Monday, December 22, 2014

Make it so (The 12 Composers of Christmas #10)

Day 10 might be considered either the best of times or the worst of times in "The 12 Musings of Christmas." This video is brilliant and entertaining, but I can't take ANY credit for it, nor have I creatively interacted with it in any sort of way. I'm just saying it's awesome. I'd penciled it in when I first started plotting out this series of specials, but I hadn't realized just how popular the video is, so I'm not sure I'm doing much service by possibly adding a few more numbers to the half a million who've already seen it. Nevertheless:



Naturally, I did start thinking about ways I might interact with this idea, but I couldn't come up with anything half as clever. Plus, silly as it is, creating this video must've taken a LOT of time. I did notice a few years back that Charles Ives wrote a song which begins (in the piano part) with the first seven notes of "Let it Snow." It would be easy enough (trivial, really) to work the rest of "Let it snow" into Ives' open-door harmonic world, but I'm not sure that would be very entertaining since Ives' song isn't very familiar. 



So, if you haven't yet seen Captain Picard et al singing "Let it snow"...make it so.

Also, since I'm here, I might as well mention (already tweeted) the perverse delight I experienced on Saturday at a Christmas pageant rehearsal. Using the accompanist edition of The Hymnal 1982, I was about to start in on the last phrase of "Hark, the herald angels sing" as a hymn intro. My foot headed for what I assumed was a B-flat in the pedal when I suddenly noticed there was no B-flat in the key signature...in the bass clef. The treble staff had the expected B-flat, so it's obviously a misprint, but that's a pretty big misprint. You might be wondering what it would sound like to hear the bass staff played without B-flats. Make it so!




The 12 Musings of Christmas (so far...)
  1. Christmas Time is Here
  2. In Season
  3. Vertical Christmas Medley
  4. Trippin' with Chestnuts
  5. Sleigh Ride in a Fast Machine
  6. Sleigh Ride of the Valkyries
  7. Sleigh Ride in 7/8
  8. A Christmas Carol
  9. Savior of the Nations, Come
  10. Make it so!

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