I’ve always believed that Latin – the language, not the musical genre – gets a bad rap. “It’s a dead language” and “Only doctors and scientists use it now” are two of my favorite examples of the spoken English language being misapprehended by practitioners of lingual suicidium. The contradictory ignorance of the basis of most of our words coupled with apparent unconcern for the veritas at the root of the proposition is barely forgivable at best, and monstrous when it can be cited as willful. Pausanias, the Greek writer, recorded that the first of the three great Delphic maxims was “Know Thyself”, a phrase the modern (post-modern?) human seems determined to bury with noise and acquisitions and distractions. Is it the fear of finding nothing of interest or character or value within that drive us away from self-awareness? Perhaps, but that’s a subject for another time and blog.

Let’s, for now, focus on something a little more externalized and only loosely connected to our lives: music we could not live without. It’s the holidays, sure: Michael Buble’ and Mariah Carey are wafting through the stores, even the parking lots, and even long-absent friends like Burl Ives and Bing Crosby find their way onto pop holiday playlists. The standards, covered again and again by smooth jazz artists, R&B icons, and country crooners crowd into our brains like Macy’s shoppers jamming the elevators. Even great parodies, like Bob and Doug McKenzie’s faux-Canadian re-envisioning of “The 12 Days of Christmas” and the original “Do It In My Twin Bed” from Jimmy Fallon’s Christmas host gig at Saturday Night Live bring, at the least, a pleasant parody and wicked ear-worm of a hook.

How, then, does the joy of music stack up with the joy of the holidays? Is it a juggernaut of secular snow frolicking and nostalgia for BB guns that drives our sentimentality to higher heights than the rest of the year, or is it bolstering of the religious hymns presented with full orchestra and choir, hymns that grew out of monastic scriptions of Latin verse and blossomed into Catholic liturgical canons and Lutheran standards? Is it a wee bit of both?

I had a few early favs among the first LPs I acquired, through parental gifting or straight up allowance (I’m not going to divulge which was which). One entry was “Songs of Christmas” by the Norman Luboff Choir, an a cappella collection of Christmas hymns and melodies (including my then-favorite “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and a moving rendition of “The Holly and The Ivy”, which would figure much more prominently in my more mature years. Lawrence Welk’s “Silent Night and 13 other Best-Loved Christmas Songs” was another early holiday entry to my collection, somewhat influenced by parents’ champagne music-fixation. My favorite Christmas album, most likely because I was about seven at the time, was The Original: Gene Autry Sings Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer & other CHRISTMAS favorites” – a compendium of the title track and eleven other kid-friendly tunes on one long playing record, the cover of which was graced with the erstwhile saddle-master in full cowboy regalia with the team of (numerically precise) nine reindeer – led by the young upstart himself – flying between Gene’s cowboy boots with the Santa in his sleigh pulled merrily behind.

In the intervening years, any number of artist’s holiday LPs caught my attention, from Jimmy Buffettt’s “Christmas Island” to Sting’s “If On a Winter’s Night…” to Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Christmas Gonzo Style” and “The Jethro Tull Christmas Album.” Entertaining, novel, and at times, truly inspired work by intrepid musicians contributing to the midwinter codex.

But something else was calling, something from an idiomatic past where the convergence of the sacred and the secular was met and melded into something both new and old. Strange, you may think; but for all the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, the lyricist concludes “…there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecc 1:9)

Two albums crossed my radar just then, one right after the other.

The first was “A Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season” by Loreena McKennit was a 1995 EP stuffed with eclectic, original arrangements of three traditional and two adapted yuletide songs. Her expanded Christmastide LP “A Midwinter Night’s Dream” revisited and reimagined several of those offerings more than a dozen years later. “Good King Wenceslas” – found on both – quickly became a favorite of mine for it’s troubadour rhythms and instrumentalities. The “Winter Garden” version of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” is to me the superior version (to the “Midwinter” one), casting the “glad tidings” of “comfort and joy” vocals in their major key, wafting paradoxically across minor-chorded Moroccan-style accompaniments. Finally, “Snow” is McKennitt’s adaptation of 19th century poet Archibald Lampman’s verse of the same name, an ethereal, evocative snapshot of an evening settling across a snowscape of rural environs, the aural equivalent of a Currier & Ives print, with a quiet depth of vision and peace.

The second was “Mistletoe and Wine” by the Mediaeval Babes, a recording I was gifted by my wife; she had acquired it through the monthly drawing of in-store plays, CDs which were given away at the end of their promotion to employees who vied for them by tossing their names into the proverbial hat. “Wine” turned out to be several new selections by the songstresses who adapted ye olde English, French, Latin, and some Middle languages into something that lurked between New Age and Classical. These were accompanied by other vaguely yule-related tunes culled from some of their earlier albums, although not present were the sometimes bawdy and salacious adaptations which might have amused Chaucer. But “Mistletoe and Wine” held some true gems: “The Holly and The Ivy” and “In Dulci Jubilo”, both leaning heavily to a cappella performances, “Jubilo” presented in a mix of Latin and English that was immediately captivating. In terms of a compellingly pure invocation of winter, the rest of the compilation is eclipsed by “Blow Northerne Wind”, the final track on the album which closed with long, dreamy vocal notes and harp runs invoking visions of gusty, winter winds. “Wine” was followed eleven years later by “Of Kings and Angels”, an album which, like McKennitt’s “Midwinter”, revisited some of the tracks on this first holiday album.

There are, to be sure, other collections containing a wealth of holiday and winter music that are not just the standard fare of XM radio holiday hits, such as Nightnoise’s “Wexford Carol” or Tenebrae and Ola Gjeillo’s “Tundra”, an epic choral work as expressive of the short days and long nights of darker season. But in all of these, we have to find the lost chords, as the Moody Blues more or less referred to it, that resonates within us. It produces that resounding feeling within us, that echoing vibration, the sound of the breath of our life that would cause us to lift our eyes and say, “Lo, the joy of music!” (Ecce musicae gaudium!)

Go, and find the music that moves you this season, challenge yourself to find something new and eclectic – Frost’s “Road Not Taken” as it were – and check back in a week or so for further adventures with the muse and minion…

Happy Winter’s Solstice to you and yours!