Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I’d be the last person to criticize this woman. She was totally sincere and believed that she was doing right by her family. And yet . . . in order to be perfectly consistent, she would have had to also eliminate Christmas and Easter celebrations from her household as well. Both of those Christian holidays have traditions with pagan roots.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Celtic crosses, Celtic love knot jewelry, Celtic dancing, Celtic music . . . it’s an industry. Since my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, does a Celtic-themed concert every other year, I wanted to find out more about the history of this term. Turns out that, as is usual when you try to reconstruct the past, especially the ancient past, it ain’t all that easy to nail things down. We’re used to thinking in terms of clear-cut events and eras when we look at history, but those divisions are often more for the sake of convenience than reflections of actual reality.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
There are many Christmas carols and songs that include the image of the Christ child as a rose. “Lo, How a Rose E’re Blooming” is a famous one, made even more so from the modern pairing of that 17th century hymn with the contemporary pop song “The Rose” by Amanda McBroom. “When Blossoms Flowered ‘Mid the Snows,” is another one such with its lines:
When blossoms flowered ‘mid the snows
Upon a winter night,
Was born the Child, the Christmas Rose,
The King of Love and Light.
(This song was originally titled “Gesu Bambino,” written by—you guessed it—an Italian.)
So I had always vaguely thought of the image of a rose, possibly a red one for contrast, blooming against the white snow, a miraculous event like the story of Christmas itself. And that would indeed be a beautiful image, except for one problem:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul;
He guideth me in straight paths for His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, For Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff, They comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me, in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou hast anointed my head with oil;
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord,
Forever, forever.
So, to begin, let me just say, once again, with feeling, that the Magi did not show up on Christmas night with the shepherds. The Gospel of Matthew 2:11 says, “On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him.” At this point it makes sense to think that it’s been at least a year since the Magi set out from their home. I know that those colorfully-bedecked camels (which are never mentioned in the biblical narrative) add quite a splash to the manger scenes we set up every year, but they weren’t there.
I’ve written quite a bit about Hanukkah in previous posts, specifically about the significance of latkes as traditional food during this holiday and about the meaning of the menorah as it relates to the eight days of miraculous oil, but I haven’t written anything about dreidels, so here goes:
As with anything to do with folk traditions, the origins of this item and the game you play with it are very murky, with several strands of meaning attached to them, and with some later interpretations being projected back onto the past. It is clear that games of chance such as this one, in which you win or lose depending on how an object lands after you spin it or throw it, are very ancient. Spinning tops specifically date all the way back to the ancient Babylonians, who played with clay versions as early as 3500 BC. And—get this—there was a wooden spinning top in King Tut’s tomb! Very, very cool.
. . . We have done that which is our duty to do” (Luke 17:10).
Note: This post was originally written in April 2016 and has now been updated.
I’m not going to try to give the full Scriptural background for this verse since I’m applying it in a very specific way. I will just say that this is something Jesus said to His disciples in a discussion about faith. You can read the entire chapter at Bible Hub.
This verse originally came to mind as I was congratulating myself on how much work I was doing to prepare for an upcoming Cherry Creek Chorale concert, which included the Mozart Requiem. (I’ve since finished a book on this wonderful work; you may purchase it here or here.) I always struggle with learning new music, especially the difficult stuff (of course).
This post may come across as rather self-indulgent, but I thought, since this is a choral music blog, that it might be helpful to my readers to learn about my long and frustrating experiences with trying to get a handle on my voice/throat issues. You may recognize some of your own symptoms in mine and get some ideas for dealing with them. If you find yourself nodding off in the middle of my fascinating story, then I guess that’ll be a hint that you don’t need the information!
I’ll begin with the fact that I have always had incredibly tight/stiff neck, jaw, and shoulder muscles. When I was a speech major in college and taking a class called “Voice and Diction,” our teacher gave us an exercise in which you were supposed to take hold of your chin and move the
If you’ve been reading my essays for any length of time, you know that I’m kind of obsessed with the details of a composer’s life, or how a certain piece came to be written, or the meaning of the words in a song. Things can get pretty granular at times! So this essay is an attempt to get at the real Vivaldi, the man behind the wig, as it were. He’s a much more interesting—and complicated—figure than you may have thought. As you sing or listen to his glorious music, I hope you’ll be able to picture him going about his life and dealing with all its complications.
Let’s start with Vivaldi’s father, Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, a resident of Venice. We are told that he was a barber before becoming a professional violinist at St. Mark’s Basilica, a little factoid that raises all sorts of interesting questions: Did that post pay more than barbering? Was Mrs. Vivaldi on board with all this? (They ended up with nine children, so money was very definitely a factor in any employment decisions, as there doesn’t seem to be any hint that the Vivaldis were well off.) How exactly did Giovanni decide to make this rather drastic career change? In any case, sources agree that Antonio’s first violin teacher was his dad. Antonio must have been somewhat of a prodigy, because Giovanni took him around Venice to perform, but I don’t know exactly how this worked. Were they basically buskers? When I first read about this “touring,” I thought my sources were saying that Vivaldi had traveled around Europe à la the young Mozart, but then Giovanni wouldn’t have been around to play at the basilica. No, it was just a hometown thing, a side hustle.
Here’s what you may already know about Antonio Vivaldi:
1. He wrote The Four Seasons.
2. He . . . wrote lots of other stuff, behaving kind of like a one-man composition factory.
3. Ummm, he was known as “the red priest”?
We’ll dispose of #3 first, as that’s the easiest to address: the nickname is a reference to Vivaldi’s hair color, and he was ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic church at age 25, so that’s that. (Although of course you can’t see his real hair in the picture.)