{"id":4628,"date":"2021-12-23T12:54:58","date_gmt":"2021-12-23T19:54:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4628"},"modified":"2021-12-23T18:25:08","modified_gmt":"2021-12-24T01:25:08","slug":"new-music-on-youtube","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4628","title":{"rendered":"New Music on YouTube"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Way back in the summer <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4562\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I posted here about digging around on YouTube for new music<\/a>, particularly in the realms of melody and harmony. I admit that an occasional hard rock song appeals to me for reasons unclear, a good example being the Gin Blossoms&#8217; &#8220;Found Out About You.&#8221; The human brain is a weird business, but we&#8217;re all nerds here and you knew that.<\/p>\n<p>So, as we close in on Christmas, I wanted to post a few items I&#8217;d found and liked on YouTube. Nearly all of it is Christmas music. (I&#8217;ll post some other non-Christmas discoveries in a future entry.)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First up is another kid choir, this one assembled by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=4cP26ndrmtg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">to provide words to Pachelbel&#8217;s Canon in G<\/a>. Until relatively recently I thought the TSO was a Russian group. Not so; they&#8217;re from Florida. My only complaint is that I can&#8217;t make out the words except here and there, and the video is old enough (2009) that there are no subtitles.<\/li>\n<li>I was startled when I clicked on a YouTube-suggested track, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=l8Sxh5E2u_g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen&#8221; by Geoff Castellucci<\/a>. Not sure if you remember Tennessee Ernie Ford. I do. Ford was a bass, but this guy Geoff is a bass so deep he brushes the Earth&#8217;s mantle. Yet he does <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=IGqf5ha_GEA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the same trick that Peter Hollens does<\/a>, and harmonizes with himself with four video images, all singing at once. Range? He&#8217;s got it, lordy.<\/li>\n<li>For comparison, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UP4z3fNKdDM\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here&#8217;s the good Mr. Ford doing his cover of the same song<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>My really big discovery this year was Pentatonix, a marvelous <em>a capella<\/em> group. How did I get to be this old without ever hearing about them? <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ku7ohU1IGls\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Their cover of &#8220;God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen&#8221; is dazzling<\/a>. (Bet you can&#8217;t guess what my favorite Christmas song is, heh.)<\/li>\n<li>I do have other favorites, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1sOfzwk2VZY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the Wayne Gratz cover of &#8220;It Came Upon a Midnight Clear&#8221;<\/a> is right up there. This isn&#8217;t new; I&#8217;ve had it on CD for many years. I just wanted you to hear it, and it&#8217;s free on YouTube.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=emXbfEzXn6A\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">More Pentatonix, from the live action <em>How the Grinch Stole Christmas<\/em>.<\/a> I&#8217;d love to hear the bass who sang &#8220;You&#8217;re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch&#8221; in the original 1966 cartoon do a cover. Geoff Castelluci could do it, since the marvelously gravelly Thurl Ravenscroft is no longer with us.<\/li>\n<li>And still more Pentatonix: The lyrics of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=o10drRI3VQ0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;White Winter Hymnal&#8221;<\/a> don&#8217;t make any sense, but the harmony is good and the video is actually a lot of fun to watch.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;d heard this one before, but it&#8217;s been awhile, <a href= \"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=5kHH6LJpEbQ\">the John Williams theme to that over-the-top Christmas movie <em>Home Alone<\/em><\/a> . My mother used to make gingerbread houses, lots of them, almost every year, and gave most of them away. I remember that gingerbread feeling well, and will forever and ever, amen. <em>Nobody<\/em> did gingerbread houses like Victoria Albina Duntemann.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s not quite a Christmas song, but <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=zDdQhsjNHcw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">it&#8217;s a hymn that should get more play than it does<\/a>. There are lots of covers on YouTube. This is currently my favorite, but I doubt I&#8217;ve heard even a tenth of them.<\/li>\n<li>This one is brand-new to me: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NZML640owtE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;Christmas Rush&#8221; by composer Matthew Curtis<\/a>. It&#8217;s unusual in that it&#8217;s a completely new orchestral composition that doesn&#8217;t incorporate familiar Christmas melodies like a lot of orchestral Christmas music. But it&#8217;s upbeat, happy, and energetic without getting too manic. (Not that there&#8217;s anything wrong with manic now and then; see below.)<\/li>\n<li>Last year I happened to hear the orchestral piece &#8220;A Christmas Fanfare&#8221; from the BYU Philharmonic Orchestra on <a href=\"https:\/\/kbaq.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">KBAQ<\/a> and immediately bought the MP3 on Amazon. Weirdly, I do not see it on YouTube, even though the orchestra is very well-represented there. So <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Christmas-Fanfare-Live\/dp\/B00P10B3WI\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">what I can give you is the Amazon link<\/a>. It&#8217;s a fine piece blending a number of Christmas favorites into a single polished work. 99c. Get it.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ll wrap up here with yet another piece of orchestral Christmas music that captures a lot of my goofy, upbeat, borderline-manic hyperpollyannic spirit, of which a college colleague once said, &#8220;The trouble with you, Jeff, is that you&#8217;re too <em>damned<\/em> happy!&#8221; Well, yeah. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tH47F7K8_a4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Weave together a bunch of my favorite Christmas melodies into a brilliantly orchestrated march with energy exploding out of every treble clef<\/a>, and my patron&#8217;s saint&#8217;s affirmation rises up in blinding light: <em>All will be well. And all will be well. And all manner of thing will be well!<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that, my friends, is precisely what Christmas music is for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Way back in the summer I posted here about digging around on YouTube for new music, particularly in the realms of melody and harmony. I admit that an occasional hard rock song appeals to me for reasons unclear, a good example being the Gin Blossoms&#8217; &#8220;Found Out About You.&#8221; The human brain is a weird [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[177,49],"class_list":["post-4628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-christmas","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4628"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4631,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4628\/revisions\/4631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}