A Kid's View of the Christmas Story

Thanks for sending this my way, Dottie.

Christmas Music with Cello

Top favorite buy this year for me in the genre of Christmas music was Christmas Cello Music - Piano and Cello Music for Christmas Dinner by New Age (Dec., 2011 by Winter Hill Records).

Giovanni Battista di Jacopo (Italian Mannerist painter, 1494–1540), known as Rosso Fiorentino (meaning the Red Florentine in Italian) Angel with Lute Madonna dello Spedalingo

Take a listen to Christmas instrumental music with cello accompaniment:

Winter Songs and a Selection from Schubert

NPR is currently asking its listeners for winter songs and stories that connect its listeners with "winter music" evocative of strong emotions and memories.

In an interview from "All Things Considered" on December 13, 2011, Bill T. Jones, celebrated dancer and choreographer, gives music from Franz Schubert entitled 'Der Leiermann' (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Baritone)...... and says

It speaks about a bleak landscape. And this bleak landscape takes me back to a day when I was in fourth grade out on the edge of town, looking at a snow-covered highway many, many yards away from my window — I should've been paying attention, but I was dreaming.

And then I saw a lone figure walking across on a very, very cold day," he continues, "and you know how it is when the wind blows and you have to turn your back against the wind, and I felt so sorry for that person, and then I realized it was my father. That my father, who was completely out of work, had been the director of his own business as a contractor in the heyday of the migrant stream back in the late '50s, but now that business had died. He was up in the chilly North with family, broke and sick, and he had to get to this very insignificant job in a factory, miles and miles away. A black man with no car, trying to hitchhike, and no one picking him up, and he has to walk that 10 miles to get to the factory. And I'm sitting in this warm classroom, getting educated, not paying attention to the teacher, and suddenly feeling torn between two worlds. And this music, when I hear it, I feel for my father. There's something about art that can be, yes, depressing, but helps us bear the pain through sheer beauty and intensity.

If you would like to hear Schubert's music from the "song cycle about a solitary traveler in a savage winter whose heart is frozen in grief"...

(More from the Bill T. Jones interview)