Whether or not one enjoys listening to the music of George Crumb, his scores are fabulous fun to read. β«Β
SO much great stuff in this year-end edition of Robin Sloan’s newsletter β and not just, or even primarily, because he links to a few things of mine. Though I will admit that when I posted the one he calls “a scintillating multimedia post that is, honestly, the most ‘hypertext’ thing Iβve seen in years” I thought: “If Robin doesn’t like this nobody will.”
The empire of money, war, and fire
cuts across the land.There are in the same country
shepherds watching their flocks.
One of the longstanding Christmas campaigns of my childhood was to forbid any reference to βXmas.β Anyone attempting to remove Christ from Christmas was surely of the devil. And yet, Xmas comes from the Greek letter chi (X) which happens to be the first letter of Christos (Ξ§ΟΞΉΟΟΟΟ), meaning βChrist.β It turns out that Xmas is a way of honoring Jesus, not extracting him. Furthermore, doesnβt the letter βXβ resemble something else? What if itβs a cross? Even if by accident, all signs point to Jesus.
I joined The Rest Is History Club four years ago, when the podcast was just a baby, a largely neglected, marginal baby β and now TRIH is the Apple Podcasts Show of the Year. I’m so proud.
The idea for the song had been with Berlin for years, and he knew that the finished work was momentous. He told his assistant that “White Christmas” was the best song he had ever written, possibly the best song anyone had ever written. Yet not even he gauged its full potential, its emotional resonance. Berlin received little encouragement from Sandrich and Paramount executives who heard him audition the score in September (when Bing was in Buenos Aires). They shrugged. They figured the score’s hit would be the Valentine’s Day ballad, “Be Careful, It’s My Heart.”
Crosby admired it from the start, a sanction for which Berlin remained grateful, often repeating the story of the day he auditioned the songs to get Bing’s okay. “I was nervous as a rabbit smelling stew. I sang several melodies, and Bing nodded quiet approval. But when I did ‘White Christmas,’ he came to life and said, ‘Irving, you won’t have to worry about that one.’”