Res ipsa loquitur

torch asks, "favorite advent songs!"

My current favorite Advent hymn is "Comfort, Comfort Ye My People." I have two recordings of it, and I'm not 100% satisfied with either of them.

Comfort, Comfort Ye My People by Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church Choir is an anthem like you'd hear from a very good church choir. It changes the rhythm in places, which bugs me.

Comfort, Comfort Ye My People by the Choirs of the Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta is more of a production, with winds and percussion.

I would love just a straightforward, minimally fancied-up version of the hymn, if anyone would like to share.

Savior of the Nations, Come by the Valparaiso University Chorale

Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus by the Scottish Festival Singers

People, Look East by the Mount Holyoke College Glee Club --- when was the last time you heard a female glee club? I really like this.

Maria Walks Amid the Thorn by the Benedictines of Mary is a pregnant-Mary song with the lovely pagan touch of a long-dormant tree bursting into flower.

Prepare the Way, O Zion/Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus by the Miserable Offenders (!) is an interesting combination of two hymns with entirely different tempos.

Come, Love, Caroling by Shusha is another pregnant-Mary hymn that I particularly like, though I'm not 100% happy with this performance. But I love the text. "All the while, wherever I may be, I carry the maker of the world in me."

Seeking Christmas music: In addition to the version of "Comfort, Comfort Ye My People" mentioned above, I'm also looking for a version of "What Child Is This" that has Dix's different text with each chorus ("Nails, spears shall pierce him through," etc.), instead of always defaulting to "This, this is Christ the king."



( Click for question list. Still 5 days left to fill. )

Here's what I've been doing for fun: I went to YouTube, where I found a poster named Top40Bill who creates medleys of every song that was in the Top 40 for a particular year. I started with 1974, which is the year I turned ten. And then I felt every feeling that it's possible for music to make you feel.

I've been working my way through my Pop Music Imprinting Period since then, and I've discovered:

- that the radio in North Carolina in the 1970s was pretty racist. (Which shouldn't surprise me considering that the North Carolina Eugenics Board was still sterilizing black girls against their will while I was singing "I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing" with my fourth grade class on the other side of town.)

- that looking at photos of the 5th Dimension is like looking at some fabulous Polly Pocket set where all the clothes are different but they all match and they're all amazing.

- that Elvis Presley, Al Green, the Pointer Sisters, Rick Springfield, and Supertramp all had Top 40 hits the same year.

- that most of the artists of the seventies were really, really ugly. But Al Green was pretty cute when he was young, and so, weirdly, was Mack Davis.

- that I can deeply and profoundly detest a song and yet be familiar with every note in it. I'm looking at you, Paul Anka.

- that Andy Kim ("Rock Me Gently") wrote "Sugar, Sugar" for the Archies, and also was Lebanese.

- that the Raspberries and Alice Cooper had multiple hits, which have been mercifully forgotten.

- so many bad covers. So many.

singulardegenerate asked for these, so here they are for everyone:

Mike, Peggy, and Penny Seeger, "Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow," and Cathie Ryan and Liam Tiernan, "In Dulci Jubilo"

Hidden Virtues just taught me how to hook into the Teranerd network from home. Do you know what this means? This means that Friday can be a day without shoes!

(Hidden Virtues is my cubemate and trainer. She talks like the biggest slacker you ever met, while quietly doing more work than any three other people.)

Anyway. Ahem.

ranalore asked: Do you write to music? If so, what makes a good writing soundtrack?

If I'm in control of my surroundings, I write to blissful silence, because I'm very easily distracted by sounds.

But if I'm in a coffee shop or something, I'll play music softly to drown out the sounds of other people's conversations. But because I'm easily distracted by sound, this music has to be either instrumental or in a language I don't understand. (And I mean I can't understand any of it. My Spanish fluency is such that if I lived in a Spanish-speaking country I'd probably get held back a year before being sent to kindergarten, but a song in Spanish is just familiar enough to distract me.)

My Working Music playlist is a weird selection -- Renaissance and baroque, 1950s jazz, bluegrass and roots music, African pop, folk in various languages. Here's a sample:

Carolina Chocolate Drops, "Snowden's Jig": Oliver Mtukudzi, "Pindurai Mambo"; Oni Wytars Ensemble, "Fa mi cantar l'amor"; Peter Knight, "Seven Dancers"; Baltimore Consort, "Newcastle"

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.

( Recommendations and download links inside )

From vickita:

Here are the rules: Comment with a request, and I'll give you a letter. You go and post five favourite songs/music videos that start with that letter.

She gave me D, so I give you ...

'Dainty Davy' by Jean Redpath. A love song collected by Robert Burns, and said by some to be based on a true story, about a woman who foolishly protected a young man by ... hiding him in bed with her nubile daughter.

'Devoted To You' by Carly Simon & James Taylor. When I was in high school, the chorus raised money by taking donations in exchange for sending a pair of singers into someone's homeroom to sing this song to them. I also know how to sing a third part in between the two voices, resulting in a paian to the eternally devoted love of three people.

'Don't Sugar Me' from 'Songs of the Pogo.' A poem from Walt Kelly's "Pogo" cartoon, set to music. Dr. Google informs me that the singer is the improbably named Fia Karin. I actually prefer the Muppets version.

'Drake's Drum' by the Revels. "Drake is in his hammock and a thousand miles away./Captain, art thou sleeping there below?/Slung atween the roundshot in Nombre de Dios Bay,/Dreaming all the time of Plymouth Hoe."

'Dry Bones' by Sons of Andros. I got this from a collection of folk music from the Bahamas (which I discovered accidentally while downloading doo-wop, as you do). I'd never known where that whole "ankle bone connected to the knee bone" thing came from.

Hey, wow, there's a holiday coming, isn't there? Until I finished the cookbooks, I couldn't even stand to look at it.

It's been a couple of years since I posted Christmas music, so all this is newly acquired during that time. Help yourself -- since it's Sendspace, no need to comment if you don't want to, but let me know if you want to download and the links have expired.

Huh. I have a lot of wassail songs, for a person who doesn't drink.

( Read more... )

Today I want everybody to go out and buy two CDs because I like them. ( Read more... )

Some songs I'm enjoying lately -- lot of trad folk and acoustic string stuff, heavy on the harmony. Just because.

Malinky, "The Light Dragoon"
Tom Chapin, "Wheel of the Water"
the Carolina Chocolate Drops, "Sourwood Mountain"
Love Hall Tryst, "Jack in the Green"
Sons of Andros, "Dry Bones"
Marley's Ghost, "Turtle Dove"
Dicey Doh Singers, "You Ain't Hurryin' Me"
Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (from "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," a Pete Seeger tribute CD -- I've discovered that one of the things Amazon downloads are good for is letting you listen to samples of all the songs on a tribute CD, find the one or two decent ones, and not be stuck with all the crappy ones)
Martin Carthy, "Hard Cheese of Old England"

Me myself, I like Christmas, maybe because (1) I eat whatever I want, and (2) my family and in-laws are hundreds of miles away. But tofty has worked up a playlist of depressing alternative Christmas songs. At her suggestion, I present the matching collection of old-fashioned traditional depressing Christmas songs.

Verily, the Tide of Christmas Doth Blow (the Nasty, Brutish, and Short Traditional Music Mix)

Andrew Parrott and the Baltimore Consort: Coventry Carol. Or: Let's see if we can save this baby while all the others are murdered.
The Voice Squad: Down In Yon Forest. Or: Arthurian imagery, sick wounds, blood.
The Voice Squad: The Holly She Bears A Berry. Blood. Blood, I tell you.
Deller Consort: Adam Lay Ybounden. Or: Crime. Punishment. Eventual redemption. For this we're required to give thanks.
Baltimore Consort: Remember, O Thou Man. Adam's fall, part 2.
Baltimore Consort: Bellman's Carol. Or: This little baby y'all are so excited about? He's gonna die.
Maddy Prior: Poor Little Jesus. Yup. Gonna die.
Maddy Prior: See Amid the Winter Snow. And plus it was really nice where he was, whereas here? Not so nice.
Anonymous 4: Seven Rejoices of Mary. Seeing her son crucified. Makes a mother's heart glad.
Revels: Dame, Get Up and Make Your Pies. Mutilated birds.
Revels: Malpas Wassail. Random drunken people at your door demanding figgy pudding.

Download here.