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> Is it the greatest Christmas song ever? I’m a church organist inter alia and I doubt any of my fellows would say it was. O Come All Ye Faithful? Certainly. H
by Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
> Is it the greatest Christmas song ever?
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.
- seandougall 8y agoI dunno, it got my kids to fall asleep last night. I'm feeling pretty good about it right now.
- haberman 8y agoThis 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.
- labster 8y agoDefinitely 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.
- fipple 8y agoCan I speculate that you grew up in a warm climate?
- Doctor_Fegg 8y agoRural England? I wish...
- fipple 8y agoMy 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.
- doctorless 8y agoAve Maria?
- ZanyProgrammer 8y agoIs that really Nativity specific? Seems more like the Annunciation.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoGod Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, and Carol of the Bells are my favorites.
- cvwright 8y agoNice 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."
- DanAndersen 8y agoAgreed! 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. [0] http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/part2c1.htm http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting...
- sparky_z 8y agoOh Holy Night, when done very well. But it suffers more than most when the performance is just mediocre.
- nicklaf 8y agoBut it suffers more than most when the performance is just mediocre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiTX_jfUI5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiTX_jfUI5Y
- bitwize 8y agohttps://youtu.be/lmX18C3PBq0 https://youtu.be/lmX18C3PBq0
- mongol 8y agoVery well, like with Jussi Björling https://youtu.be/ofKk_Etapq4 https://youtu.be/ofKk_Etapq4
- mci 8y agoGive Bóg się rodzi a try. It is a Polish Christmas song whose lyrics come from ~1792. The melody is much older. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyKE7XbEVpQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyKE7XbEVpQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Is_Born https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Is_Born
- Tomte 8y agoTo laypeople probably more so. 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.