Truly old music

Ancient Noels; Maggie Sansone and Ensemble Galilei

In the early morning of Christmas Eve in 1984, what the media called a “killer blizzard” descended on the upper Midwest, canceling worship services and impounding people in their homes. The wind had gusted up to fifty miles per hour, the temperatures remained around thirty degrees below zero and, by the time the storm had blown itself out, we had two feet of snow to walk on.

A little drama unfolded on Christmas Eve morning involving three poorly dressed friends from my high school (I had graduated the previous spring.) and a borrowed truck that got stuck in a drift in the middle of the night about a quarter of a mile west of our farm. When the parents and the owner of the truck found the kids, our nice warm house emerged as the logical place to feed them, get them warm, and to wait until a vehicle could plow through the fast accumulating snow to take them home.

My Uncle M. and Aunt I. had invited us up to their house for Christmas Eve, but we called it off as the storm got progressively worse over the course of the afternoon. In our efforts to provide quality sustenance for our weary sojourners, we didn’t have an awful lot of festive food left for a cozy family gathering, but somehow Mom raided the freezer and threw together an excellent yuletide feast. And to pass the time, we relied on the TV station that gave us the best reception: Channel 8, PBS.

I haven’t watched Christmas Eve programming on PBS for a number of years, but at that time you could count on a musically lavish lineup. And on this evening they didn’t disappoint. We saw a special with Peter, Paul and Mary, Pavarotti at the cathedral in Montreal, a New England Christmas, and one other program that my sisters and I have talked about for years. We don’t recall the name of the program, but we definitely, positively, absolutely remember that it featured Sigismund the donkey. He, Mr. Sigismund, helped write a special Christmas carol, but the name of the carol escaped us. This special Christmas mystery has elicited discussion around the Christmas table for twenty-five years.

When I saw “The Donkey’s Carol” included on this excellent CD put out by Maryland musician Maggie Sansone, I was hoping that our donkey carol conundrum would receive its answer. Alas. Sigh.

Christmas often serves as a conduit of time, a lens through which we experience nostalgia. How often each Christmas do we recall memorable times with or about people who mean so much to us? We have special recipes handed down by our grandmothers, decorations that have adorned Christmas trees for generations, honored traditions that bring esteem to the memories of those we long to remember.

Most of us, though, don’t have the ability, much less the inclination, to genuinely relate to a person much older than three or four generations back. That’s where this CD comes in. Through this music from centuries ago on instruments championed by the Psalms, we connect with ancestors some twenty generations behind us - to celebrate an event that occurred some twenty generations before them: the coming of the King. In the guise of Maggie Sansone and the Ensemble Galilei, our ancestors from so long ago exalt the birth of Jesus from a not-inappropriate down-to-earth perspective, preferring quiet dignity to a loud herald but not without a hint of wonder. The birth and the death of Christ isolate probably the two single instances of cultural and spiritual recognition that all of humankind from the first century AD to November, 2009, hold in common. A unique family reunion like this brings timelessness to my Christmas celebration.

Credits: To John Rutter, for the story of Brother Heinrich’s Christmas. If a donkey’s voice is good enough to sing outside in the middle of God’s creation, why not in a choir stall? Thank you.