Tag: Christmas music

Phone it in Friday LXXIV: Christmas Concert 2024

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This morning at around 8:21 AM EST my students will perform their annual Christmas Concert.  It’s a time-honored tradition, and represents the biggest performance of the first semester.

I often describe the Christmas Concert as my favorite and least favorite day of the school year.  It’s my favorite because it is incredible seeing my students perform, especially while glorifying God.  It’s my least favorite because it’s usually a stressful and busy day, after which I am completely drained.

However, this year I am feeling much better about it than I normally do.  My kids always do a great job, and the concert always comes off without a hitch (or without too many of them).  I think I am feeling confident about the concert because I have actually had time to prepare myself and my students for it properly.

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TBT^2: Joy to the World

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Tomorrow my students have their annual Christmas concert.  Neither of my Ensembles are performing “Joy to the World” this year, but it remains one of my favorites.  I love its rollicking and robust melody, which seems to charge forth, first with that delicious downward D major scale, and then it’s jaunty, bouncy return back up the scale in leaps.

I’ll have to dust this one off for next year’s concert, and I will certainly be playing it at church (if I have not already done so by the time this post publishes).  It’s one of the best to belt out with a room full of people.

With that, here is 14 December 2023’s “TBT: Joy to the World“:

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TBT^256: O Little Town of Bethlehem and the Pressures of Songwriting

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Pickup my newest release: Leftovers III!  Use promo code ziggurat to take an additional 20% off all purchases on Bandcamp!  Code expires at 11:59 PM UTC on Tuesday, 31 December 2024.

My students’ Christmas concert is coming on Friday, 13 December 2024, and we’re playing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” this year a la Frank Sinatra.  We’re starting in what I call the “Christmas-Eve-candlelight-service-at-your-grandmother’s-unheated-church” style, then shifting to a groovy swing.

I was thinking about the harrowing, last-minute nature of this song’s genesis while wrapping up Leftovers III, which I was getting done at the wire.  Somehow, October got so busy that I let a lot of my composing fall by the wayside, but I managed to wrap up the album in time to release it on Black Friday.

The next week will be similarly busy.  Tomorrow night is the school Christmas play, for which yours portly will be running sound.  Saturday I’ll be playing Christmas music for a local festival.  Sunday I’m rehearsing with my church for our Christmas cantata on the 22nd.  Monday is Council Meeting—and on and on and on.

Let’s all take a moment to remember the subject of this beautiful carol, and to reflect on the wonder of Christ’s Birth.

With that, here is “TBT^16: O Little Town of Bethlehem and the Pressures of Songwriting“:

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Open Mic Adventures LXVI: “Scribblings I: Post-Christmas Concert Scribbling”

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After the big Christmas Concert on Friday, 8 December 2023, I took a few quiet moments to unwind and scribbled out a little piece in my music journal.  It became “Post-Christmas Concert Scribbling,” then I added the pretentious “Scribblings I” to the title, which means there will eventually be a “Scribblings II” at some point.

It’s a short, fun little piece, meant to have a vaguely yuletide sound to it, unfolding at a moderate tempo.  The whole thing has a slight bit of pomp to it, as many great Christmas carols do.

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TBT^2: “Silent Night” Turns 200

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On Tuesday’s edition of Open Mic Adventures I shared my impromptu rendition of “Silent Night“; as such, I figured I’d throwback to this classic post about the timeless Christmas classic for this installment of TBT.

I’ve always loved the sweet, peaceful simplicity of this carol.  It also lends itself to multiple interpretations.  My Middle School Music Ensemble students have done it in 4/4 in a punk rock style.  One year, my High School Music Ensemble played it as a bluesy, Christmas-Eve-at-a-roadside-honkey-tonk jam in 6/8 (but, as I recall, only in practice—that might have been too bold for the sensibilities of my administration).

But the song is best presented as it was 205 years ago:  sung by a small choir on a cold Christmas night.

With that, here is 12 December 2019’s “TBT: ‘Silent Night’ Turns 200“:

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Open Mic Adventures LX: “Silent Night”

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We’re getting into the cozy part of the Christmas season, with plenty of cold nights spent bundled up by the light of the Christmas tree, sipping hot chocolate and wearing sweaters.  It’s the hygge, and yours portly couldn’t be happier.

Naturally, all this cozy Christmas cheer gets me thinking about Christmas carols, and few carols capture the quiet peace of Christmas quite like “Silent Night.”

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Concert 2023 Review

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Eight days ago (Friday, 8 December 2023), my students had their annual Christmas Concert.  The Christmas Concert is one of the two marquee concert events of the school year, the other being the more amorphous Spring Concert, which can fall pretty much anywhere between March and April (and even early May).  Of the two, the Christmas Concert is my favorite, and while it’s also one of the most stressful days of the year, it’s also one of my favorites.

Our Christmas Concert follows a predictable format, consisting of performances from our choir, our World Language classes, and finally from my Middle School and High School Music Ensembles.  Historically, dance classes have performed pieces prior to the musical portion of the concert, but this year marked the first that dances were not included, as the dance class performed before the Christmas Musical, which was on Friday, 1 December 2023.

Honestly, excluding dances was a major improvement.  I have nothing (well, not much) against dance as an art form, but it was never a comfortable fit in an already-overstuffed Christmas concert format.  It also adds some minor additional headaches for yours portly, who in the past has had to move pianos in the middle of the concert to accommodate the dancers.  At the risk of editorializing (but isn’t that the whole point of a blog?), I find most of these “dance” routines to be rather distasteful and a tad lurid, although I am to report that this year’s dance performance was really exceptional, tasteful, and beautiful.

But I digress.  What of the music itself?  Let’s dig in, like a Wisconsin dad shoveling snow.

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TBT: Joy to the World

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Somehow, I have not reblogged my 2019 post about “Joy to the World,” one of my favorite Christmas carols, in four years!

I’ve always loved the bouncy, joyful nature of this piece, and I almost always program it for our annual Christmas Concert.  Indeed, this year my Middle School Music Ensemble students performed it.  While we’re working on the piece, I always give my students a little speech to try to get them into the spirit of the piece.  Essentially, I tell them to imagine what it would have been like to be a shepherd on that starlit night, and for a heavenly host of infinite singing angels to burst suddenly into the sky, belting out “For Unto Us a Child Is Born!”

Our goal, I tell my students, is to capture some fraction of the overawing joy and majesty of that moment when we perform “Joy to the World.”

With that, here is 10 December 2019’s “Joy to the World“:

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Phone it in Friday XLIV: Christmas Concert 2023

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Today is the day of our big Christmas Concert at school.  It’s incredibly fun and incredibly stressful, but if everything has gone according to plan, it should go smoothly.  It’s worth it to see the kids singing and playing and having a good time.

As I’ve grown older and, arguably, more professional (and almost certainly more ornery and ill-tempered), I’ve scaled back a bit of the theatricality and bombast of the Christmas Concert to something a bit more manageable.  Gone are the days of singing while standing on a piano (I did that once, years ago).  I also strive to make the concert focused on the kids and Jesus.

One big change this year is that our Dance and Choral students won’t be performing, because they had their performances as part of the Middle School Play last Friday.  The Foreign Language Students will still get up there and belt out Christmas tunes in various languages.

I’ll be doing a full write-up one Saturday (possibly tomorrow) covering it, but for today, just pray for yours portly.  I’m confident it will be a good concert, I just gotsta get through it!

As a preview, here’s what my students are performing:

  • Middle School Music Ensemble
  • High School Music Ensemble
    • “I Wish You Love” by Icelandic jazz songstress Laufey
    • “On Christmas Day”—a piece that one of my students wrote and arranged himself!
    • “O Holy Night“—the best Christmas song ever written

Merry Christmas!

—TPP

TBT^16: O Little Town of Bethlehem and the Pressures of Songwriting

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My students have their big Christmas concert tomorrow, and while we’re not performing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” on this year’s program, there’s quite a bit of pressure to get everything sounding and looking good!  Like most folks, I don’t like stress, but it’s amazing how it forces us to get stuff done—and to make it even better!

The story of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” is relatable to songwriters, but I think speaks to all of us who have had to create or complete something with a ticking clock and high expectations.  “It takes pressure to create diamonds,” they say, and the frantic, last-minute composition of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” is a testament to that principle.

With that, here is 15 December 2022’s “TBT^4: O Little Town of Bethlehem and the Pressures of Songwriting“:

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