James MacMillan Delves into the Past and Makes It New—“O Radiant Dawn”

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Image by Anja from Pixabay; perhaps not quite true to a text written way before lighted Christmas trees, but I couldn’t resist such a lovely image!

Musical Beginnings of Sir James MacMillan

Exploring this one brief piece by the contemporary Scottish composer James MacMillan has been rather like peeling an onion, to use a somewhat cliched phrase, I’ll start with the composer himself, who is a much bigger mover and shaker in the British music scene than I had realized. As far as I know, his name has never come up in any of my own research, but now it’s clear to me that he belongs in the same ranking as John Rutter and Karl Jenkins. After some bopping around on YouTube I ran across a fascinating interview in which he explained how he became interested in music. I’ve included a section from the transcript because it’s so revealing about him:

I think for me the life of music began on the very first day I was given an instrument, which was a little plastic recorder. That’s what happens in most British schools, certainly in the 1960s when I was given mine, and it’s not the seismic moment for most British schoolchildren as it was for me, but it certainly felt like a light going on. I could feel almost immediately within days not just that I wanted to play this instrument and play other instruments but that I wanted to create music of my own that could be played on these instruments. So even before I had notational understanding I was beginning to write little lists of notes down—B A G F# and so on—just to see how I might find them and re-arrange them [in ways] that I liked. So for me the initial impulse in music, the desire to play music, was almost simultaneous with the desire to write music. (See below for the full interview video.)

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“Christmastime” Rings the Bells and Sings with the Angels

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Image by Chris Iontcheva from Pixabay

If you belong to a choir you’ve almost certainly been performing arrangements of songs instead of the songs themselves for much of the time. I’d been a member of my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, for quite a while before it occurred to me to wonder about the “arranged by” notation on much of our music. Slowly I began to realize that there was a whole world of artistry and creativity out there in which original music could go through a transformation. This world will be very much on display in our upcoming Christmas concert, as we’re singing nine arrangements and only four pieces written originally as choral works. I’ve picked out one in particular to write about in this post but will include others as time allows.

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Is “Joy to the World” a Christmas song?

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Hey, isn’t that a pretty dumb question? “Joy to the World” is one of our most traditional of Christmas carols. At least, that’s what most of us would say. But a quick look at the words reveals no mention of mangers, angels, shepherds, stars, or Christ as a baby. So what’s the song really about? I was intrigued to see the name “Isaac Watts” as the author of the lyrics. He’s known as the author of many famous hymns, including “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” So it wouldn’t be surprising for him to have written about Christmas.

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Katharine Lee Bates’ Vision of America’s Beauty

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Image by Clive Amutsa from Pixabay

Why, you might ask, is the Cherry Creek Chorale singing a quintessentially American piece in a program featuring German music? “Well,” said our artistic director Brian Leatherman, “it’s America’s 250th, and so . . . we  wanted to put it in.” I can’t argue with his reasoning, especially since its inclusion caused me to think about the words of this song in a way I hadn’t done so before. What’s up with those alabaster cities? And who was Katherine Lee Bates, the author of the lyrics? If put to the test I’d probably have pictured her gazing out of the window of her farmhouse over fields of wheat to see the line of Rocky Mountains in the distance. (Yes, you can in theory see them from as far away as western Kansas.)

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Is the song “Edelweiss” from “The Sound of Music” authentic in any way?

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Image accessed via 3Bee (I’d have to say that to me these flowers look a little strange–sort of like something you’d see on Mars. But hey! They’re distinctive!)

Well, no—at least not officially in terms of being Austria’s national anthem or anything like that. But the choice of this little Alpine flower as the centerpiece of an iconic song in the musical does indeed come from its cultural significance. So I guess the real answer is yes, kinda sorta. (My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, performed a lovely arrangement of the song in our Oct. 2026 concert.)

I’m not going to be able to tell you exactly how the lyrics to this song occurred to Oscar Hammerstein III.  What we do know is that “ten days before The Sound of Music opened on Broadway, Richard Rodgers felt something was missing. He decided that the non-singing Captain Von Trapp needed his own signature tune: a chance for the grumpy ‘good Austrian’ to say farewell to his beloved homeland.” There is a mention of the flower in the actual script, or book, of the musical, written not by Rodgers and Hammerstein but by the team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. I looked up the scene—Gretl, the youngest of the seven von Trapp children, presents a single edelweiss to Baroness Elsa Schraeder, Captain von Trapp’s current love interest at the beginning of the show. I’m sure that the scriptwriters just thought, Hmm. Gretl should present a typical Austrian flower to her possible future stepmother. What would that be? And they decided on an edelweiss, or “noble white.” (Are you curious about how this whole writing-a-musical works? Read the first couple of paragraphs in this post.) So it wasn’t much of a leap for Hammerstein to use the flower in the Captain’s final song.

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What’s Up with “Bring Us In Good Ale”?

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Image by Alexandre Gonçalves da Rocha from Pixabay

If you’ve ever sung “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” (with or without actual beer drinking involved), then you know perfectly well the answer to the title’s question. The lyrics simply list a set of reasons why it’s always, always a good idea to drink beer, or ale, or anything else alcoholic, rather than to consume anything else. And since this is a folk song there are a number of variations; I’ll include at least some of these as well as the lyrics in the John Rutter arrangement that the Cherry Creek Chorale performed in our October 2026 concert.

Rutter set this text to his own music instead of that found in the original 15th century manuscript, calling upon the accompanists (either the original small orchestra or the piano reduction) to convey a sense of increasing inebriation even while the choir is supposed to maintain “strong rhythm and well-projected text” to the end.”1 The Chorale will try to fulfill this direction!

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The Light and Frothy Side of Johannes Brahms–His “Liebeslieder Waltzes”

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Image of Brahms at the piano accessed via https://brahmsliebesliederwaltzes52.
wordpress.com/2018/04/26/the-journey-begins/

Betcha were a little surprised to see that Brahms even had such a side. Isn’t he rather . . . monumental for such a description? After all, isn’t he one of the three B’s of classical music, along with Bach and Beethoven? Bach certainly wrote lighter music–his “Coffee Cantata” contains the immortal lines “If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat.” You can’t quite picture Brahms, or for that matter Beethoven, writing something that silly.

But there were several aspects of Brahms’ life that lent themselves to his writing this music. First, he loved getting together socially with his circle of friends to discuss and perform chamber works. Second, he felt the need for somewhat lighter composing as a relief from his work on Symphony No. 1, an endeavor that took him 21 years. Third, he was always falling in love with unattainable women. Oh dear! First (we think) he fell in love with the wife-then-widow of Brahms’ mentor Robert Schumann and then with a succession of already-taken younger women, one of which was the Schumanns’ daughter Julie. Whew! And, last but not least, Brahms was greatly influenced by the earlier composer Franz Schubert (editing some of Schubert’s music for publication), by Robert Schumann, and by the Waltz King Johann Strauss. The first two wrote many songs, some based on folk tunes, and Strauss of course took the public by storm during his career. Those composers’ lives span from 1797 (Schubert’s birth) to 1899 (Strauss’s death). And there’s Brahms, smack in the middle, living from 1833-1897. But Brahms also kept a pretty canny eye on the musical scene, and it can be said that “these works, in a deliberately popular style, were overwhelmingly responsible for spreading Brahms’ reputation to the general music-buying public, and became the chief source of his personal wealth.”1 After the success of the original Opus 52 set of 18 pieces published in 1869 Brahms went ahead and produced another set of 15, Neue Liebeslieder Walzen, Opus 65. published in 1865.

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An Ode to the Great Peter Schickele–and His Great Creation P.D.Q. Bach

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Photo by Peter Schaaf; accessed via “Conversation with Peter Schickele/PDQ Bach“

Here’s the thing, folks: If you’re funny, no one takes you seriously. But in order to be funny you have to be serious about whatever it is that you’re known for being funny about. (You may have to read that sentence several times.) And nowhere does this seriousness about humor apply more than in the area of music. You can’t be a funny musician unless you’re a serious musician to begin with. Just take a moment to think about great comic musicians of the past if you don’t believe me. Spike Jones played multiple instruments and had the impeccable timing that comedy requires. Victor Borge was a fine pianist. And . . . Weird Al Yankovic is a great performer. The humor is an added layer on top of the virtuosity and has had to be rehearsed relentlessly.

So it was with Peter Schickele, who was a very serious musician indeed. He had a master’s degree in composition from Julliard and was an excellent bassoonist. Okay, well and good. He might have ended up spending his life playing the bassoon in a symphony orchestra (which would have been perfectly fine, of course, if perhaps not terribly remunerative) had it not been for his early introduction to the music of Spike Jones. He heard a recording of Jones’ “Serenade to a Jerk” at age 10 and “was smitten by the King of Corn’s use of outrageous instruments and sound effects—like car horns and goat bleats—to burlesque popular songs.”1

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Felix Mendelssohn Takes to the Woods and Celebrates Autumn

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Image provided via Wikimedia Commons–oil portrait by Edward Magnus, Berlin State Library

We don’t typically think of Felix Mendelssohn as a great outdoorsman nor as a composer of intimate songs. He’s associated most commonly with big orchestral works, notably his symphonies and concerti. His second area of expertise is in the area of big choral works, either his own (Elijah) or those of J. S. Bach. In fact, Mendelssohn was pretty much single-handedly responsible for getting Bach’s great music back into the public sphere, starting with his direction in 1829 of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion in Berlin. Mendelssohn was only 20 at the time, and for the rest of his short life he was profoundly influenced by Bach. In fact, Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah, his final large-scale masterwork achievement completed before his death, was written very much in the style of the Passion. (If you’re curious about how and why this young man was so taken with a Baroque composer whose works had completely fallen out of favor, you can’t do better than to read this article that lays out the whole chain of transmission. Key sentence: “Only the advent of an extraordinary individual could redirect an entire society’s attention towards a forgotten composer.”)

But enough of that. What about these outdoorsy songs? Well, I honestly don’t know why the rather frail young man who suffered from chronic ill health all his life liked being out in nature; I would have thought that he’d stick close to home and its comforts. But he wrote a whole set of lieder that were subtitled “To be sung outdoors” (“Im Freien zu singen”) and actively sought out lyrics to be used. In one letter he asked for his friend the poet Karl Klingemann to “send me a song or a pair, to be sung in autumn, or better yet in summer, or in spring, on the water or in a meadow or on a bridge, or in a forest or garden. …” And we do have one description in a letter to his mother of a time when Mendelssohn indeed got to fulfill his dream of an open-air concert:

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In Taberna/In the Tavern

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“In the Tavern” by David Teniers the Younger, 1610-1690, from The National Gallery of Art, public domain

One of the most popular concert choral works of the 20th century is Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. I’ve written a book about it, and I’d encourage you to take a look if your own group is involved in a performance. Below is a version of a chapter about one selection, “In Taberna,” which my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, included in our Oct. 2026 concert which was all about the joys of Germany and drinking, in whatever combination we could come up with.

This particular piece is part of a larger section of Carmina that is also titled “In Taberna.” In that section Orff includes some texts about the joys of drinking, gambling, and lust. It’s fair to say that it’s this section that has given Carmina as a whole its scandalous reputation of being sacrilegious, but in reality none of these pieces are directly about church institutions at all. That whole connection stems from the fact that the set of original medieval manuscripts from which the texts were taken happened to be found in a monastery. But even the piece “Ego sum Abbas/I Am the Abbot” isn’t about a real abbot at all but about an “abbot of the drinkers” who presides over a parodical “Drinkers’ Mass.” So don’t take any of this too seriously!

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