Music blunts the chill of winter

The days shorten. The clouds deliver snow, ice, rain. On some mornings, Venus shines in the dawn sky. On other mornings, she hides. We spend more time indoors: in schools, churches, homes or community centers. And often, the kitchens, halls and walls are ringing with song.

Singing is the only art form where your body is the instrument. Mine is aging and cranky. It demands at least 20 minutes to warm up. But it’s worth it.

Many churches host choirs. It’s why musicians are more widely spread in Minnesota than any other group of artists. Some are paid, many volunteer.

And every year, Cromwell’s Bethany Lutheran Church offers a cantata that retells the Christmas story in word and song. This year, Director Deb Switzer invited members from the community to join us. Quite a few have, including Cromwell-Wright’s Principal Nathan Libbon, his daughter Katherine and myself. We work and rework everything: pitch, pace, rhythm, enunciation. The cantata is jazzy — lots of syncopation and rhythms that vary from waltz to tango.

I sang alto just left of Terry Smith. I leaned on her precision and preparedness. I love being just one voice in harmony with dozens. But on the night of the cantata, I had just caught a very bad cold that savaged my voice. In practice before the event, I could manage only a few notes below middle C. Above that, every effort I made to create sound with my breath failed miserably. But I did sit in the front row, just behind our organist Julianne Hansen, and hear all 22 of them blending in vigorous song. That was a treat!

In making music, there’s always the stretch, a new challenge! This fall, I accompanied the Cromwell-Wright junior high students in their Christmas concert. It was much harder than I imagined. The sheet music ran six, seven pages. Though I taped the pages together, it was difficult to see the notes sprawling the piano’s width. Over the rim, I closely watched choir director Mary Rose Varo vigorously gesturing lively beats. I was often playing six, seven notes in tandem. And, I was nervous. At the concert, I skipped a few notes. But the kids’ voices were so strong and sure that no one noticed. It was exhilarating!

And often it is just lovely to sit and listen to music. Every mid-December, there’s the beloved music that fills our living space and swirls around our Christmas tree. John Eliot Gardener’s Handel’s Messiah with the Monteverdi Choir (1982) is the first CD I rummage for each December. Earlier this month, Rod and I drove to St. Scholastica to sing the Messiah with hundreds, a bracing experience. You must have humility, a sense of humor, and be willing to make mistakes! Fortunately, everyone is quite tolerant.

I love to go caroling, though I haven’t recently. Maybe this year. It’s fun to surprise people, showing up at front doors and launching harmonies into the cold air, your expressed breaths crystallizing as they fall.

Caroling has a long and tortuous history. The word “carol,” I learned from the jacket notes to Joy to the World: A Baroque Christmas, recorded in 1942, derives from the medieval French carole, a spirited dance with musical accompaniment. Later it became a “seasonal religious song with several refrains, strong rhythms and a characteristic lilt.” Before the 15th century, carols could be satirical and humorous as well as sacred and profound. Oddly, carols disappeared between 1647 and 1865 in the American colonies, because English Puritans disapproved!

If you’d like a quick tour of this history, the American group Fuma Sacra’s The Best Nowells that E’er Befell (1995) offers up 10 centuries of luscious sounds from nine singers, an oboe, violins, viola and cello.

Christmas music became broadly popular in the 19th century in this country. John Doan’s Wrapped in White: Visions of Christmas Past is another favorite, recorded in 1994 in Oregon on 19th-century popular instruments. Contemporary and jazzier versions include Minnesotan Lorie Line’s Sharing the Season (1995) with her Pop Chamber Orchestra, a gift twenty years ago from my friend Barb Walli. Also outstanding are Minnesota jazz pianist Laura Caviani’s Angels We Haven’t Heard on High (1999) and Cyrus Chestnut’s powerfully rhythmic and exalting Blessed Quietness, his 1996 collection of hymns, spirituals and carols.

But making music ourselves, no matter how amateurish, is more fun than listening to recordings. Everyone can sing, despite teachers who taught some of us that we can’t. A sigh is the simplest song — the whisper of air over the vocal chords. It doesn’t bother me if someone I’m jamming with hits a wrong note wrong — I do, too. It’s just simply glorious to create song together. And good for the soul, too.

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot Board Member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband Rod Walli.