Gaudete, gaudete!

One thing that Tim brought into our lives was the musician George Winston, who he saw in Maine at some point, and in particular Winston's solo piano albums.

(His other interest is slack-key Hawaiian songs, which don't speak to me at all, but made for an interesting show when I saw him play at the Troy City Music Hall. I was with the talented concert pianist I was dating at the time, and his technique has some obvious quirks that drove her nuts, which I of course exploited to needle her. ANYWAY.)

The album December probably has original compositions on it, I dunno, but my favorite track has always been the souped-up (instrumental) arrangement of "The Holly and the Ivy." I don't actually know the song from anywhere else, but in looking for a good video of it (check out this one!) I came upon the old Latin carol "Gaudete." As you'd expect, the King's Singers do a tight traditional madrigal thing.

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BUT. You can also hear it done by Steeleye Span, one of the stalwarts of the English folk revival! Their approach is much more of a "humans without conservatory training" vibe, just having at it with their daytime accents.

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It doesn't exactly feel secular, what with the "Christus est natus / Ex Maria virgine" refrain, but despite the Latin—which is not rocket science, as Latin goes—their performance is definitely vernacular. The dude in front is wearing a white t-shirt and seems to have mixed feelings about this song interrupting his glass of wine (which he continues holding). It's entirely likely they can make themselves sound like a regular choir, but that territory has been amply covered for centuries. Regardless, clearly Maddy Pryor has found an application of her voice that she's content with.

Steeleye Span is also my favorite version of "The Boar's Head Carol":

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We used to go to the huge Boar's Head Festival at the Neo-Gothic church where I went to nursery school, and it was amazing. If you grabbed some artists and said "Build me a medieval Christmas festival inside a church" you would get that sort of profusion of acrobats, jugglers, minstrels, people on stilts, acrobats on stilts, pageant, and music. Steeleye Span's "rehearse a lot and then get a couple drinks in before the show" approach really honors the material.

"The Boar's Head Carol" also connects with the text of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, of a similar vintage. It wasn't until an adulthood blessed with Wikipedia that I looked them up and learned that mixed-language texts are called "macaronic." Knowing this has had no apparent impact on my life, except that I know it, and learning is my most fundamental joy.