Music
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I tend not to like jazz reworkings of Christmas carols. There's almost always a kind of levity that either borders on or crosses over into irreverence. And for that matter I'm not fond of classically-trained voices singing anything except classical music. But this seems an exception on both counts. A friend sent it to me,…
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This is a carol I did not know until fairly recently but have come to love, by way of this King's College recording, which I think I've recommended before. It's an inexpensive two-disc set of wonderful performances of most of the best-known and some lesser-known carols, plus a Vaughan Williams "Fantasia on Christmas Carols" (which…
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If you don't know Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, you should. It's a selection of Middle English poems related to the Nativity, set to music. Here's a performance of the entire piece. And here is something I posted a few years ago, a sort of recipe for a very tasty holiday drink. I said then that it…
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Music for Gaudete Sunday A few nights ago I was looking for Advent music to post this weekend. I came across this hymn, which I hadn't heard before. I played it once, only half-listening, shrugged, and then ran out time for looking without finding anything better, so ended up not posting anything. But we sang…
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Glenn Gould's humming sometimes makes it seem like there was a lunatic lurking in the recording studio.
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Advent Weekend Music I was actually looking for the English hymn based on the traditional Latin, and ran across this, which is quite lovely.
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Weekend Music I saw these guys in concert Tuesday night. Most enjoyable. This was their encore. The most striking thing they did–not the best, but the most unusual and attention-getting–was a piece in which they did things to their guitars that made them sound like a gamelan orchestra. Yes, really. Mostly it seemed to…
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Weekend Music That's so good–let's have another from the same album, Shine, this one with Emmylou Harris.
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Weekend Music Demonstrating the folly of trying to associate music very closely with specific images and narratives, the heavily reverbed guitar sound has somehow become associated with the desert as well as with the ocean. You hear it a lot in movie sound tracks and commercials, though frequently it's a dobro or other slide guitar…
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Weekend Music I'm not sure exactly when it started, but when I noticed it sometime in the mid-1990s or so there was a surf guitar revival going on. It started out as a straightforward imitation of the old stuff, with a bit of irony thrown in, as in that clip by The Metalunas that I…
Light On Dark Water 