I’m a church organist inter alia and I doubt any of my fellows would say it was. O Come All Ye Faithful? Certainly. Hark the Herald? Could be. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen with that spine-tingling David Willcocks last verse? Perhaps. But sweet, saccharine Silent Night? It wouldn’t be on the list.
This is funny for me. I'm a singer and organist who has spent my life in churches and I am notorious among all my friends and family for loathing Silent Night (in good fun). It is slow, harmonically uninteresting, but worst of all it is always sung unaccompanied on Christmas Eve, in which time it get slower and flatter until it is at risk of coming to a complete stop.
Give me O Come All Ye Faithful or One in Royal David's City from Carols for Choirs. Or O Come, O Come Emmanuel.
Definitely some survivor bias in your choices, since Adeste Fideles and Veni Emmanuel have Latin names. I'd throw In Dulci Jubilo in the same group of songs that have earned a permanent place in the Christmas songbook.
Nice choices! IMO the best Christmas songs have a mix of joy and something.. else. Something a little eerie. Not quite foreboding, exactly, but definitely a bit tense.
From a certain perspective, maybe this is theologically correct to have a mix of "Yay Jesus is coming!" and also at the same time "Oh shit, he's coming here?!?"
For those from other faith traditions, imagine you hear that your CEO is finally going to visit your little under-appreciated department. "Yay!" you think.
Then they tell you, "Yeah, cool huh? He's waiting in your office."
Agreed! My favorite Christmas carols are the ones that aren't just marking a jolly merry festival, but have that "foreboding" melancholy potency you describe. I think G. K. Chesteron did a good job of capturing the sense of it, in his "The Everlasting Man" [0]:
>Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. [...] There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only bangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapor from the exultant, explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savor is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaws den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicing in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.
Ah yeah. O Holy Night is the perfect example. It starts off soft and soothing, then transforms into something that sounds foreboding, and then finishes with something that sounds triumphant. It's marvelous.
Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht has always been the ultimate song at the end of the Christmas service in my church, after the benediction.
And, the best part when I was a child, the sun on the side of the organ would spin at the last verse. It would only do so on that occasion, once a year.
My theory is that most people who don’t like Silent Night never got to have a truly silent winter night... which of course requires active snowfall with no wind.
No I haven't. Seems apropos. For some strange reason, the description reminds of of Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," which doesn't have much joy in it.
Can anyone link to what they believe is the most faithful recreation of this first performance of Silent Night 200 years ago? Would be interesting to see if it was a hit out of the gate or if it evolved over time.
Silent Night is interesting (and by that, I mean boring) in that it's your basic three-chord I/IV/V melody.
One might think this structure is only a recent invention with early blues and rock & roll. Is it unusual for a 200-year-old song to follow this pattern? How old is the three-chord musical structure?
It's not exactly just three chords, with the chord on the first "peace" which according to one source is called a "G# Ø half dimº" chord, followed by the suspension on "heav-" aka "G add9 flat5 6th no3" [1].
There are some really cool passing chords in Silent Night.
Talking about a rock and roll structure does go nicely with the image from the article, of the debut of the song by a young priest (himself inspired by peace in the face of war) and his composer friend, accompanied by just a guitar.
As just one more point of reference for this song's cultural power: whereas the greatest movie about boxing, Raging Bull, made such wonderful use of highbrow music like the Intermezzo from Cavalleria, the greatest boxing movie, the first Rocky movie, in its own way, makes wonderful use of more familiar touchstones. In particular, an instrumental "Silent Night" plays jarringly in the background of the dramatic climax scene, where Adrian stands up to her brother. Masterful.
Daniel Kantor wrote an accompanying song to Silent Night called "Night of Silence" that's sung together. Do a search for "Silent Night / Night of Silence".
The song Twas In the Moon of Wintertime, also known as the Huron Carol, has a similar moody or melancholic effect on me. Though it is hard to find a performance on YouTube that matches my memory.
I always enjoy looking up songs that were originally German in the English Wikipedia and compare the translations to the German and, if there are multiple ones, to each other.
Interesting example to pick! It apparently has roots in the black plague, and probably existed in close to it's current form since the late 18th century.
Actually this rhyme probably had nothing to do with the Plague at all, although people go on about this all the time. This 'connection' was only picked up mid-20th century and not mentioned before.
I’m a church organist inter alia and I doubt any of my fellows would say it was. O Come All Ye Faithful? Certainly. Hark the Herald? Could be. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen with that spine-tingling David Willcocks last verse? Perhaps. But sweet, saccharine Silent Night? It wouldn’t be on the list.