I have been dilatory in my responsibility to provide you with Sissel Christmas videos on this blog. Here is the greatest singer in the world in concert in Iceland, doing what I believe is her favorite song, a Swedish Christmas hymn called “Mitt Hjerte Altid Vanker” (My Heart Always Wanders).
Category Archives: Music
Behind "Do You Hear What I Hear?"
A bit of the story behind “Do You Hear What I Hear?” It involves warfare and missiles in Cuba.
Vitae Lux
Today is St. Lucie’s Day, celebrated every year in Scandinavia (especially in Sweden) with morning processions of young girls, led by one special “Lucia” who wears a crown of candles. The video above is from Sissel’s televised Christmas concert with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir a few years back. Unfortunately for you, this is the Norwegian TV version, so her introduction is dubbed in Norwegian, which you probably can’t understand. But trust me, she’s talking about St. Lucie’s Day. The video’s also a little misleading, because the song she does here isn’t the traditional song for the ceremony, “Santa Lucia” (yes, the Italian one). But it’ll give you some idea of the thing. And it’s always nice to hear Sissel sing, whatever she does.
Happy Luciadagen!
Heart-Warming Songs from Early America
Autumn always gets me thinking of early America. Maybe it seeps out from Thanksgiving, that thoroughly Pilgrim holiday. So I offer you this music which, though in theme is slightly off-season, in tone is perfectly placed. As Hawthorne said, “She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.”
Nature Meditation: Crickets
Here’s a recording of crickets, played in two tracks. One track is normal; the second is slowed. The beautiful result makes a good meditation on God’s creative genius. (via Jeffrey Overstreet/Facebook)
The Unused Score for 2001
Perhaps Alex North’s musical score for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t right for the movie, but that doesn’t change the fact that North put everything he had into that score, working with the belief that it would be used. But Kubrick never intended to use it. He wanted the public domain music he selected himself for the temp track.
North’s daughter-in-law, Abby North, writes, “As all composers know, directors fall in love with temp tracks. It is often next to impossible for even the most talented and skilled composer to replace the temp tracks with new music cues that elicit the same feelings initially felt with the temp tracks. Unfortunately for Alex, Stanley Kubrick loved the grandeur of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and the “poetry of motion” of Johan Strauss’s The Blue Danube in the context of 2001: A Space Odyssey.”
For a bit of context, see this piece on Kubrick’s use of European music in The Shining. “[A]lmost the entire score is made up of music by the best European composers of Kubrick’s time,” writes Hope Lies, Béla Bartók’s music in particular.
Rest Within His Sanctuary
The final figures on our free offer of Hailstone Mountain yesterday show upwards of 1,000 downloads, which strikes me as pretty good. We’ve gotten a fair number of sales in the backwash today as well.
So in a mood of thanksgiving, I offer the video below, the best version I could find of a Christian song that (in my opinion) has never gotten the attention it deserves, Rest Within His Sanctuary.
You can also download the MP3 from Amazon here, which I did. This professional version, also, is not quite up to the original I remember from the radio some years back. I’m pretty sure it was recorded by the Lillenaas Singers (Haldor Lillenaas, by the way, was born in Bergen, Norway. Just thought you’d like to know that).
If you sometimes wonder what makes me smile, well, the answer is that few things do. But this song does. I endorse it even though I strongly suspect its purpose is to promote the schismatic Calvinist doctrine of Eternal Security.
Broad-minded, that’s what I am.
This is what you're getting for St. Patrick's Day, and you'll take it and like it!
Under protest, it goes without saying, because I’m afraid of the power of the Irish Lobby, I offer the following clip of the redoubtable Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. It’s a song I’m particularly fond of — the kind that might not impress you on first acquaintance, but sticks in your mind after a couple repeats. I particularly like the line, “Castles are sacked in war, chieftains are scattered far — truth is a fix-ed star….”
Now an Anthony Sacramone update: He sneaked back into his blog last week, tiptoeing with his shoes off, and did a post. Then he did another yesterday. So we’ve got that. He also links to the web page of the Intercollegiate Review, where he’s got a very amusing cover story right now:
Empire builders and revolutionaries, reformers and moral scolds, civil libertarians and uncivil prohibitionists—all believe History is on their side. Beware anyone who imputes to History an inevitable, self-directed, Forward march, as if it were as fixed as a bar code, as predetermined as male-pattern baldness, as sovereign as any voluntaristic deity. Most risible are atheists, old or new, who act as if the expanding energies of a supposedly random and causeless Big Bang could even possess an ultimate purpose….
Norwegian Folk Tune “Akk Mon Min Vei Til Kanaan”
Ak, mon min Vei til Kanaan
Endnu er meget lang?
Mon jeg kan naa det glade Land,
Som snubler Gang paa Gang?
Som snubler Gang paa Gang?