Eccentric Flower:199812/carol me this

four twelve fourteen

carol me this

Christmas, when you think about it, is the only holiday that has its own separate genre of music.

Oh, sure, we usually trot out the patriotic songs for the Fourth of July, but that's an American affectation (we love our parades). You don't see an album of Songs For Guy Fawkes' Day in the London stores every November, and you don't see Julio Iglesias Sings the Songs Of Bastille Day selling all over the place every Juillet.

Walking through the webring and other journals, I have made a shocking discovery: Some of you like Christmas music. Some of you actually start listening to it voluntarily when December rolls around.

I never bother to actually play Christmas music of my own volition - my CD player is currently holding the same Louis Prima collection that it's been holding for about two weeks, because every time I try to replace it, Buona Serra comes back into my head and I have to listen to it again.

I figure I'll get force-fed so much of it during December - in stores, in the place where I get my morning coffee, in airport lobbies - that I shouldn't seek it out. On the other hand, those places hardly ever play the kind of Christmas music I do like. Maybe it's time to go build my own personal stash of the Good Stuff, just as a countermeasure.

I am normally a very eclectic listener - I guarantee I listen to at least one thing that would horrify each of you (I mean, a different thing for each of you - one of you would run screaming from my ABBA collection, another from my Bach fugues, another from my They Might Be Giants CD's - you get the idea). But at Christmas I turn into a deep-seated traditionalist. Here are my Categories of Christmas Music, beginning with the worst and getting better.

1. Rearrangements, or any other attempts to modernize or regroove any original versions of Christmas songs. These are almost always scary.

2. Covers, where the music has not been substantially altered but someone new is performing it. In general, the bigger the time gap - that is, the older the original - the more likely it is to be scary. I'll listen to Hanson cover White Christmas before I'll listen to them cover It Came Upon A Midnight Clear.

3. Any Christmas songs written after about 1900.

4. Everything else. Not that there's much in this category.

Basically I like traditional English and German carols, the things people actually sang in the streets, not something Bing Crosby wrote to sell some seasonal records. From a time when people dared to write Christmas songs in a minor key (like two of my favorites, the creepy-sounding Coventry Carol and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. The latter is my absolute favorite, actually, because the lyrics are so great - name me another Christmas song that talks about Satan).

The English ones tend to be about revelry and religion. German carols tend to be pastoral songs, songs about nature or sensory events, such as Leise rieselt der Schnee (Softly falls the snow). Remember that in Germany Christmas is still much more strongly connected to the Yule (i.e. pagan) tradition. Gentle, subtle songs. I think that's the problem with current Christmas music, in a nutshell - lack of subtlety.

But composition may be an issue too.

I was in the mall yesterday, buying a new camera bag, and they were playing Sleigh Ride by Leroy Anderson. Now, Anderson gets a special exemption - he was a weirdo genius who also wrote pieces like Syncopated Clocks, and even though Sleigh Ride is from the early 40's, I love it. (As long as no one actually tries to sing the words, which are stupid.)

Another piece which is generally played without words, which dates from after my 1900 deadline - I think; I seem to recall that it was written later than I thought it was - is the Carol of the Bells. Now, this piece is really annoying to some folks, because of its repetition. Tell it to Poe. I love its fuguelike structure - this is like listening to a piece of real music.

Then it hit me. The older carols have better composition. Most of them were written by church composers and organists and choirmasters and the like. They're choral music, not popular songs.

Not that I usually dislike popular songs, but as I say: At Christmas, I become nastily traditional. Or maybe just plain nasty.

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