Curious Conversations, a Research Podcast

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Travis

Whether or not you celebrate the holiday itself, is almost impossible to entirely avoid Christmas music during this time of year. It's on in stores, it's on TV, and there are even radio stations that have dedicated entire blocks of programming to it pretty much since Halloween. So, I'm curious how we got to this place where Christmas music has such cultural relevance. I'm curious how Christmas music even began and what even qualifies as a Christmas song. Does Frosty the Snowman count? Is it the diehard of Christmas songs? I'm not really sure, but thankfully Virginia Tech's Ariana Wyatt has answers to all these questions and more and was kind enough to join me on the podcast. Ariana is the associate dean for outreach and engagement and an associate professor of voice and Virginia Tech's College of Architecture, Arts, and Design. She's also a graduate of Julliard Opera Center and has performed in operas and concert halls throughout the country. So, Ariana helped me understand the origins of Christmas music and she explained how this blending of church hymns and secular music has pretty much occurred throughout history and it really still takes place today. We also talked a lot about the 20th century and the rise of the commercialization of this genre of music and the impact World War II had on the music and lot of the songs that we still listen to today. And we also got into the nuts and bolts of what is a Christmas song and spoiler alert Frosty does in fact count under these guidelines. And we wound down the podcast by discovering we share a favorite Christmas song. So, stick around for that and see if you also share that song. I'm Travis Williams and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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Travis

Well, I wanna talk to you about Christmas music because it is that season. And so I am curious, I guess, just to start this conversation, what do we know about the origins of Christmas music?

Ariana

Yeah, absolutely. Well, of course, we don't have enough time to talk about the full origins of Christmas music today. We'd need a few hours over the course of several days, I think, to kind of get into the full history of it. what we do know in kind of brief history is that the first kind of Christmas-y hymn was the Angel's hymn that we have from 129 AD. And that is attributed to the Bishop of Rome at the time. And we have kind of in the fourth century, our earliest known kind of Latin Christmas hymns are created. And those are attributed to the Bishop of Milan. And that one was called Come Redeemer of Nations. So we can see that since the birth of Christ, there were Christmas songs. And of course, our written history of that time is not complete. We'll put it that way, right? It's not complete. And so what we have are bits and pieces, right? But what we do know is that kind of from the fourth century on, we have a lot of Christians kind of weaving in the Christian themes of Christmas into what are already existing kind of pagan cultural traditions of songs that really centered around the winter solstice, which is of course usually around December 20^th the shortest day of the year, the longest night, and it signifies the turning. We're starting to get longer days. Spring is coming, even though it's several months away. And so that was a big ritual that was part of pagan culture. And the Christians, as is generally what we have done, what Christians have done throughout time, is kind of in bed in the culture and the existing kind of practices that existed. So, they would essentially take those tunes and write new words that were celebrating the birth of Christ. So then kind of through the middle ages, we have a lot more of this. Hymns become part of Christian services, but they're always in Latin. So they're not necessarily the most, you know, excited or exciting for the general population because the general population doesn't speak Latin, course, right? Kind of in conjunction with that, we have a secular development of the celebration of Christmas, which is festivities around Christmas, around winter. And they're sometimes Christian in nature, and they're sometimes not. And they're often accompanied by dancing and drinking and the like. And so we have references to this kind of caroling from the Middle Ages in kind Chaucer's writing. We have a reference in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was a poem that my son had to read a few months ago. He really did not like it. But it does have a reference to raucous caroling accompanied by drinking of regular folks in town singing and rejoicing and enjoying each other's company. throughout that time That's essentially what was happening. We had it developing in the church and we had it developing outside of the church, right? And there were groups throughout the late middle ages, kind of in all over Europe. And in France, they were called the Troubadours and the Trouvers. And they were essentially just groups of wandering minstrels who would take these songs, travel around and sing them for money or food or drink or whatever. And they started to kind of popularize this kind of music. And we see that kind of throughout Europe in various ways. So that's kind of we get we get to the Middle Ages. So we've gotten through 1000 years. Yeah.

Travis

Yeah, well, it sounds like, and I don't wanna cut you off too much because I'm sure there's a lot more, but just from hearing that, it sounds like that there's much of this back and forth between some of it's happening in church, some of it's happening out in the secular culture. And honestly, it doesn't sound that different from where we are right now with Christmas music.

Ariana

It's essentially the same. So, I mean, we're skipping a lot and we can come back to it. But if you skip to the kind of 20th century, it's very similar, right? We have structured hymns, Christmas hymns that have been written down, they were written down in the mid-1850s, right? Kind of in that Victorian era where Christmas was really, I would say kind of codified in the way that we view Christmas today, right?

And so you had, for the first time, these kinds of collections of Christmas music, Christmas hymns specific to the church were written down and popularized through their publication. But at the same time, you had popular music, which is very similar to the 20th century, right? So those carols exist and the kind of strophes that you see throughout, both varieties of music, whether you're calling it that kind of secular or the sacred version, you're going to see that in the 20th century as well. So you have songs about revelry, you have songs about drinking, you have songs about romance, you have songs about dancing, know, all of that in the secular part. And then mostly in the sacred part, it's really about the birth of Christ, right? It's about the story.

And it's a little bit different, right? So it's interesting if you think about the 20th century, right? When does the Christmas season start? What would you say?

Travis

probably right after Halloween because I've noticed in stores the pumpkin shaped candies shuffle out right as the Christmas tree shaped candies shuffle in. And that's how I gauge it.

Ariana

Basically November 1st, exactly. So that's when we start having Christmas music on the radio. That's when we have Christmas things popping into stores, right? Right after Halloween. And yet in the Christian church, that's not the case, right? So in the church, we have the season of Advent that leads up to Christmas Eve, but that's all expectation. It's not revelry, it's not celebration. It's the expectation.

O come, O come, Emmanuel, right? The expectation of he's coming, he's coming, he's going to be born. We are waiting in anticipation. We are waiting in anticipation. We don't celebrate until Christmas day. Whereas in our secular culture, we have from November 1st until December 25th, and then we're done, right? Whereas in the church, the Christmas starts on December 25th. That's the first day of Christmas. We have 12 more until we get to Epiphany. So, You know, it's an interesting chain of juxtaposition, right, that our kind of societal culture has shifted in this way versus kind of how the church views the Christmas season, Advent and the Christmas season.

Travis

That is fascinating. I personally would like to just celebrate both of those and then just keep it going through the entire port. Well, you mentioned some of what we know modern, I guess, some of what the modern context is specifically, I guess, for like the church, Christmas hymns type songs. Were most of those developed in that 1800s period?

Ariana

Yeah, I mean, they had really been in development throughout. The kind of codification of it happened in the 1700s and the 1800s. So in the 1700s, we had our first dictionary of music that was written by Rousseau in mid 1700s. And he was the first to kind of define various aspects of music. And we had a lot of musical treatises that happened around that time and into the next hundred years. treatises on music itself, the art of music, what defines music, and then also specific kind of pedagogy books for the first time. So those are books about how to teach singing, how to teach strings, how to teach, you know, all of these kinds of things. We start to see the evolution of that kind of aspect of music. And so he was the first to kind of define them. so to speak. And he defines them in two categories, essentially hymns and carols. So he classifies the hymn or the cantique as a song in honor of divinity, is how he puts it. And then he has a category of noelle or carol, essentially, which is a type of musical air, which is a song, destined for the people to sing in the festivals of Christmas and they tend to be rustic and pastoral in character and matching in the simplicity of their words. And it's interesting the origin of the word carol, which in both contexts, Greek and Latin origin, both mean kind of gathering in a circle and dancing. So dancing in a circle, singing together is kind of the origin of the word carol. But a lot of those carols were kind of rewritten, reconfigured, rewritten again and again and again throughout the 17 and the 1800s until we started to get some of these publications. So in the mid 1800s, we had two big publications. There were several others, but there was a carols for Christmastide and the Christmas carols new and old. And that's when we start to have, you know, less rejiggering, so to speak, less recomposing of these kinds of carols. But just to remind you, mean, these carols or these hymns had been composed since the birth of Christ. So the reality is that probably many of the carols that we sing today have medieval, especially tune origins, right? So we're likely using some of these pagan melodies, some folk melodies. And it's just that when we start to kind of write them down and codify them and be more specific with them, then we start to all sing the same version. In the 1800s, we have the ability to get books more readily. And we have the ability, therefore, to more easily share knowledge across borders. And we also had, again, troops of singers that would take specific songs and then popularize them. So you take something like Silent Night, right? It's one we all know. It was written in 1818. It's based on an Austrian, or it's reminiscent of an Austrian folk tune. And it was popularized by a family of singers, not unsimilar to like the von Trapp. family singers, right? A troupe of singers who went around and performed for people all over Europe. And then they came to the United States, think it was like 1839, somewhere around there, late 1830s, and sang it for the first time at New York City's Trinity Church, one of the most famous churches that we have in the United States. And at that point it was translated to English. now, know, Silent Night is a canonical Christmas song that everyone knows. there's of course that wonderful story about it being sung by both the German and the English troops during the Christmas Eve truce of 1914 at the start of World War I, because it was a shared him that we have with our German neighbors, German and Austrian neighbors.

Travis

Yeah. Well, and I think you may have answered this in some of your, some of what you've explained so far, but I'm kind of curious, how do you think that Christmas music has influenced culture overall?

Ariana

I think there was a real explosion of secular Christmas music in the United States that started during World War II. And we can point back to White Christmas as being the impetus for that. It was probably the beginning of popular Christmas, widely successful popular Christmas music. And that one was sung on Christmas Eve for the first time by Bing Crosby, Christmas Eve 1941, right after Pearl Harbor, right after the U.S. joined World War II. It started a whole kind of genre of commercialized Christmas music that exists today, right? And what is really interesting in terms of kind of how the music has affected the culture or how the culture has affected the music and In many ways, that's really hard to parse out, right? I mean, it develops in tandem, it develops together. So I don't think that one influences the other, but you can see how during World War II, we had a lot of songs and kind of this, what we could categorize as a white Christmas kind of song, right? A song that is a ballad, that is nostalgic, that is longing for Christmas's past, it is hope for Christmas's future. We have a whole lot of songs in this kind of category during that time. And then after that, we have a whole lot of songs that you could categorize as kind of green Christmas. It's all about Santa and presents and giving and receiving. So green referring to money, of course. So as the American economy kind of boomed after the end of World War II, you see a lot more songs in this kind of genre in terms of the commercialization of Christmas. So I don't know that one influences the other, but they definitely happened, right? So you have a lot of songs around Santa. You have songs around snowmen. You have Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and new characters that are written during this time that have nothing to do with the birth of Christ, of course but are entirely about kind of that giving and receiving of presents. So it's really interesting to see how that happened. And there was a real kind of explosion of Christmas music at that time. So the vast majority of the repertoire that we have today in terms of popular Christmas music was actually written between 1940 and 1970, which is kind of fascinating. Right? So while we have new songs today, we do, to be clear, the vast majority of those songs were written during that kind of 30 year period. And they live on today. I we still listen to Bing Crosby's recording of White Christmas. We listen to Frank Sinatra's Christmas carols that he recorded. Right? We listen to the jazz greats and their rendition of the various kind of Christmas songs that we have. And so it's really interesting in a genre, kind of the widespread genre of popular music in the United States, that's really all about change and evolution and constant, what's the new thing, what's new and exciting, what's different. You have Christmas music that has largely remained the same, right?

Travis

Yeah, that's fascinating that that time period still has such a hook on us and that I guess so many characters specifically, I think of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer as I mean, many people I grew up with, it was just a staple. I don't know where it came from. Like to me, it was like it had always been there. So to find out that no, it wasn't. It was a thing somebody wrote into a song and then it had, has that type of cultural hook is just so fascinating. I'm curious, what do you think right now? What qualifies a song?

Ariana

Yeah, sure. Well, I think, you know, a Christmas song. So I would say, you know, we can kind of put two categories. You have carols and songs. So carols are kind of the ones you're going to find in hymns. They're sung in the church and they're about the birth of Christ, right? Or, and stories from the New Testament, essentially, right? And then you have songs, which I would categorize as anything that references Christmas in any way and then wintertime. So you have songs that don't directly reference Christmas, but we still categorize as Christmas songs because they're talking about winter, right? So an example of that one is Jingle Bells. Jingle Bells does not reference Christmas at all and in fact was written for Thanksgiving. It was written in the 1800s for Thanksgiving about a middle-class family, essentially, because then they're a one-horse open sleigh, right? Going over to grandma's house, they're going to celebrate Thanksgiving. But then it was kind of reconfigured as a Christmas song. So anything that kind of references, you've got sleigh bells, you've got snow, you've got anything that kind of glistens or is bright. You have fires, you have chestnuts which of course reference the great American chestnuts. And again, go back to the forties when we used to actually have the American chestnut before the blight took them all away. And so any sort of references like that are gonna mean the broad category of Christmas music. Even if it doesn't reference Christmas at all, you have those kind of references, reference points to the kind of time of year and the feeling that you have around Christmas.

Travis

Yeah, I specifically asked that question because I wanted to know about Frosty the Snowman because I don't really know what to do with that. There's no as far as I mean, I Santa may show up in the in cartoon. I can't remember. But the song itself is just a magical snowman. And but it's very much a Christmas song. I don't hear it played in February and we could easily have a magical snowman in February. Right. So, yeah, that's why I asked that question.

Ariana

And that's kind of about all of the songs. know, Frosty is spreading cheer. That's his whole life's purpose, right, in the song. It's to go around and spread cheer to little girls and boys all over the place, make their life a little bit better in the cold, in the dark, in the winter, right? And so you find that thematically through a lot of that kind of music, right? The spreading of joy, the giving of presents, the sharing of food the sharing of drink, all of those things in order to kind of make winter better. But you're right, frosty, I don't, I have to go through every lyric to make sure, but I don't think there's a real explicit reference to Christmas, or to Santa, or to anything.

Travis

If it is, it's gotta be subtle. it's not, I'll say this, it's definitely not the main point. The main point is the magical snowman. well, when it comes to Christmas music, I'm very curious about how or maybe why it has this grasp on us and in a way that often makes us branch out from the traditional genres we might be interested in. And specifically, I think about my family, the types of music, the genres we would listen to at Christmas. We will not listen to the rest of the year. We don't listen to orchestra music really at all. This was me growing up. My wife may have different opinions right now. But me growing up, didn't listen to orchestra music. But at Christmas time, that was a staple of one of the things my dad played a lot of time. So what is it about Christmas music that I guess encourages us or makes us kind of broaden out like that?

Ariana

You know, I mean, this is my opinion, but I think that we seek out spectacle. I think that we seek out magic. I think that we seek out big, grand, merry, bright, shiny, all of those things during the season. And part of that is because it is cold, because it is bleak at times, right? And...We can't spend a lot of time outside, generally speaking. And of course, I'm, you know, excluding here the West Coast, so to speak, where I grew up, where, you know, it's fine. It was 70 degrees out on Christmas. It's cool. So I'm being real specific to kind of where we are and in general. But it's my opinion that people seek out spectacle. They seek out grand events. Why do we go see lights?

You could ask the same question and we could go see lights any time of the year. Why do we only do it at Christmas, right? Why do we want to go see Christmas shows? Why do we want to do, you know, when do people go to see a ballet? Christmas. They go see the Nutcracker. That if they're going to see a ballet in their life, I guarantee you it's probably going to be the Nutcracker. It's possible if they really love ballet, they'll go to others. But, you know, most likely most have gone to the Nutcracker as part of a field trip, right? It's ingrained in what we do, and I think it's that magic, it's the spectacle, it's the grandeur, really what is more effective, what is more kind of impactful than a large live symphony orchestra? And I'm gonna go ahead and admit that I was born a lover of classical music, have loved it and studied it, and performed it my entire life. So obviously I am biased here, but I believe that there's a certain magic of being able to hear that music performed with that many people on stage in that way. And that people kind of want that. They want to experience that magic. They want to go away and feel lighter and happier and hopeful, more joyful.

Travis

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. It's not just orchestras, I guess. I'm also thinking of like, well, we don't listen to Bing Crosby and Our House in April or Frank Sinatra is not really a staple in July. So, you know, there's that genre too. Those Christmas songs really have this, I don't know, kind of, they make me expand beyond my usual genres, I guess I should say.

Ariana

Well, I was just going to say that I think that is really about the nostalgia. mean, all you have to do is think of White Christmas. And where does it put you? Right? No matter where you are, when you are, you think of White Christmas, and you think of joy. You think of family. You think of being together, of community. You might think of snow, but I don't think that's really the point.

Right? The snow is there, but meh, that's not the important part. The important part is being together, is of community. And so, you know, that's where music can be so impactful, is that it allows us to remember, to experience, and to process complex emotions. Right? We enjoy songs in a minor key, songs that are quote unquote sad. Right? Not because we...We want to be sad, but because we need to process sad emotions, we need to process longing, we need to process loss, we need to process regret, and music gives us that opportunity. So I think Christmas music is powerful in that way because it has such a sense of place and community so that when we hear it, we immediately go to that place and we feel enveloped in our community.

Travis

Do you think that that may also be one of the reasons why so many artists want to cover Christmas songs that have been done a dozen other times?

Ariana

Yes, I do. I think that everyone enjoys singing Christmas music, but also money, right? So it is a huge opportunity to make money. So while I might have a that, you know, isn't super successful in the long term, if I record a hit musical, sorry, a hit Christmas song, I mean, that will exist for decades.

Like just look at Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas, right? The most successful Christmas song of all time, right? It is still the singular most popular Christmas record of the 21st century. was recorded in 1993, right? And it is the most played, the top charted Christmas song for, I'm not gonna say how many years, cause it's gonna date me, but you get the idea, right? So like, Money, money speaks, right? And so artists are gonna record this music because they can make some money.

Travis

also feels like one of the more divisive Christmas songs as far as who does and doesn't appreciate it at this point in its culture. I'm surprised by that. It's not, the number one one wasn't Grandma Got Ran Over by Reindeer. Maybe that was just really popular for me in elementary school. I'm not really sure. Well, I have to ask you this. What is your favorite Christmas song?

Ariana

Holy Night, 100%.

Travis

That's awesome. Me too. I literally wrote that down that that is my favorite song. Now, do you have a specific version that you most like? Because I do.

Ariana

You know, no I don't actually. That's an interesting question. I've loved it performed by many different artists. But it's just the one that gives me all the warm and fuzzies. Like I tear up a little bit on that one every time. know, what's your favorite recording of it?

Travis

So my favorite recording of it is actually Weezer's version of it. Weezer did a Christmas album and it's all hymns, except for I think like, you know, Wish You A Merry Christmas. It's like five hymns, I think, and that's one of them. And it is criminally underrated. It's a great album. If you like Weezer, I guess if you don't like Weezer, it's not, it's not, but I like Weezer, so.

Ariana

Yeah, I'll have to listen to it.

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Travis

And thanks to Ariana for helping us better understand the origins and the impact of Christmas music. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at vt.edu. I'm Travis Williams and this has been Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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