National Post (National Edition)
Prelude to spring
The holidays are here. And with them, the annual sleigh-dump of Christmas music, which this year arrives like an unsolicited fruitcake: heavy, disproportionately sweet and near impossible to digest. Christmas music has long been a seasonal allergen I could power through with the right level of mindful attenuation (i.e., tuning out) and medication (open to interpretation). In 2020, however, every carol stings like a murder hornet.
I'll Be Home for Christmas? The Most Wonderful Time of the Year? Here Comes Santa Claus? Not without a mask he doesn't. (Don't even think about kissing my mother.)
There really aren't enough chestnuts to make this holiday season feel like reason to sing. And I'm here to say that it's OK to not be OK.
It's fine if the 12 days of Christmas this year felt like as many months. And it's fine if Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime fills you with unseasonable rage.
I've found myself hunting for music to store away that might resonate more clearly within the peculiar acoustics of a dark, difficult winter. So many times this year, I've turned and returned to Claude Debussy, especially his works for solo piano.
I love the way they feel pulled between destination and distraction, the way uncertainty seems integral to their structure, the way they take one step and then another — a quality most clearly sounded in the sixth of his Preludes, Des pas sur la neige (or Footprints in the Snow). Its gentle back and forth enacts a lonely walker's steps through a snowy wood, perhaps, but the gentle fall of the notes, the way they catch different glints of harmonic light on the way down, they way they gather in your memory as both pattern and pile — it's as though you're listening out the window instead of just looking.
Debussy achieves a similar effect in The Snow is Dancing, another piano miniature from his 1908 Children's Corner suite. Jean Sibelius, too, achieves a kind of twilight between cheer and despair in his many works that turned toward the landscape of his native Finland. Talvikuva (or Winter Scene) was one of his final compositions for piano, the second of the Cinq Esquisses (Five Sketches) he composed in 1929, a time in his life when his loneliness and isolation were pushing him to lose hope.
And though Talvikuva lets you feel the snow piling up around you, its lush sonorities seem to bloom. Like any winter scene (and like Debussy's Prélude), it's actually a prelude to spring.
And what comfort, in each of these pieces, to hear some of the harmonic characters that Vince Guaraldi would assemble anew in his signature suite of jazz carols for 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas. Here, too, the intimate sighing from Schroeder's piano was not just a perfect match for the blooming boomer angst of the Peanuts gang, but for a more evergreen ennui. Its melody heats like a hearth, but its notes hang like icicles. The joy of the season; that sad little tree.
What is it about all of these piano miniatures that speaks to me so much more clearly than the carols already etched into my consciousness? Perhaps it's the way their tiny details sound magnified (like footsteps in the snow). Or perhaps it's the way their closeness offers that feeling that walking through snowfall can give you: alone in the world, yet enveloped in it.
The composer John Luther Adams spent nearly four decades of his career isolated in the boreal forest of Fairbanks, Alaska, where humans were scarce and the near-permanent winter furnished an empty landscape that doubled for Adams as “a vast, white canvas.”
In the quietude of the snowscape, he sensed a “shared resonance” between “landscape and mind, culture and ecosystem, painting and music” — a synesthetic understanding of landscape; the world as music.
In a journal entry from January 1999, Adams noted the way the silence deepened along with the cold, how the few sounds he could hear were “vividly present.”
“In such deep cold and silence, the smallest sounds speak with singular clarity,” he wrote. “The resonance of my musical landscape now is more interior, a little less obviously connected with the external world.”
Sound familiar?
We're all living a bit more inside of everything now — our houses, our rooms, our bodies, our heads. As the dark settles in more swiftly, as the pandemic swells and the temperature plummets, and as 2020 gets in its last few shots, I want music that revels in what we have while we have it, even if that just means footsteps through the snow.
“It's forty-five below zero, and getting colder,” Adams wrote in his January journal entry.
“But it doesn't matter how cold it is. We're moving toward the light.”
IN SUCH DEEP
COLD AND SILENCE, THE
SMALLEST SOUNDS SPEAK
WITH SINGULAR CLARITY.