You will almost always find me in the “Don’t Screw With Christmas Songs!” camp but, I have to confess my weakness, I often find odd instrumental arrangements of Christmas music irresistible. I usually don’t like instrumental arrangements of Carol of the Bells – it’s all about the singing, you know – but this is very nice. It’s followed by God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, also nice but I don’t like it as well. Still too hooked on this recording, I suppose.
Update: Oops, almost forgot. Nice a cappella version here. Strange… those are not the lyrics I remember.
Update II: More about Carol of the Bells. The lyrics in the third box are the way I remember it. I didn’t know until now that they aren’t the original. Whatever you grow up hearing will always feel like the original though.
December 17th, 2010 - 12:13 pm
Very nice! I like the alternative lyrics you found, though I “grew up on” the Wilhousky arrangement and lyrics. (I also “grew up on” the Wilhousky arrangement of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and other standard fare, but haven’t remained as attached to it and much of his other work.)
Thanks for the link to my posting of SNC’s version of the Carol of the Bells. And congrats for spelling “a cappella” correctly! *heh* Rabbit trail: 25 years or so after my bachelors program, I attended a concert of a high school group led by a classmate. She’d named the group “a capella” something or other and had concerted, toured and recorded them under that name for several years. When I asked her why she’d named her (a cappella) group after a female goat, she was a bit nonplussed. *heh* Oh, well. She took it well, though… and amended the spelling. (Despite the spelling faux pas, the group was very, very good for a H.S. choral group, particularly a H.S. a cappella group. I even ended up “stealing” a snippet of a motif from one of the pieces it introduced to me to build a song of my own around.)
December 17th, 2010 - 12:16 pm
BTW, thanks also for leading me to the McKennitt recording. Like her stuff, very glad to be introduced to this performance! Good, good catch!
December 17th, 2010 - 12:41 pm
I. Can’t. Stand. Christmas. Music. It was great when I was a kid, before I’d heard the exact same songs sung in progressively more irritating ways for 30 years. But now, I HAVE heard the same songs performed in an increasingly annoying manner for the last three decades, and when going out into public I take my MP3 player so I don’t have to hear it. Can’t wait for January.
December 17th, 2010 - 6:15 pm
@Hippie: *heh* I used to start listening to Xmas music every year right after Easter. Love the stuff. Different strokes. I even send out a copy of “No Holy Night” (the epic world’s worst performance of “O Holy Night”–no one, NO ONE, can ever top it for utterly disgusting misperformance of music in the past two millennia) to a select few just about every year. Want a copy?