Unlike many in the Western world, for some reason "Fairytale of New York" has only been on my radar for a few years. I'm not sure how it so thoroughly eluded me, other than to note that this kind of music doesn't generally form the backbone of my music listening. It's not the easiest song in the world to love, that's to be sure, but I always think it's important to acknowledge the difficult emotions that Christmas always makes us feel, in the dark moments when we're alone with our memories. This is a lovely cover I found while looking for Christmas music featuring Uilleann pipes.

I could write a lengthy intro essay for this one...or I could just write, "Here's Mr. John Denver." Choices, choices. Here's Mr. John Denver.

Somehow I made it to just the other day (as you're reading this) without knowing that in 1983 David Bowie starred in a Japanese war film about the individuals living in a POW camp. The film's English title is Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and the film's score, by Ryuichi Sakamoto, is highly regarded, possibly moreso even than the film. (I only know this by reading the film's Wikipedia entry.) The movie doesn't appear to have any specifically Christmas subtext, except that one of the Japanese characters wishes Mr. Lawrence, one of the non-Japanese characters, a Merry Christmas several times throughout the film.

Cascading fountain, Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens Continuing our series exploring classical music about or inspired by water, in one way or another, we have one of the most evocative tone poems of all time: The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. Respighi lived 1879-1936, and his gift for using the orchestra for illustrative effect is nearly unparalleled. His music sings with pictorial clarity that recalls Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, and echoes Richard Strauss, albeit with an Italian flavor. His scores are shot through with brilliant light. Fountains is perhaps a bit more introspective than Respighi's other famous showpiece, 

A lot of what I post in this series every year comes from just simple YouTube searches, which I then follow until I find something interesting. This is a case in point: I searched "Appalachian Christmas", which yielded some good stuff! One thing I almost used was a recording of an actual cantata a composer wrote using old Appalachian melodies, but...I didn't like the performance in the recording, which sounded oddly "commercial" in my ears. So here is this, performed on a selection of Appalachian instruments. The performer, Timothy Seaman…

Riley Street Station, East Aurora, NY.Taken on Miranda (Lumix FX1000ii), using a "starburst" scene mode.f/3.1, 1/15 sec, ISo1600 Welcome to December! Along with "normal" blogging, this month always features a daily music or video selection pertaining to Christmas. There are some items I post annually, while other things will be brand new. That's one of the things I love about this season: every year it's a mixture of the old and traditional with new stuff that may become tradition in the future, or rather fade into memory until someday you say, "Hey, remember that one Christmas when everybody was doing/singing/watching that one thing?"

She left a $390,000-a-year job and now uses a simple set of rules to make her savings last in Switzerland.

NOTE: As stated in the title, this is a repost of something I wrote a couple years ago toward the end of summer. Now that Thanksgiving 2025 is in the rear-view mirror and most people who took the long weekend are going back to work tomorrow (except me! I took Monday off! HAHAHA!!!), we're solidly into The Christmas Season, or The Holidays, or whatever you call this time of year. Now, I've always been one to factor Thanksgiving mentally into "The Holidays": after all, that term is plural, and for me it includes not two but three separate holidays that all reflect a common theme of people coming together to celebrate one another.

Watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this morning is one of our very rare forays into commercial television each year. We have become such infrequent viewers of commercial television that it's always something of a shock to us to have to endure all the advertising. We're always like, "We just watched four minutes of teevee! Now we have to sit through another six minutes of commercials?!" I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about the common practice of using old songs on commercials. On the one hand, it does at times feel a bit...dirty.

Eighty-three years of Casablanca. This morning I got in the car, turned on the radio, and as I was preparing to switch it over to my phone's output so I could listen to a podcast, the announcer on WNED indicated that they were about to play a suite of Max Steiner's wonderful music for Casablanca, because the film opened eighty-three years ago today. That movie has been a part of my world my entire life. I didn't watch it myself until sometime during, or immediately after, my freshman year of college, but I was always aware of it, and my parents always spoke very highly of it.

Here's something I didn't know until today when I was driving home: English composer Frederick Delius lived for a time in Florida in the 1880s, during which he managed a local orange grove while he studied with a noted organist in Jacksonville. From this stay arose one of Delius's most popular works, The Florida Suite. We're only concerning ourselves with one movement from the suite, because our focus in this series right now is music inspired by water. The orange grove Delius managed was on the St. Johns River, which is the longest river in Florida, running over 300 miles from headwaters south of Orlando to its mouth near Jacksonville.