If you like Christmas music, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” isn’t just the name of a song.
This time of year, Christmas music is all around us — in stores, in elevators, in ads on your phone. It may even be in your home. My wife was raised on “The Perry Como Christmas Album,” so that always gets some play in our household. I am not a Christian, and I wasn’t raised with any Christmas albums, but of course I know all the songs. The music really is everywhere.
There are a lot of great Christmas albums to choose from. Mel Tormé’s are classics. So are Barbra Streisand’s. And Neil Diamond’s. Bob Dylan’s “Christmas in the Heart” is on its way to becoming a classic. So many great choices! If I had to pick one, I would choose John Zorn’s sparkling “A Dreamers Christmas,” which has just the right combination of noise and nostalgia for me.
None of the artists who made these albums are Christian. The same goes for “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”; its lyricist is Eddie Pola (born Sydney Pollacsek), and its composer is George Wyle (born Bernard Weissman).
Whether it’s chestnuts roasting on an open fire or a white Christmas, many of our classic Christmas images are drawn from songs written by Jewish composers and lyricists. Why are so many great artists drawn to making art about a holiday that isn’t theirs? Every Christmas, I ask myself this question, because accidentally I — a Jewish composer — have also written something of a Christmas classic: “the little match girl passion.”
The cynics among us may think that these artists make Christmas music because they’re chasing the market. I believe there is something deeper at work. The market and the money are there because the audience is there, and the culture is there. These artists are all alpha communicators; it is their deep connection to their audiences that make them such important pillars of our shared, cultural community. If most of the country and much of the world are celebrating something, it is hard for them not to feel the pull of being there, too.
It may be that these Jewish artists end up secularizing what for many is a religious holiday. But these very artists have helped spread the notion that Christmas may have universal values that can be distilled and shared by everyone. Every Christmas, my family watches “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.” I am pretty sure that believers and nonbelievers cry in exactly the same spots.
In classical music, the world I live in, the relationship between religion and culture is a little easier to see, because Christian content is so foundational to Western classical music. The Church was the first, most active, most dependable and most generous funder of the kind of music-making that evolved into my field. The Church needed music for its worship, so it supported performers and composers.
The relationship between choral singing and church music has been going strong for over 1,000 years now. Almost all the name-brand composers of Western music composed choral works on Christian subjects, and many of those are among the highlights of our repertoire. Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” Mozart’s Requiem, Monteverdi’s “Vespers for the Blessed Virgin,” Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” and so on. Chances are, if you are singing the choral hits of classical music, or are interested in Medieval or Renaissance music, it’s almost all Christian.
At Yale University, the elite choral ensembles are not located in the School of Music, where I teach, but in the separate Institute of Sacred Music. The discipline of singing this music is taught as its own kind of ennobled, holy pursuit.
I love all this music, and I have tried to learn what makes it work. When I was a student, I sang in groups that performed many of the choral hits: Bach Mass in B minor, Verdi’s Requiem, Handel’s “Messiah.” Occasionally, I would sing in a Gregorian chant choir for Sunday services in a Catholic church. There would inevitably be a place in each of these experiences where I would have to remind myself that my job as a performer was channeling Bach or Handel’s belief in Jesus, and not proclaiming a belief of my own.
As a non-Christian composer, it can be hard to navigate the connection between choral music and Christianity. Most composers don’t want to say something in their music that they don’t believe. The Norwegian ensemble Trio Mediaeval recently asked me to write a piece to be performed within the context of a medieval Mass. I decided to use only two words originally from Hebrew worship that made it into the Latin Mass: “Alleluia” and “Amen.” That’s the whole text of my piece. And, I admit, it’s a little bit of a dodge.
There are two times, though, when I decided not to dodge, when I decided to head straight on into the glorious Christian history of classical music.
The first was in 2007, with “the little match girl passion.” I was commissioned by Carnegie Hall to write a piece for Paul Hillier and his ensemble Theater of Voices. I discovered that this thoroughly modern champion of composers I love, like Terry Riley and Karlheinz Stockhausen, had also recorded a huge output of old music about Jesus. If Paul could go back and forth between the secular and the religious, so could I.
I started looking at Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” and I wondered whether I could use that as a template for something I could believe in. What is powerful about the Passion story is that people become changed through noticing and caring about the suffering of Jesus. I started thinking that maybe the “religion” in the story is as much in the “noticing and caring” as it is in the person of Jesus. What would happen if I could tell the Passion story by paying close attention to someone else’s suffering? I substituted Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Match Girl” and told it in the format of the “St. Matthew Passion,” interspersing Andersen’s narrative with my versions of texts of the crowd and character responses in the Bach.
Would this approach elevate the little girl’s suffering to a higher plane, or would it bring all the religious content crashing to the ground? I didn’t know, but I took it seriously and tried to treat the girl with Bach-like respect. I wasn’t trying to write a seasonal hit, but because the story takes place in winter, it somehow became a Christmas standard, repeated all around the world, year after year. In New York, it was the annual holiday concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a decade. Death of Classical just finished its second annual presentation, sung by the ensemble Ekmeles, in the Crypt of the Church of the Intercession in Manhattan.
My most recent choral piece is “poor hymnal,” which I wrote for Donald Nally and the Crossing, and which has its New York premiere on Saturday at Alice Tully Hall. I got interested in hymnals through the music of Charles Ives. I took a class in Ives’s songs in graduate school, and I realized that I needed to know more about the hymns in Ives’s world if I was ever going to get all the references in his music. I needed to know how Ives distorts “Shall We Gather at the River?” or “There’s a Fountain Filled With Blood,” so I started buying old hymnals to find out.
My piece “poor hymnal” really is in the hymnal format: 14 very tonal hymns, in four-part harmony, with a little hint of Ives’s New England Congregational singing in the background. As in “the little match girl passion,” I tried to find the essential nature of a particular religious musical format — a group of people coming together to give voice to the things they all believe — and then ask if those things can be believed by us all.
Two years ago my father died, and I said Kaddish for him — memorial prayers — every day for a year, in the company of other similarly grieving Jews. I had a lot of time to think about what a religion asks or expects of you. My religion and many others remind us, often, to welcome the stranger, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless. And yet we don’t do nearly enough to make much of a difference. Maybe the religions we have aren’t focused, laserlike, on the welcoming and the clothing and the sheltering. I wondered, if there were a religion whose only purpose was to remind us of our obligations to help one another, it might need new prayers and new hymns. So I wrote the hymnbook for this imaginary, utopian religion, based on scraps of text from the Psalms, Tolstoy, Barack Obama, and various Jewish and Christian sources.
I have always felt that the great gift of being a composer is that you get to spend a lot of time alone, paying close attention to your own emotional life. Composing can be a chance to dig deeply into who you are, to examine your strengths and weaknesses, your hypocrisies, your hopes. One of the things I think about when I am alone is my relationship to my own religion. Even though my faith is important to me, in truth, I am only intermittently observant — like many people, I pick and choose what practices I follow. But I believe the power of religion, mine and anyone else’s, is to help a community envision how to live in a better world, together.
I wrote “poor hymnal” to imagine what hymns that community might sing.
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