December daily: Christmas music

[resonant]

wychwood prompts: What is your very favourite Christmas music? What makes good Christmas music for you? Which one CD etc would you recommend?

For those of you who just met me, I have 1,049 Christmas songs, including eleven distinct melodies of "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night." It's fair to say that I really love Christmas music.

As far as what makes for good Christmas music -- well. I like acoustic instruments. If there's a vocal ensemble, I like it to be small, as opposed to something like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir where you can't pick out a single voice. I'm very partial to 6/8 time. When it comes to religious music, I quite like the weird and unorthodox, which is why I also have three distinct melodies of "Down In Yon Forest."

The hardest element to define is: If you'll think of a continuum more or less between quality and authenticity, there's a sweet spot in the middle but more on the authentic side. In other words, I've been known to reject a recording because it was too off-key, but I'm much more likely to reject a recording because it's "too slick" or "overproduced" or some other vague thing that means too far away from simple enjoyment of the music. Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band are right on that sweet spot for me, and so are the Christmas Revels.



The core of my Christmas music collection are music from these CDs:

The Revels: "The Christmas Revels," "Sing We Now of Christmas," and "Christmas Day In the Morning" and "Wassail! Wassail! Early American Christmas Music"

Exultation

The Boston Camerata: "Xmas: A Renaissance Christmas" -- the first Christmas CD I ever bought

Joseph Est Bien Marie

The Chieftains: "The Bells of Dublin"

Ding Dong! Merrily On High

Christmastide Musicians: "A New England Christmas" (all instrumental)

O Come, All Ye Faithful

Duke Ellington: "Nutcracker Suite"

Sugar Rum Cherry

Early Music New York: "A Colonial Christmas" (which I believe I got from myalexandria)

Paxton (a different tune for "Joy To the World")

Ella Fitzgerald: "Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas" (this is probably about as far as I go on the "well-performed" end of the continuum)

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Maddy Prior & the Carnival Band: "Carols and Capers" and "A Tapestry of Carols"

See Amid the Winter's Snow

Mike and Peggy Seeger and Family: "American Folk Songs for Christmas" (this is probably about as far as I go on the "authentic" end of the continuum)

Shine Like a Star In the Morning

on this day earth shall ring: "Songs for Christmas"

A La Nanita Nana

Vienna Boys Choir: "Music for the Festive Season" (which was a free CD provided with a subscription to BBC Music Magazine)

Tritsch-Tratsch Polka §

The Waverly Consort: "Christmas from East Anglia to Appalachia"

The Gloucestershire Wassail


It would be cruel, cruel, to make me choose just one, but if I had to, it would probably be one of the Revels collections -- that's enough variety that I wouldn't miss the rest too terribly much.

Comments

[wychwood]

This is really fab! Thanks for posting it - I'll be looking into these :)

In return, I think you might like my 2013 Christmas music discovery - Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker's new album. I believe it's only going to be available in December, so you may wish to take a look. Folk, she has a lovely voice, some nice unusual carols, and I'm really enjoying the whole album. She's not Maddy Prior, but for me it definitely falls into the same kind of mental slot as the Carnival Band album.

(Also, I bought the CD because I like to have physical copies, and it arrived in a little parcel with a hand-written Christmas card signed by the artists! There's something really sweet about that.)

[jesse_the_k]

Very few people are Maddy Prior. Oh! the day I first heard the Silly Sisters!

Nevertheless, thanks for introducing me to Clarke & Walker.

[wychwood]

This is true! She does have a truly fabulous voice (and June Tabor is pretty great too)

[resonant]

How neat! I got a folk song by them from the Cover Lay Down blog, but I didn't know they had Christmas music too.

I'm annoyed with Amazon; every year at Christmastime I used to poke around and find ten or so new songs and download them, and it was as simple as downloading any other file, but now I can't figure out any way to buy songs from Amazon without it insisting on involving me in the Amazon music player software, which means a simple purchase now requires launching a big slow piece of software that brings my ancient MacBook to a near-standstill.

[wychwood]

Yes! Cover Lay Down posted their "We Three Kings" from this album a week or so back, which is where I discovered it.

I hate that I have to buy mp3s one at a time now, a separate transaction for every. single. track (unless I'm buying a full album, at least). Fortunately they don't have installable software for Linux, so I just download the tracks one at a time from the cloud player. That sucks for you, though.