25 days ago I wrote about Christmas music, and focused more around the significance that music has on the holiday itself. Now, I want to focus on the music itself.
Christmas has long been connected with music and has produced some of the most iconic music. Back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, making a Christmas album was almost a rite of passage in the music industry. Albums like the Beach Boy’s A Beach Boys Christmas Album, Bing Crosby’s Merry Christmas, and Sinatra’s A Jolly Christmas From Frank Sinatra are classics and still continue to get listens.
Now, in the modern day, these albums are a sort of time capsule for music of the past. Pop radio stations normally don’t play songs from the 50s except when it comes to the holidays, where Christmas songs get mixed in from across generations.
Anomalie’s Holiday album released this year is a great example of an interesting contemporary Christmas album. It is instrumental, takes influence by modern jazz and modern production techniques, and takes creative liberties. Some of the productions would seem unrecognizable if not listening closely.
These types of albums often are just collections of covers of various classics. I don’t mind the occasional cover here and there, but holiday playlists are oversaturated with them. I wrote more about that in my previous post, where I discussed limiting my consumption of holiday music in order to not get burnt out. But from a historical stance, the choice to make covers helps isolated the differences in “style” from era to era, and not composition get in the way of consideration.
I wrote mostly of Christmas music in this blog, because in America, where I live, it is the dominant cultural phenomenon. I also don’t personally celebrate Hanukkah nor Kwanzaa, and thus don’t have authority to speak for their part of American culture.
Dali, Salvador, Christmas Tree of Butterflies. 1959, Hallmark Art Collection
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