"Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas"

I've been to Rob Kapilow's music appreciation programs before. He's the best speaker on that topic I know of, avoiding both the Scylla of reducing the subtleties of musical form into inane simplicities and the Charybdis of drowning the reader in arcane technical specificities. Besides classical pieces, he's covered musical theater and jazz, and this one went off in a similar direction: Christmas songs by Jews, of which there are a lot. I was too curious not to go.

Kapilow put this in context by explaining that the children of the Jewish immigrant generations in the 1880s-1920s were anxious to escape the crowded ghetto and tried to assimilate into American society. And so those who turned to music (which didn't have the ethnic quotas of higher-status professions) wrote Christmas carols, which became, Kapilow said, the songbook of the American dream - written by immigrants and the children of immigrants, a lesson worth remembering.

The foundation stone of this collection was, of course, Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" (1941), whose Bing Crosby recording became about the most popular song ever. It was followed by so many others that, within a few years, songwriters were wracking their brains to come up with a new angle when asked to write a Christmas song. For a cynical Bob Hope movie about an urban grifter? The first urban Christmas carol, "Silver Bells."¹ For Eartha Kitt, at the time "the sexiest woman alive" (according to the songwriter)? The first sexy Christmas carol, "Santa Baby."² (This, Kapilow said, faded into obscurity until resurrected by Madonna, who'd be just the person to do it.)

All these songs were resolutely secular, part of a movement - sponsored by the government, which wanted to culturally unify the troops during WW2 - to secularize Christmas and make it the leading national holiday. (It didn't work on me: as a child I resented the invasion of Christmas into my Jewish existence. I got over it when I married a Christian woman. I help her celebrate her holidays and she helps me celebrate mine. It's a deal.)

But there were a couple of exceptions to the rule that Christmas carols by Jews were secular. There's "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,"³ which is a parable of anti-Semitism. Oh yes it is. And there's "Do You Hear What I Hear?"⁴ which turns to the nativity story as a plea for peace during the Cuban missile crisis when it was written.

All of these songs were sung on stage during the evening's program, by a couple of soloists and/or a small choir, with piano accompaniment. Kapilow either played the piano or conducted, with other people to do those jobs when he was doing the other one. (Credits)

But the real meat of the program was the musical analysis of what makes these songs great. "White Christmas," Kapilow said, owes its seductive charm to a touch of melancholy, reinforced by minor and dissonant chords in the accompaniment. (Yeah, but I've heard arrangements which ignore all that.) And the warmth that comes at the very end ("And may all your Christmases be white") is due to the last note being the first time in the song that the melodic line is on the root note of the home chord. Something technical also explains the toasty feeling of the end of "The Christmas Song"⁵ ("Although it's been said many times, many ways / Merry Christmas to you"). After a song's worth of melody in a jazz style, changing key almost every bar, for the conclusion the melody returns to the home key and stays there.

Kapilow also noted the similarity of the openings of "The Christmas Song" and "Let It Snow."⁶ Both begin with an upward leap (cf also "Somewhere over the rainbow") followed by a sequence of descending notes. Interestingly, both songs were written - though by different people - on the same occasion for the same reason: to think of something cold as relief from the brutally hot LA summer of 1945.

1. Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, 1950.
2. Joan Javits and Philip Springer, 1953.
3. Robert May (lyrics, 1939) and Johnny Marks (music, 1949).
4. Noël Regney and Gloria Shayne, 1962.
5. Mel Tormé and Robert Wells, 1945.
6. Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, 1945.