creating a christmas music poll of my own

I don’t really do pop Christmas music so I decided to create a poll based on my personal playlist.

There’s more songs I would put here if I could, but tumblr of course limits our poll options.

To further inform your voting, the recordings I listen to tend to be of handbell choirs, church choirs, folk artists, and deliberately old-fashioned arrangements. For instance, one of the albums I listen to has Victorian-era arrangements of Christmas carols. But I invite you to imagine your favorite arrangement of each song if it helps you select your answer!

Also, it’s way too early to post this poll, as it’s not even Advent yet. Reblog to reach everyone else on the non-pop-Christmas side of tumblr.

willie of winsbury is a very funny song

imagine you think you're gonna get executed so you make sure to dress up real nice and hope the king's latent homosexuality works in your favour and then it does

Gonna look that up~

janet: *gets pregnant*

her father, the king: who did this. please tell me it was a nobleman

janet: no it was willie of winsbury

her father, the king:

it's possible willie of winsbury always dresses in red silk but i like to think he dressed up specifically for his arrest in order to boost his chances of surviving through means of being hot

it also doesn't specify what was made of red silk so, you know, feel free to interpret this in as slutty a way as you like

Honestly, I think the 'his skin was white as milk' line gives you licence to imagine Quite A Lot of skin if you so choose

right????

anyway if anyone wants to draw willie of winsbury in red lingerie I think you could make a textual case for it

Circular song

Medieval music books, with their merry notes jumping off the page, are a pleasure to look at. This sensational page from the 14th century adds to this experience in a most unusual manner. It presents a well-known song, the French ballade titled En la maison Dedalus (In the house of Dedalus), be it that the scribe decided to write both music and lyrics in a circular form. There is reason behind this madness. The maze created by music and words locks up the main character of the song, the mythological figure Ariadne, who is a prisoner in the house of Daedalus - she is represented by the red dot. The book contains treatises on music theory, notation, tuning and chant. In other words, it was meant for experts readers. The beholder likely enjoyed the challenge of singing a circular song (did he or she spin the book around?) and how it held its subject hostage in the merriest of ways.

Pic: Berkeley, Music Library, MS 744 (made in Paris in 1375). More about the manuscript here, including more unusual images. This is a study of the book (the ballade is discussed at p. 14).

Here's the music, along with a neat visual representation:

you know what? you’re so fucking right.

go here u guys

I LOVE THAT THERE IS A WEBSITE TO CREATE YOUR OWN GREGORIAN CHANT

please do look it up if you dont know the date bc there may be at least an approximate answer and otherwise the last option will completely dominate and this poll will be boring.

and dont be like 'but i cant sing'... just answer the earliest tune you know well enough that you COULD sing it

periods of western classical music provided only for reference

Every single American voting in this poll should be getting at LEAST 19th century. I know you motherfuckers can sing at least PART of the national anthem.

Probably this bop:

Edit: I forgot I sing this every year

You want Henry V to live longer so that he could finish conquering France.

I want Henry V to live longer so that he could finally compose music for all parts of the Mass and not just the Gloria and the Sanctus.

We are not the same.

There's an incomplete song in the Old Hall Manuscript called "Carbunculus ignitus lilie" which is about Thomas Beckett that's been suggested to be another Roy Henry composition on the basis that the Roy Henry compositions are the only compositions besides this one to have floral borders in the Old Hall Manuscript, though the folio has been vandalised to remove the initial and composer. You can read more about it here in Sonja Dass's thesis (pdf link).

Music a millennium old

Fragment of a missal, a book containing the texts for celebrating Mass, from approximately 1000 CE. The smaller text is a passage of Gregorian chant with neumes, an early form of musical notation.

MS Typ 773

Houghton Library, Harvard University

The text, Ad te Domine levavi, is from Psalm 25; here's a rendition:

Medieval Dance by Andrey Vinogradov

BRUH

For those curious, the instrument is called a hurdy gurdy and did in fact exist in medieval Europe.

yooo that’s the smoothest gurdy i’ve ever heard

I tried to restrict this list to songs we know originated in or before the 17th century, but obviously it's not exhaustive. (I couldn't find a consensus on "Adeste Fideles/O Come All Ye Faithful," with some people arguing it's one of the "oldest carols" extant and others claiming it dates to the 17th or even 18th century. So it's not here, either.)

(yes, those Monkees)

[tambourine intensifies]

I couldn't find the exact gregorian chant I recommended but this one is also good

Here you go, anon!

As long as we're branching out from the strict definition of chant, Spem in Alium by Tallis may be the most beautiful piece of music in history:

Alright James VI was a smart kid but I'm just not convinced that, at three years old, he would have been thinking "Wow this composer has masterfully treated the two interweaving treble parts in this Psalm"

So some of you knew that there were these musical instruments (aerophone-lip-vibrated horns, technically) called "serpents"? And what, you were just going to wait until we ran into them while whiling away time on the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection on JSTOR (which includes nearly half a million open access images for everyone, btw)?

We don't even care what they sound like, we love them.

A nearly complete 1st century BCE carnyx found in 2004 at Tintignac, France (the one in the left picture, with a reconstruction in the right). Fashioned as a snarling boar, the carnyx was a war horn used by the Iron Age Celts between c. 200 BCE and c. 200 CE

fun fact, the first reconstruction of the carnyx was built in Scotland in the early 90s, and John Kenny brought it to my dad's photographic studio (our house) to have publicity pictures taken. I was very very young, but I had a precocious interest in history, and Kenny showed me the detailed boar's head, which had an articulated tongue that would give the effect of a subtle ululation when it was played. He played it for us in our garden, and I can still remember the sound. It sounded like a trumpet, if a trumpet was a wild prehistoric animal capable of throwing back its head and howling. It sounded like something great and tusked and angry and brass that knew what blood was and wanted it.

I don't know how old I was when I heard it, I think it must have been after its debut at the museum, but I do remember Kenny telling us we were among a very small handful of people who had heard the carnyx in 2,000 years. I remember my nextdoor neighbour's pigeons all taking off from his loft, and the wide silence that rang out afterwards, that more often came in the wake of foghorns from the harbour. I wonder, in retrospect, what all those people packed around us in their tenements in the poor part of Leith thought they'd heard. what does an ancient celtic war horn sounds like, floating through the window while you're doing the dishes?

here’s what it sounds like. holy shit

@petermorwood

Now imagine what a whole bunch of these would sound like, played together before the start of a battle.

Oh this FUCKS so hard!!!!

toots @ you

toots @ you