Leading up to Christmas I chose to read The Carols of Christmas: A Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Christmas Songs by Andrew Gant. As a lover of all things Christmas, especially the music (I put on the Christmas radio stations before Thanksgiving) I thought this would be a fun book to read as a way to add some historical background to the songs I love so much.
Gant takes us from Advent through Epiphany with historical background on 21 different carols. Everything from O Come, O Come Emmanuel to Jingle Bells with lots of others in between, including my all-time favorite O Come, All Ye Faithful. Each carol gets its own chapter where the author gives a very detailed history of how it came to be, the variation in lyrics from one place to another, original language and translations (where applicable), and then the words and music of the most common version being used today.
All in all this is a very good book. But I do think it's probably not for everybody. Maybe the title is a little bit of a misnomer. Though it's subtitled "A Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs," perhaps a more accurate title would have been "the Surprising History..." because most of these read more like history than flat-out stories. Not a bad thing, but probably not something I would have picked up as a light read in the busy weeks before Christmas.
This book also assumes a knowledge of musical history that some readers may not readily have. More than once I had to go look something up in order to understand what I was reading. Again, not a bad thing; I love to learn when I read. But I probably would have waited for a less busy season to read this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment