There's almost no gray area when it comes to Christmas music. You either love it and feel it's charming, or it's a holiday plague that you endure, cringing instinctively every time a bell jingles and someone wants a "figgy" pudding.
I readily admit I love the damned stuff, though I've recently reduced the size of my collection from seven boxes to a mere three. I got to the point this past summer where I had to admit that no one really needs six versions of Chuck Berry’s "Run, Run, Rudolph."
Most Christmas records are compilations where perhaps a track or two are listenable. Of…
The 50 greatest cartoons of all time? Could be.
A few links are nonstarters, but this ought to keep you busy for a while.
Christmas without Pops? Unthinkable!
Armstrong's 1942 band was smoking! Don't miss whatever it is that Velma Middleton does at the end.
Because nothing says Christmas like marimbas and wild bass! BTW, if the marimbas look backwards, it's because the clip was designed to be projected in one of those film jukeboxes, where they were in fact viewed from the other side.
Kyle Gann has posted Schoenberg's Weihnachtsmusik for our Christmas bliss. If you think Arnold never wrote a melody you'd like, take a listen to this gorgeous setting of "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming."
And if you're a thoroughly modern kind of a guy, check out Gann's Postclassic Radio. It's music I guarantee you won't hear anywhere else.
Father Athanasius Kircher explains just about everything—and the pictures are gorgeous.
David Mehegan remembers his grandfather's devotion to the Harvard Classics: The Five-Foot Shelf of Books. Mehegan contends that the "Five-Foot Shelf" was the lodestone for "the life of a totally successful human being."
This is one of the best profiles ever run in The New Yorker—and one of the longest. It's worth it.
Jeremy Denk opines, "Something that is definitely not chopped liver literally, metaphorically, or in any other way is the slow movement of Schumann's D minor Trio. (Please see: The Art of the Graceful Segue, by Jeremy Denk, Hyperion Books, 2031, p. 5832.)"
The New Yorker, right on the money, as usual.
