The news of the day has been about Duck Dynasty patriarch
Phil Robertson being suspended from his own family’s reality show on A&E,
because he answered a direct question about his opinion on the definition of
marriage, in an interview to be published in GQ Magazine. There is a firestorm of response about that. A couple
of my favorites are Shawn Rogers’ commentary (available on Not on This Watch
Facebook page 12-19-2013
) and PJ Media’s Bryan Preston. If you’ve read my Defense of Marriage collection, you probably know where I stand.
Which doesn’t make me a hater either—just a civilized
thinker.
So, rather than spend more time on that just before
Christmas, I’m going to spend time sharing something much more pleasant: Christmas Music.
Music is a pretty big part of my life. I play piano and
organ well enough for church purposes. I lead the church choir. I play mountain
dulcimer, and taught that instrument in an adult education class through the community
college this fall. The little jam group I attend weekly, which includes
dulcimers as well as guitars, mandolins, a string bass, banjo, and flutes, has
performed as a service several times this month. I also occasionally play
guitar and recorder (wooden flute, soprano and alto). And I sing. To paraphrase
Buddy the Elf, “Singing is my favorite!” Or lines from “The Holly and the Ivy”:
“…The playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir.” It’s what I do. I
sing at home and in the car. Sometimes in public.
Christmas is a music season. So I thought I’d put together a
little online concert here—some of my current favorite Christmas pieces, for no
other purpose that to feel what it is to feel the Spirit of Christ while we’re
spending time celebrating His very special life.
This first one, is a capella, written by Aaron Edson. I
first heard it in two places, in late 2005. Edson wrote it for a scripture
video series called Liken the Scriptures (very fun series, with kids imagining
how things must have been, with lots of music). This one is sung by the
shepherds in The First Christmas. It
was also included on BYU’s Vocal Point 2004 album, “Standing Room Only.”
Vocal Point is BYU’s national
award-winning men’s a capella ensemble. So I’ve been a fan since years before
they became famous on the TV show The Sing Off.
In 2006 I contacted Aaron Edson to see if I could get the
music for a concert I was conducting. He was at that time working to get it
into print and sent me, at no cost, a pdf of the music along with permission to
use it for our church concert. What a great guy! We had a group of eight or so
perform the ensemble piece for our 2006 concert. This video is excerpted from The First Christmas.
Since we can’t get enough of men’s a capella, here’s a bonus
of Vocal Point doing the perfect version of “12 Days of Christmas.” (Harvard
and Indiana University men’s ensembles have done this as well.)
Do you know about The Piano Guys? Hurray for the internet
making performances possible and sharable in ways they never were before! The
Piano Guys is a combination of pianist Jon Schmidt and cellist Steven Sharp
Nelson and some other musicians who happen to also be extraordinarily skilled
at video production. So these guys do videos of their music in various places.
Once they airlifted a grand piano onto a dangerously high mesa
in southern Utah, where they’re from.
Recently they performed on the Great Wall of China. I’m a big fan—got to see them in concert
last summer when they stopped in Houston on tour.
Their newest Christmas video is “Angels We Have Heard on High,” using the piano in ways you might never
have seen—unless you’ve seen these guys before. I encourage you to go to the
link. Watch everything they’ve done! But the video I’m including is from a year
ago, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” a Mormon Channel video including them and
their music in a beautiful depiction of the nativity and Christ’s life. (It
looks like it was filmed on location in the Holy Land, but is actually a beautifully
done media studio set.) I watched this every day for a month last year—well into
January.
The year that Vocal Point was on The Sing Off, that year’s
winner was Pentatonix. I was disappointed my heroes didn’t win, but I’ve come
to really like this group. This year their version of “Little Drummer Boy” is
my new favorite of that song. It’s no longer the same song I sang in elementary school.
Lindsey Sterling is another internet video star. She’s a
violinist who dances (dubstep) while she plays. She’s a delightful
elfin/pixie-looking young woman, and makes use of that, totally decked out as
an elf in “Celtic Carol.” But the piece I'm sharing is her heart-wrenchingly
beautiful version of “What Child Is This.”
Lindsey has done videos with both The Piano Guys (a very fun
"Mission Impossible" spoof) and Pentatonix (a post-apocalyptic looking "Radioactive.”)
She grew up in Arizona, it turns out
in the same neighborhood where Mr. Spherical Model’s brother lives. Her dad is
a close family friend. I mentioned this to my son Political Sphere, who used to
live there too, and he said, “Oh, yeah. I know who that is.” I was a fan well
before I learned she was a regular person just down the street, except for when
she’s touring the world.
There are others I’d like to share, but are less easily
linked. So I’ll end with a new favorite I discovered this year. My dulcimer
group introduced me to this one, and we’ve already performed it several times. I’ve
gotten ahead for next year and ordered it for my church choir to sing. The link is
for audio only, but it’s a heavenly three minutes, called “Shines the Light.”
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