old man that tired is not a verb or adjective, it becomes a very noun in later life. His word-music is graceful, but careful readers of Hardy’s text* that I sing here will notice that I modified it a bit to fit the song music I made and sang this with.

New Year's Gifts

Music as a gift: later today I’ll be going out to hear the Midwestern Jazz combo The Bad Plus, a present from my wife.

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While other members of my little household baked cookies, I worked on composing that music for “The House of Hospitalities.”   It’s a simple tune, but Hardy’s words and my sensibilities didn’t ask for more than that. I played it on an electric guitar as I sang — electric oddly, so that I could keep the sound lower and separate from the household’s other holiday tasks, for Hardy’s poem is solitary save for memories. Then late on Christmas Eve I worked on adding the bowed strings Hardy mentions in the viol that is now home to wood-worms, some treated electric piano, and the tiny lead instrument of the piece you can hear: glockenspiel. I finished after midnight’s noon, Christmas having entered in the dark.

This morning I give it to you to unwrap. You can play it with the graphical player below that most will see. Don’t see that? No problem, here’s an alternative highlighted link that will play my performance.

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*I need to thank the Fourteen Lines blog who introduced me to this poem of Hardy’s this month. Lots of variety in the poems they share there. Here’s a link to their presentation of it with Hardy’s original text.

Christmas in the Workhouse

~ Frank Hudson ~ 7 Comments

One thing about the Christmas and winter holiday celebrations is that they can occasion the sharing of strands of different traditions. For the teenager in the house, hardly old enough to have traditions, it’s been watching Hogfather,*  and at least for this year, as many of the Matrix movies** as can be found to stream. For the wife, it’s been revisiting a memorable-to-her Seventies’ Christmas TV movie The Gathering.***

The Gathering stars Ed Asner, not yet transformed from the comic Lou Grant of the Mary Tyler Moore Show  to the more dramatic Lou Grant of the spinoff series.  One of the pleasures of this cheaply and quickly made TV movie are the scenes where Asner gets to show off some of his range the viewing public probably didn’t know he had, aided by the rest of a cast headed by Maureen Stapleton.

The script’s story by James Poe could be viewed as a blander suburban-set predecessor to The Royal Tenenbaums,  with Asner as the thoughtless and self-centered older father trying to reunite his varied family and his connection to them.

One lovely scene stood out for me, one odd enough that it could have made it into a Wes Anderson version. Male family members surround the partially redeemed patriarch Asner amid Christmas decorations in the old family home to enact what is presented as a family Christmas ritual. Adapting a broad Cockneyish accent, Asner recites a poem he ascribes to Rudyard Kipling while another family member, who well knows the piece, “bleeps” offending words with a little Zuzu Bailey Christmas ornament bell.

Readers here will know this’ll ring the Parlando bell too. I had to know more about this poem! First off, there’s no evidence that it’s by Kipling, though its audience would likely have been familiar with Kipling’s poetic style. Rather it’s an Edwardian parody of unknown authorship of an earlier Victorian sentimental poem by George R. Sims.  Sims’ poem is a critique of the limits and constraints of the workhouse solution**** of poverty and vulnerable citizens without support, couched in a Dickensian weeper of a personal story by a poor man who the system has failed. The original aims to engender angry tears.

The parody on the other hand is a much more compact work, though too a critique of the same workhouse system and limits of charity. This work by an unknown author is meant to make one’s anger laugh at such human coarseness. It can be enjoyed, immaturely, as simple travesty, a variation of the “Jingle Bells, Batman smells…” substitution of sentimental holiday cheer with the lyrical equivalent of fart noises or singing dogs. But Batman is a fairytale character who wears his underwear on the outside of his tights, and riding a sleigh to grandma’s house is unexperienced nostalgia; while residents of a workhouse, or the unhoused modern equivalents, are actual fellow human beings who we emphasize with and aid imperfectly.

If you’re of the mood to shout “balls” at unexamined Christmas cheer or the faults of Capitalism, or if you’ve ever been condescended to by a “better,” then you’re the audience for this piece. Perhaps you’re not of that mood? Well then, here are two Christian Christmas hymns the Parlando Project has done: Christina Rossetti’s sad-sounding yet beautiful and joyous “In the Bleak Midwinter”  and my adaptation of Henry Wadsworth’s Longfellow’s “The Three Kings”  which is full of precise majesty even with undernotes of parental anxiety.

Christmas in the Workhouse chords

Here’s a chord sheet in case you want to form your own workhouse chorus to sing this one

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In the 1977 movie, the missing but rhyming rude words of this ditty were assumed to be understood even if missing. In modern TV standards they’d all be allowed. Rude British slang probably even adds unintended charm to American audiences. “Beer” of course isn’t a curse other than to abstainers, though too much may be a burden to be coarsely unburdened of. “Balls” or bollocks are testicles, and patriarchally still somehow measurably more polite than the “c word” (also used more freely in British than American slang.) “Sods” is more obscure, but is short for Sodomite, which gets its suppositorian retort from the don’t ask, but will tell, crusty veteran.

Assault your tender ears with my performance of “Christmas in the Workhouse”  using the player below. No player to be seen? This highlighted hyperlink will serve.  I was aiming for a bit of the early Billy Bragg sound for this one, but I ended up somewhere else nearby. Wife and teenager were dragged away from their Matrix series home-viewing festival to play members of the workhouse chorus, so the least you can do is listen. Happy Holidays to all you intoxicated, genital flaunting, gender-queer, ass-owners who despite it all manage to listen to a variety of musical presentations combined with a variety of words — only some of which are solemn — here.

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*A wonderful British TV movie presentation of an episode from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Unreservedly recommended.

**I saw the first one and liked it well enough to not have a great desire to see the continuations.

***Footnotes, it’s like even more gifts to unwrap after that package of socks — and wait…it’s… another…pair of…socks.  Watching The Gathering  made me grateful for the much higher standards expected of modern “event television” productions. The Gathering  won an outstanding dramatic event Emmy for 1977, so it was considered good of kind for that era.

****Workhouses were a British invention to solve the problem of the chronically unemployed, unhoused, indebted, and sometimes frail or mentally abnormal citizens. The idea was that if you couldn’t scrape together enough to survive otherwise your option was to be sent via government edict to a facility where you’d be given enough to arguably survive under a discipline and order that might include being treated as inmate labor.

This sounds exactly Dickensian and out of the mouth of Scrooge before conversion, but this solution was also widely adopted in America. Even in my childhood I can remember driving with my dad past a local Iowa “county farm,” which was founded on the same principle. In practice these institutions varied from hell-on-earth abusive places through ascending circles of shame and shaming up to sites that, at least when under the best administrations, may have been not altogether worse to what came before and after. The degradation was often “designed-in,” as the workhouse was supposed to make even the worst of wage-labor situations look better than the alternative.

In some ways then, today’s piece continues my honoring of the life of Ethna McKiernan, who worked with the unhoused professionally up until the onset of her final illness.

The Three Kings

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Here’s a piece that will seem appropriate for Christmas, but to be exact, it’s actually early  and only due by January 6th. Yes, even though your standard-issue Christmas decoration depicts a stable with baby Jesus, his parents, livestock, shepherds, a hanging heavenly star, and that exotic trio: the Three Kings, the Three Wise men, the Magi, the reviewers who will give King Herod a scathing no-star* Yelp review—never mind that creche, the traditional story has it that the three kings arrive later.

the-adoration-of-the-magi by Rubens 1

In this painting by Rubens it looks like the Magi have  roadies, a security detail, and an all-access pass

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There’s even a church holiday associated with this January date: Epiphany. And that date, the visit of the Magi, was also the endpoint of the English 12 Days of Christmas, something best remembered here in the U. S. via that crowded, livestock enriched, counting song.

But never you mind. On Christmas, angels appear on high, animals can talk, and Christians celebrate the coming of the Godhead as a small human baby. Let’s not sweat the small stuff.

I found this late Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, “The Three Kings,”  this week, and set about quickly seeing if I could turn it into a Parlando Project piece in time for Christmas. Turns out I can. And as a result, you all get a new Christmas carol today.

The Three Kings

You don’t need a word-a-day calendar when you have poetry. “Kine” is an archaic word for cattle. As to the breath of cattle, well, carbon-neutral poetic license there. “Paraclete” is the consoling aspect of the Holy Spirit.

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The full original text is longer than what I’ll perform. Here’s a link to the full poem in case you want to see what I started with. Figuring that performing the whole thing would run long (I like to keep Parlando Project pieces under 5 minutes) I looked to see if I could excerpt a scene from it, and rather quickly I found what I think is the heart of the piece. Even though the Three Kings are the title characters, and lots of detail on their story is included in Longfellow’s original, the real central character is Mary, the mother of Jesus.

So, I open with the Kings arriving and finding the incongruous royal, holy, baby in the stable. I love the stanza where Longfellow so touchingly, and humanly, recounts something many first-time parents will relate to: Mary with joy and worry watching the fragile miracle of her newborn’s breathing.

And then he follows that with the exact details of the gifts that the Magi are offering, efficiently detailing what they symbolize, ending with the myrrh and the note that it is for burial of the body. Which, as one might expect, is not what worried Mary wants to hear.

I close on Longfellow’s next-to-last stanza, where Mary comforts herself with the annunciation message she had heard from an angel before Jesus’ birth, which didn’t include the fine print of her baby’s eventual suffering, torture and execution.

Longfellow may have a reduced reputation as an effective poet, but particularly when I zoom in on the heart of this piece, I don’t think he comes off badly. I believe also that the aged Longfellow has his own life to draw on here, not just as a parent, but as someone who lost his first beloved wife in childbirth and his second beloved wife to a fire that he himself tried to smother out on her body.

Longfellow himself says the moment of his poem mixes the joy of life with the terror of death—yet oh my, I’ve gone and mixed Christmas joy with sorrowful things, but I will not remove the above, nor decorate it with some statement that sorrow is what makes joy more intense, or that neither is everlasting, or some elaborate reminder that this happy holiday has been set so near our Northern hemisphere’s shortest day and longest night to set it off with hope. As I say from time to time here, it’s not what I believe that is important—it’s what you  believe.

Thank you for reading and listening. A player gadget should appear below to hear my performance of my selection from Longfellow’s “The Three Kings”  using my own music. If you don’t see the player, this highlighted hyperlink will also open a player in a new window so that you can hear it.

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*Astrologers giving out a no-star review is the ultimate burn for those guys. See also haruspex dishing on bad chicken take-out, palm readers who really don’t want you to give them a hand, and numerologists who’ll correct your bad arithmetic.

Love Came Down

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

One of the particulars of childhood is that one can experience extraordinary things as usual. In the years of my childhood, protestant Christian church services always included the singing of several hymns by the congregation at large. I suspect this may be less common today. I believe larger churches now often feature talented musicians and singers performing more of the musical parts of the service, which makes the worship more like conventional entertainment. In many of the rural churches of my youth, even organizing a church choir for a single number might strain the resources of the smaller congregations. So instead, we held the hymns in our own breaths and wavering pitches.

The singing of such hymns, many from the 19th century, was part of my musical initiation. The melodies were various, some taken from traditional airs, others adapted from famous classical composers. The words? There was that ordinary/strange part. Hymn writers were often the philosophical sort, and their lyrics would drop esoteric theological terms and judgements as austere as their hopes were sure. It wasn’t just the children that would be asked to fill their lungs and sing these arcane terms, they were also not the common language of the farmers and tradesmen who filled the pews.

Often the minister leading the congregation would skip the more difficult verses, but I, enamored of words, would read them anyway and wonder at their celestial descriptions. This experience may have primed me for a later-life appreciation for Emily Dickinson, who sometimes used the common hymn meter for her own original and less than orthodox hymnal.

Well, that’s a long digression before bringing forth the author of the text I use today: Christina Rossetti. Rosetti often wrote short devotional poems, and while I don’t know if she intended them from the start as hymn lyrics, some were straightaway used for same. Her poem “Love Came Down at Christmas”  is one example. It’s sung to several melodies, one of which is a traditional Irish tune which I used as a basis for my setting.

Rossetti as a poet is not often drawn to extravagant verse (unlike many of her Victorian contemporaries), and the text of her poem is quite short: 12 lines, 63 words. While not in an exact form like a triolet, rondel or the like, it makes significant use of repetition: 11 of those words are uses of the word “love,” and its relative “lovely” could make that count 12. The poem has only one rhyme, which sometimes just repeats its word rather than true rhyme: divine, sign, mine.

So, a simple structure, the kind of thing that is ideal for singing. None the less, it’s been altered in most performances I’ve sampled. The line “Love to God and all men” has sometimes been changed to inclusive language (“all of us”). The other common alteration is to drop the second verse. That’s odd, it’s not like this is a 48-verse ballad or something. I suspect that dropped verse is excluded because it uses those dodgey theological words.

Here’s Rossetti’s original second verse:

Worship we the Godhead,
Love Incarnate, Love Divine,
Worship we our Jesus,
But wherewith for sacred sign?

Many would be in the philosophic weeds there. The belief that sweet baby Jesus is an incarnation of the divine Godhead is orthodox Christianity, but it comes off kind of Hindu expressed so. And the last line is a bit awkward in sing-ability and sense.

Edward_Burne-Jones_Star_of_Bethlehem

The gifts are nice, but the Airbnb review Joseph’s writing will still be scathing.

 

Still, dropping it obscures the point Rossetti chose to make: that the incarnate Godhead is not something that we can invariably grasp. Use of three-kings astrology and wandering stars is not reliable after all. As the second verse makes way for the third, she chooses and old standby from folk-ballads for her compressed song: the love-token. In songs like “John Riley”  long-separated lovers know each other by some special device they have exchanged, and in this case, love itself is the token. We will know the Godhead, and not some counterfeit, is present by love’s presence.

I took the liberty of revising Rossetti’s second verse rather than dropping it. Here’s how I rendered it:

If we seek the Godhead
Love incarnate, love divine;
Where to find our Jesus,
What would be his sacred sign?

I also took liberties with the music. All the repetition with the words often resolving down to the same made me think of musics based on similar relationships to departing and returning rather than a harmonic progression that goes onward. That and the second verse called for me to pull out the tambura and sitar,* and to play guitar and organ in a manner that would match them. The piece would benefit if a better singer in that tradition sang it than myself—but then, there may be a benefit to singing the hymns even if one isn’t the best singer in the congregation.

Choices like this as I pursue this project to introduce different words and music to each other is my adult way to make the extraordinary usual. The player to hear my performance of Christina Rossetti’s poem is below.

 

 

 

 

*Though I once played a copy of the Coral “Electric Sitar,” I no longer use that approximation of the real sitar. Instead I use my MIDI guitar to play sitar and tambura “virtual instruments” where the guitar (or keyboard) can trigger the sound of each note in the instrument’s range as one plays, using a variety of realistic timbres from the real thing.

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day (Christmas Bells)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Here’s a hopeful song written by a worried man during the great trauma of the American Civil War.

Those who’ve followed along on this blog in 2018 will know that I’ve performed several pieces with words written by that man, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I’ve written about his once great fame and his steep fall from poetic fashion, but I’ve written little about his eventful personal life.

longfellows house in winter

Not all of what it seems: a picture postcard scene of Longfellow’s home during the Civil War.

 

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, there could be no doubt on which side Longfellow would be on. To the extent that Longfellow was political as a writer, he was resolutely against the institution of slavery. Longfellow was also philosophically a pacifist, but even before the war he was aware of the cost Abolitionist convictions could bring. His closest friend, Charles Sumner, a U. S. Senator and another Abolitionist, was sitting at his desk on the Senate floor in 1856 when three southern congressmen launched a planned assault on him. The leader of the crew beat Sumner into unconsciousness with a walking stick, while the other two held off any who rose to try to stop the assault, one brandishing a pistol to keep help at bay. Sumner was so badly injured from the attack he was unable to resume his Senate duties for three years after the attack.

By the spring of 1863, the Civil War over the maintenance of slavery was now two years old. No one knew how long it would continue or what the outcome would be, and once more someone close to Longfellow would feel its blows. Longfellow’s 17-year-old son Charley, who had firmly resolved his own feelings about the war, snuck out of the family home and made his way to Washington to join the Union army. In November of that year, his unit was reconnoitering around a Virginia location called New Hope Church. They found what they were looking for. A southern bullet ripped through Charley Longfellow’s torso sideways, just nicking his spine. Luck that, and luck that he was able to endure and survive a painful evacuation on a wagon and the woeful state of battlefield trauma care in his time. Over half-a-million fellow soldiers didn’t.

So, a month before Christmas, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was searching the maze of makeshift hospitals and camps in Washington until he found his wounded son. Son found, by Christmas the Longfellows could return home for further recuperation.

Today “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”*  if listened to casually may pass as just another carol, an obligatory musical evocation of some cheerful pealing on a winter’s holiday. But to the poet who wrote these words that Christmas, and to the nation torn apart, that he and his audience were part of, this was not merely another generalized Christmas card.

I wrote a couple of hundred words, meaning to put them here next, starting to say, preaching about, what Longfellow said in his poem—but Longfellow says what he needed to say pretty well and clear for an unfashionable poet. Maybe that “clear” thing is part of what is unfashionable, but despair shared and hope earnestly put forward is  a gift.

The player gadget below will let you hear “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day (Christmas Bells)”  as I performed it. To sharpen Longfellow’s point, I trimmed back the number of stanzas in his original poem and then again from the shorter number of verses usually sung in the hymn that was made from it. I also reharmonized the chord changes a little. Guitarists wanting to play this themselves can use this shared link to see the details of the open tuning and chord voicings I used for this. The modified tuning, with the two lowest strings on the guitar tuned down even lower, makes this very easy to play.

 

 

 

*When Longfellow’s poem was published the next year it was titled “Christmas Bells,”  but it’s now best known through the hymn/Christmas carol set to music by John Baptiste Calkin.

In the Bleak Midwinter

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Tomorrow is Christmas, a holiday that in the English-speaking world owes a lot to the English Victorians in conception, which gives me an excuse to present once again the words of the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, this time in the guise of her popular and explicitly Christian-religious Christmas song “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

Burne-Jones' Nativity

“You could have brought a casserole.” Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones’ nativity.
Is it just me, or is Mary looking a little non-plussed by all the visitors?

 

The song used for Rossetti’s words seems to be attributed to Gustav Holst, a composer who is best known to me for his orchestral suite “The Planets,”  which has been admired or borrowed from by both Frank Zappa and King Crimson. In my rush to complete this today I can’t say that I’ve done as much justice to his tune, though I used a rough approximation of it.

The tune is quite pretty, and it makes it a fine solo for any good singer, which therefore makes it a challenge for me, so I’ve resorted to my usual parlando. On the other hand, a great many versions of this song in hymn books and elsewhere seem to have modified Christina Rossetti’s words, changing terms and phrases, even dropping some stanzas, where I’ve been faithful to them. I don’t have my usual time today to research why this would be. The meter of her original text is slightly irregular, and so it may have been modified for better singability or for audience reasons.

Botticelli's Mystic Nativity

Botticelli’s “Mystic Nativity.” Painted before the career of Raphael
So literally, a first-order “Pre-Raphaelite”

 

Rossetti’s approach makes use of her characteristic modesty in approaching religious subjects, with some lovely lines in the first verse picturing our northern Midwinter, and then going on to describe the stable setting, and the supernatural surrounding sentimental maternity and spiritual imminence.

Musically, I tried to compensate for my speaking the words by unleashing my bass playing. Like some gifts you may get this Christmas, it may not be the right size or color—but it was given in a good spirit at least.

To un-wrap it, use the player below.