The cold winter days and especially the Christmas season have inspired many composers to write contemplative and jubilant works. The Berliner Philharmoniker playlist offers music that suits the festive season and will guide you into the new year in a positive mood. While Corelli’s Concerto grosso was written specifically for the occasion, and Tchaikovsky’s enchanting Nutcracker ballet tells a Christmas fairy tale, sacred works such as Bach’s Magnificat and Mozart’s “Exsultate, jubilate” create a wonderfully festive atmosphere.
You can also enjoy the live stream of the family concert “Queen of Christmas” on Sunday 15 December.
Visit the Music LibGuide for access to resources available to you in Music.
Volume 17, number 2 (1975) special issue is titled Paul Henry Lang on Choral Music: Selected Essays and Reviews. Pages 7-10 focuses on Choral Music of the Seasons – Christmas.
‘The beginnings of the carol go back into the Middle Ages, for· it descended from the hymns of the church services, as well as from dance songs, rounds, marches and folk songs, and there are unmistakable connections with the liturgic play. The dramatic instinct of the Middle Ages was responsible for the introduction of the practice of displaying the crib of Bethlehem to furnish the humble, unlettered peasants with a pictorial representation of the Nativity. Then there were the Italian shepherds who on Christmas morning came to Rome, like their Biblical ancestors, to play their bagpipes before the pictures of the Madonna. As is usually the case, this delightful custom inspired the great composers, and many fine Christmas concertos and pastorals were the result. Every one knows the gently undulating “Pastoral Symphony” from Messiah; Handel borrowed it from one of the old Italian pastorals.
‘We must beware of the romantic-popular concept that the carols stand for spontaneous folk song; the best of the genuine ones were written by gifted, if anonymous, masters, some of the tunes later becoming known as “traditional,” or “folk song.” There are some five hundred old English carols extant, both in English and in Latin. With their freshness, lilt, and rhythmic vigor they represent some of the finest music of the late Middle Ages, the counterpart of the Christmas-inspired paintings of the period. But who knows them?
‘The carols were composed for ecclesiastical use, especially for processions, and often had moral, didactic-even political-undertones. If this seems strange to us, we must remember that the Middle Ages did not know the distinction between “sacred” and “secular” we make with rather startling incongruity. Those good people, whose entire life was infused with religion, would certainly be amazed by the saccharine trivialities we declare “sacred” music.
‘There can be no doubt that the carol was danced to, marched to, that it was used in church for the greatest solemnities, and also as banquet music. “Wassail,” which is a cry of elation, like “Nowell,” proves this, for it was most certainly sung on convivial occasions and’ accompanied by the appropriate spirits drunk from the wassail bowl.’
The database highlight this week is Ethnographic Sound Archives Online. This database is available to member of the University of Cambridge both on cand off campus with on campus access available to researchers within the University Library.
Alexander Street Press include this information about the Nature and Scope of the resource: The practice of going into the field to “collect” music dates to the early 20th century, as innovations like the portable phonograph enabled sounds to be recorded on wax cylinders. In response to a growing commercialized music industry, and tied to the Romantic Era notion of disappearing cultures, early field workers such as Frances Densmore and Alan Lomax traveled to remote areas to document and preserve everyday songs and language. By the 1960s, sound collectors began incorporating theories and methods from cultural anthropology—and ethnomusicology as an academic field of study was born.
Ethnographic Sound Archives Online brings together 2,000 hours of audio recordings from field expeditions around the world, particularly from the 1960s through the 1980s—the dawn of ethnomusicology as a codified discipline. Building on their predecessors’ early sound collecting methods, ethnomusicologists began to fill in gaps on the world music map, traveling to field sites to record and document music in its broader cultural context. These collectors’ bodies of work contain some of the most comprehensive surveys of regional music on record, including Mark Slobin’s survey of Afghan music, Nazir Jairazbhoy’s survey of classical Indian music, and Hugh Tracey’s survey of southern and central African music.
Music is tightly woven into society and culture — it accompanies rituals and dances, and fills social spaces. It is the goal of the ethnomusicologist to document sound in this broader context, so field recordings are often accompanied by film footage, photographs, handwritten notes, and records of the larger soundscape. Where possible, the audio in this collection is presented along with its contextual materials, totaling more than 10,000 pages of field notes and 150 hours of film footage, re-creating music’s relationship to its cultural context in a digital space.
Cambridge University members have access to Naxos Music Library (NML), the world’s largest online classical music library.
NML offers streaming access to nearly 3 million tracks of both standard and rare repertoire. Over 600 new titles are added to the library each month.
The contents can be browsed by composer, artist, genre, category and label. In addition to listening to recordings, NML provides liner notes for many albums. Listeners can create personalized playlists or enjoy predefined NML playlists, such as this one for relaxation and contemplation.
“Musically speaking, Christmas can be a very conservative time of year. For many people, it is the only occasion they go to a sung church service or a concert.
“We expect to hear what we know and to be able to sing along–no one wants to have to try to puzzle out the melody of some 15th-century French motet in a freezing-cold church in December. What makes a piece of music a Christmas carol, anyway? Besides references to angels, shepherds and newborn babies, a melody that even the least musical congregation can bellow out is definitely desirable. What would a carol service be, after all, without “Once in Royal David’s City”, “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”?” (‘How to write a Christmas carol’ Crampton, Caroline. New statesman (1996), 2015, Vol.145 (5293-5296), p.19)
Christmas carols are a part of Christmas in Cambridge. ‘A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols’ at King’s College Chapel on Christmas Eve was first held in 1918 and was first broadcast in 1928. This year you can listen into the service on BBC Radio 4 from 3pm-4.30pm on Christmas Eve.
The Carols from King’s will be broadcast on BBC television on Christmas Eve. Clips from past Carols from King’s events are available on BBC iPlayer.
“At 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve, as shadows lengthen, candles flicker, and a solemn quiet envelops the medieval chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, Stephen Cleobury, the music director there, will point to one of his boy choristers. The boy — who won’t know in advance that he’s the chosen one — will steel himself and sing into the darkness the first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City”: Plaintively alone, but heard around the world.”
(White, Michael. “Every Christmas Eve, a Lone Choir Boy Sings to More Than 370 Million.” New York Times, 24 Dec. 2018, p. (L). Gale General OneFile)
If you would like to play your own carols you will find music scores indexed in iDiscover. Why not play In dulci jublio (Michael Praetorius ; arranged by Tony Zilincik. [New London, Connecticut] : Cimarron Music Press, [2011]) from the Music Online Classical Scores Library.
Would you like to start the holidays with a gentle festive concert? We recommend “Bach’s Christmas Oratorio“, one of the treasures of the sacred choral repertoire.
This is one of many concerts available from Medici TV, a classical music platform that provides over 4,000 concerts, operas, ballets, documentaries, master classes and jazz programs available to stream in HD.
The top 5 performances viewed by Cambridge Universtiy members in 2023 were:
Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro
Mozart’s Don Giovanni — Conducted by Teodor Currentzis
Rossi’s Orfeo
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly
Richter, The Enigma by Bruno Monsaingeon (I)
Visit the the Music LibGuide for access to more resources available to you in Music.
Cambridge University members now have online access to the Journal of Sound and Music in Games (2020 to present) on the University of California Press platform.
From the University of California Press website:
“The Journal of Sound and Music in Games(JSMG) is a peer-reviewed journal that presents high-quality research concerning all areas of music and/or sound in games. It serves a diverse community of readers and authors, encompassing industry practitioners alongside scholars from disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, computer science, media/game studies, philosophy, psychology and sociology, as well as musicology. JSMG is the only journal exclusively dedicated to this subject and provides a meeting point for professionals and academics from any tradition to advance knowledge of music and sound in this important medium”
Nigerian music intelligence company Josplay Inc. has announced the launch of the African Music Library (AML) social project, a unified database aimed at providing the global music industry with the most accurate and comprehensive understanding of African music.
The digital platform indexes empirical and historical data about music made in Africa or by Africans in the diaspora, the company says. AML aims to collect, study and document the creators and participants of all recorded music in Africa or by Africans, cataloguing information about artists, bands, record labels, their works and how they are made, including instruments and genres.
The library is launching with data of over 3 000 artists and more than 10 million data points on recorded musical works. It also tracks more than 100 genres spanning different generations. More information about this new open access database here
Cambridge University members now have online access to the Classical Scores Library, complete volumes 1 through 5 on the ProQuest/Alexander Street Press Music Online platform.
Classical Scores Library is a series of five volumes with a mission to provide a reliable and authoritative source for scores of the classical canon, as well as a resource for the discovery of lesser-known contemporary works. The collections encompass all major classical musical genres and time periods from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. With full, study, piano, and vocal scores, this comprehensive collection will enhance the study of music history, performance, composition and theory for a variety of scholars.
THIS RESOURCE IS BROUGHT TO YOU WITH FUNDING FROM UKRI
This new acquisition is funded by a grant from UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) for building capacity through strategic investment in research priorities.
In Cambridge University Libraries we are proud to be recipients of the UKRI award enabling us to purchase high-priority, data rich electronic research resources to provide a step change in research capacity and research environment. The selection of resources has been informed by benchmarking with peer institutions and developing academic research priorities across multiple schools and themes, including diversification and the Global Humanities.
African-American Music Reference is a comprehensive reference database that chronicles the rich history of African-American music through 1970. This database brings together the most important reference texts in this subject area, including discographies and bibliographies combined with song sheets, images and other print resources.
The database offers the first comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression – and the only electronic access to this coverage. Resources include biographies, anthologies, encyclopedias, images, lyrics (digitized and fully searchable), song sheets, chronologies, critical textbooks, a comprehensive discography of the top African-American artists, and links to editorially selected Web resources. It contains more than 50,000 pages of reference materials that include rare and previously unpublished items.
“Go-go is not only non-stop, but also largely improvisatory, with only the hint of a play list established at the beginning of any performance. A go-go proceeds largely on gut instinct as the band reacts to and interacts with the crowd. Make no mistake about it–at a go-go the distinction between the audience and the band is very narrow indeed. There is an ongoing dialogue (much like in a good marriage or any other close, cooperative venture) with give and take and call and response helping to establish the communication necessary for an intimate and satisfying experience. In strong contrast to a performance by a folk-pop artist like Jackson Browne or Tracey Chapman, where the audience is warmly appreciative and enthusiastic but rarely overbearing, go-go crowds are always “in your face” while interacting with the band. Because the go-go community is largely racially segregated and most of its adherents reside in close proximity, the members often know one another well, so go-gos tend to be social as well as musical events. The fans let you know what they want to hear and how good a job the band is doing; they express themselves vigorously and loudly, in no uncertain terms. Go-go fans, in short, are demonstrative, not at all shy, and overwhelmingly black.”–
THIS RESOURCE IS BROUGHT TO YOU WITH FUNDING FROM UKRI
This new acquisition is funded by a grant from UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) for building capacity through strategic investment in research priorities.
In Cambridge University Libraries we are proud to be recipients of the UKRI award enabling us to purchase high-priority, data rich electronic research resources to provide a step change in research capacity and research environment. The selection of resources has been informed by benchmarking with peer institutions and developing academic research priorities across multiple schools and themes, including diversification and the Global Humanities.
ejournals & databases services 
