Christmas Music 2011 #4: Libera

As the year progressed into summer I started thinking about Christmas music and wondered what new music would come out this year.  I was thinking which group I would love to see a Christmas album from and it was Libera!  Surprisingly it happened and I have been enjoying the album tremendously.  The only other album that had a chance to be a runner up was one by William Joseph that his web site said would be coming out this year, but alas it did not show up.  So Libera wins by default.  I will put a couple of the songs I enjoyed below, but know that the whole album is great. 

Carol of the Bells by Libera-- this video shows them singing in a forest.

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night by Libera--This video shows the group singing.

In Dulci Jubilo and Jubilate Deo by Libera--Video shows Nativity and other Christmas scenes.

Hope you have enjoyed their music and my four submissions of fine Christmas music this year.  Merry Christmas!

Christmas Music 2011 #3: Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Surely some of the best Christmas music, especially in recent years, has been sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  Over the last several years, since they have been doing a yearly Christmas concert with solo singing luminaries like Sissel, Natalie Cole and most recently David Archuleta, they have been putting out fantastic Christmas music.  This year as they prepared for their yearly Christmas special on PBS they were told that they are PBS's number one Holiday show.  In addition to the choir and guest singers they perform their Christmas concert with The Orchestra at Temple Square and the Bell Choir at Temple Square.  All together making a free concert that so many people want to attend that the tickets are given out in random drawings.

I had a friend who told me that he had requested tickets and was prepared to fly to Utah to attend the concert if he was lucky enough to get a ticket for him and his wife. 

A few years ago Mannheim Steamrollers were the Christmas music of choice for just about everywhere.  I really enjoy their music both Christmas and otherwise.  But in recent years they have been unsuccessful at coming out with anything new to enhance their great body of Christmas music.  Actually no one has been able to come  with much to replace them until the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has stepped into that void.  Now year after year the MTC as I call it has put out excellent Christmas music and a Christmas spectacle that is unmatched on T.V. and which comes out of DVD the following year.  Click here to read an articl that give more information about the choir.

The song I have been enjoying most of all from the Mormon Tabernacle choir is this one:

Carol to the King: Mormon Tabernacle Choir

There are plenty other great ones as well and I'll add a couple below.  Hope you enjoy the Christmas music!

Hark the Herald Angels Sing by Sissel and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Hallelujah Chorus by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Ring, Christmas Bells by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Christmas Music 2011 #2 Eclipse

Another new Christmas album that came out this year is by A fantastic Accappella group that I have been enjoying for a few years.  This is their second Christmas album and sixth album overall, it is called "It's Christmas Time"  The band is made up of six guys:

Paul Hansen

Kevin Jones

Jake Despain

James Case

Dan Kartchtner

Shayne Taylor

 They have been singing together for about ten years and really have a great sound.  They started singing together when they were students at Utah State University and have had a couple changes in personnel since.  The members of the group are almost all return missionaries for the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, having served from Bangkok Thailand to Vancouver Canada.  Most are married with children and all love to sing having long histories of singing individually and in groups.

 Here is a video with a very quick summary of the songs on the new Christmas album. It is only a minute long:

Here is a full version of one of their songs from the Christmas Album
Do You Hear What I Hear by Eclipse.

This last video is a promo video that has a sampling of several of their songs both Christmas and otherwise.  It is fun to get an eight minute smattering of the various types of music that they sing. 

Hope you enjoy their music as much as I do!

Christmas music 2011 #1: Matthew West

I was surprised to find a really great Christmas album from an artist I was only minimally familiar with.  I had run across one of his songs a while back that I included with one of my Manly Man Trainings that you can view by clicking here.  From that little exposure I knew he was a Christian song writer and singer but I didn't really pay any more attention than that one song. 

For me Christmas music time starts early and I start looking around for good new Christmas Music coming out around the end of September.  Matthew West's album: The Heart of Christmas, was one of the early entries, so I listened and was impressed and I downloaded the album.  I have listened to it quite a bit this season and am more impressed the more I listen. 

Matthew West was really excited about baseball when he was a child.  He played baseball through High School where he hoped to get a baseball scholarship to a university.  Instead he ended up with a music scholarship to Millikin University in Illinois.  After graduation he put out three independent albums before signing a contract with a studio to produce future albums.  Also after graduation he was offered a deal to write songs and he has written some songs for famous singers. 

In 2002 he forgot his keys and was locked out of his house.  In his effort to break into his house he ended up cutting his left arm severely and blacked out.  He awoke to Spanish speaking construction workers praying over him.  He was taken to the hospital and told his chances were slim that he would regain full use of his arm.  However, he did indeed regain full use and continues playing the guitar and singing. 

In 2007 Matthew started having some difficulties with his voice that soon required surgery to repair.  Once again his career was threatened and it was unknown if he would be able to get back to singing.  Following the surgery he was prescribed a two month period of no speaking.  Fortunately he was able to recover and resume his singing career.  During that time a documentary was made of his situation entitled "Nothing to Say".  Not surprisingly his next album was called, "Something to Say".

Matthew West has been married going on ten years and has two daughters.  Being a family man and a person who has gone through difficulties in life may give him good perspective as he continues to write and sing that are able to touch people and change their lives. 

His Christmas album: The Heart of Christmas, came out this year and has a few traditional songs done well.  The real strength of the album is the Christmas songs he has written that will be new ones that we will enjoy years into the future.  Below I have put the videos from three of them.  Enjoy!

Day After Christmas by Matthew West

Give This Christmas Away by Matthew West

One Last Christmas by Matthew West

Monday Music #18: Chris Field: Ave Maria

Chris Field is a musician that is known for writing movie trailer music.  If you are unfamiliar with this genre you may want to go to here to learn more.  He has written trailer music for a lot of successful films including Yogi Bear, Nanny McPhee Returns, Twilight, Valkyrie, War of the Worlds, X-Men, Black Hawk Down and Harry Potter. And I left more than twice that many movies out, so he has done a lot of trailer music.  This is his first album.  Chris himself refers to his own music as having "a calmer uplifting feeling". 

Chris recently had a studio built into his home where he now does much of his music on computer.  He said he started learning how to make music on the computer about 8 years ago.  He says,"I was told as a kid by a teacher that there is never an end to learning music. It's true. I just keep on trying and discovering new ways to do things."

The album, entitled Subconscious, is described in these words on his own website: "Sub-Conscious is a neo-classical groove, with ambient and cinematic styles."  That is music talk for 'it is very cool sounding music'. Ha! 

Most of us have heard of the song Ave Maria and are familiar with it.  Nowadays it gets played a lot at Christmas time and is considered a very religious song to those from the Catholic church.  Since it has been associated with Christmas it has been been given a lot of different versions, as much of our Christmas music is nowadays, in a variety of music genres.  This version is very unique and in some ways becomes almost unrecognizable from the original.  It may well have you thinking differently about this song than ever before.  And if you are unfamiliar with this song, this version serves as a good introduction to electronic music.

Chris Field: Ave Maria (The video shows only the album cover throughout)

The rest of the album is quite enjoyable as well.  If you like this song you may enjoy the others on the album.  Enjoy!

TIME after TIME after TIME marches leming like into the past or future?

I have heard of 'fast' time and 'slow' time.  It was explained to me by comparing when you are doing something you love like reading or contentedly listening to music (speaking for myself) which time goes by fast.  For others it might be watching movies or playing video games, watching sporting events or building and creating.  Slow time connected the best with me when I thought of organized wrestling.  There are three periods, each three minutes each.  In the midst of that wrestling with muscles straining against another wrestler time goes very slow it seems, especially in that third period.  

So here it is already four days after Christmas all fast time because it has been so enjoyable.  Between the fun and business of Christmas and the days following also filled with plenty to do it seems that time has passed by quickly.  This time of year I take off from work as much as possible to be home with my family (kids and wife off from school and girls home from college) to talk, play games (which this year was cribbage), after Christmas shopping and this year we replaced our traditional Christmas party with a Christmas open house.  It fit our schedule best to do it after Christmas rather than before.  We used the last half hour of the open house to sing Christmas songs and hymns maybe for the last time this season.

It is always lots of fun to have family and friends to visit.  The Hintons came for the open house which we enjoyed and spent a long time talking even after the singing.  Lori and Brendon came as well and brought some really yummy chicken salad mini sandwiches which I enjoyed many of.

It is a great time of year to put more thought and effort into our family and friends and to me that is what Christmas is all about.  We celebrate the coming of our Savior who taught us the importance of our friends and families.  I'm grateful for all those who are a part of our extended associates.  I recognize how much they mean in my life and am appreciative for them. 

As time goes by it of course becomes our past but doesn't it also greatly influence our future.  How we use our time now helps develop us and shape our future choices so that it not only gives us strength and comfort, or their opposites, from the past but begins the process of laying out and preparing our future.  So time does seem to march both to the past and the future at once.  A paradox?  An oddity?  A reality.

Christmas Tradition part 5: Caroling

Tonight we carried on with another of our Christmas Traditions, that of going caroling.  We made a few minor changes to our tradition tonight.  For one we cut down on the number of homes we went caroling to.  We had noticed over the years that it begins to get a little stressful when you are running across town to 15 or 20 homes to sing to people and give them some goodies.  We weren't doing this for stress so thought that reducing the number would help.  It did. 

Secondly with the added time it allowed us to be a little more flexible.  That is when it crossed our mind to sing to someone else nearby one of the families we had planned to sing to we had the time and were able to do so. 

We also invited more folks to sing with us and we enjoyed having the added numbers and got to do something fun with our friends as well.  We sang to a number of folks that we hadn't seen in a while and they seemed to appreciate the singing.  We have enjoyed singing over the years to friends and letting them know that we still remember them and care despite the fact that our busy lives might have made it so we don't see them as often as we once did. 

Tonight one family had told us in advance that they wanted to have us in for some warm apple cider and some goodies so we went to their home last and they had some great cookies, cider and crackers and dip.  There were eleven of us and we even sounded pretty good.  One of our company enjoyed the time away from her family with one of her children since over the last few months with her husband deployed she has spent her days with her four young children and enjoyed being with adults that didn't require her to change their diapers. 

Our family has always loved singing together thanks to my wife's great music skills and we have had this tradition for many years where we would share our modest abilities with other's to help them feel the meaning of Christmas and the fun of the music.  Now we are including more of our friends to sing with us which makes it even more fun all around for more of us. 

Christmas Tradition Part 4: Temple Lights

One of our big traditions that typically takes about a day is going to Washington DC to see the lights on the Washington DC temple.  This year they said there were a half a million lights.  It is always beautiful and something that helps to bring the true meaning of Christmas (remembering the birth of our Savior) into our thoughts as we view the temple with all the various colored Christmas lights.  They said that the lights start getting wrapped around the trees in August in preparation for Christmas and takes hundreds of volunteers.  Wow!




Most years we go up as a family and spend the evening and day in DC with seeing the temple lights as the focal point.  This year however we went up the day before and spent the night at a hotel and added a few other things and then went to the Temple lights in the evening on Tuesday.  The ward was having a "temple lights" day too, so we got to see several folks from the ward that were there as well. 

Seeing so many Christmas lights has always been fun and it seems reasonable that there would be such great beauty and excitement over the birth of Christ at the temple where the whole point is about Christ.

At the temple visitors center they always have a number of exhibits which includes creche sets from around the world.  We always enjoy looking at those as well.  This year they had one from Thailand!  This is the first nativity made in Thailand that I had ever seen.  Being a Buddhist country I wondered if there was someone who made them there.  This set had some great cultural indicators that really made it enjoyable and distinctly Thai..   

They also have Christmas concerts in the visitors center and we listened to Sandra Turley sing a few Christmas songs.   



She sang a great song in a broadway tradition called Christmas Lullaby from Songs for a New World which was a song about women being like Mary which was very enjoyable.  Here are the lyrics of the song:

I'll never have the power to control the land
Or conquer half the world
Or claim the sun
I'll never be the kind who simply waves her hand
And has a million people do
The things I wish I'd done

But in the eyes of Heaven
My place is assured
I carry with me heaven's grand design
Gloria, glory, I will sing the name of the Lord
And He will make me shine

And I will be like Mother Mary
With a blessing in my soul
And I will give the world my eyes
So they can see
And I will be like Mother Mary
With a blessing in my soul
And the future of the world inside of me

In the eyes of Heaven
My place is assured
I carry with me heaven's grand design
Gloria, glory I will sing the name of the Lord
And He will make me shine

And I will be like Mother Mary
With a blessing in my soul
And I will give the world my eyes
So they can see
And I will be like Mother Mary
With a blessing in my soul
And the future of the world inside of me

And I will be like Mother Mary
With the power in my veins
To believe in all the things
I've yet to be
And I will be like Mother Mary
And I'll suffer any pains
For the future of the world
For the future of the world
Inside of me...

If you are like me and have never heard of this before and would like to listen to a version of it on youtube go here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywFNUYJ5-g

It was a great night and we had an enjoyable time.  Naturally we missed having our oldest daughter Jaime and Mike with us but we did have Megan, Hilary, Haleigh, Jeremy and Matt with Lisa and I (a full van I might add).  It was fun to share this tradition with our friends this time as well. 

I love our traditions that have helped us build a family with many great memories. 

New version of an old standard Christmas song 1

This year I ran across a very nice Christmas album by Angels of Venice.  Angels of Venice is a group playing classically influenced harp strong music, sometimes with vocals sometimes without.  I have enjoyed their music for a couple years but was excited to find a Christmas album.  So my first award for a "New Version of an Old Standard Christmas Song" is for Carol of the Bells Vocal version on their Sanctus Album.  Here is the Youtube link so you can listen to it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_migFvnzoY

I really enjoy the album as a whole but this one is my favorite.  Enjoy!

New Christmas Music favorites 1

I am a lover of Christmas music!  Every year I am checking out the new music and finding music I didn't know existed from years past and finding things that I particularly like.  I have two categories: new renditions of Christmas classics and new Christmas songs that I haven't heard before.

To start things off my favorite new Christmas song I haven't heard before is "Love Story" by Naturally 7 an acappella group.  You can listen to it here:

http://new.music.yahoo.com/naturally-7/albums/christmas-its-a-love-story--46102914

Be sure to pick the one titled "Love Story" and listen close it has a good message.  Enjoy!

Surprise reminder of Christ

This is an awesome video. It brought tears to my eyes as I imagined what it would be like to have been there. What a surprise and a reminder of what is important this time of year. And to watch the people enjoy it and then participate in the singing. Awesome. Take a look.

Christmas Tradition part 1: Decorating the Tree

Last night we did some of our Christmas traditions.  We decorated the green tree.  You see in recent years we have begun to have two tress to decorate. 

The white tree has the homemade beaded balls that my mother made about 45 years ago when I was a little child.  I have memories of her making them with her friend but to be honest I can't tell if they are real memories or ones that have been put in because she has told me about it so many times.  In addition we put the family photo ornaments on the white tree.  Each year since the girls were born we have put a picture of them from that year in an ornament and hung them on the tree.  Even at the beginning of having children I realized that the day would come when there pictures would be needed to remind me of so many special years as a father.  Since our girls are 16 and older that means we have a lot of photo ornaments.  This year I put that tree up and decorated it mostly by myself a week ago.  I enjoyed looking at all those ornaments and sorting through memories as the girls were growing up.  This year for Jaime's ornament it now has her with her husband.  As I told the girls as they have grown up, we had the daughters and they got to choose the sons.  So I encouraged them to choose wisely.  Jaime did.  The white tree has a nativity scene under it that Lisa gave me for a present a few years ago, to help us remember the real thing we are celebrating at Christmas.  This white tree is primarily for Lisa and I to enjoy fond memories of the girls.  Oh the girls often try to put some of their less desired pictures in the back of the tree but overall it works out well. 

The green tree is connected with another tradition.  Lisa brought a tradition from her family that the parents gave the kids a new ornament each year and then when they got married and left home they took their ornaments with them.  We try to have the ornament for that year have some connection with something they did during the year.  This year for the first time there are lots of ornaments missing because Jaime got married and we boxed those up and sent them to her so she could have the beginnings of ornaments for her first tree with Mike.  I wonder how that is going?  (by the way we found a couple ornaments we missed and will have to send them later). Still we managed to have tons of ornaments and had to become picky at the end as to which ones we put on the tree.  Then after we were done I gave them their new ornaments for the year.  This year Megan received a glass nativity ornament since she has served the last year and a half as a missionary for Christ.  Hilary's ornament I can't mention since she isn't home to receive it yet.  Haleigh's ornament was an angel holding a child symbolizing her class in high school on child care that she enjoys.  Jaime and Mike's ornament was two frogs dangling their feet over a fence and of course in love.  If they would just kiss then they wouldn't remain frogs?  I had forgotten that part of the tradition was playing the Mannheim Steemroller DVD as we do this.  Haleigh brought that to my attention and it was quickly rectified with rousing Christmas music. 

But this year things were a little different because Lisa wasn't with us as we decorated the tree.  She is in MN caring for her mother and concerned about her Dad.  Fortunately she called as we were finishing up and it was a little bit like she was there with us. 

The piece de resistance was mostly overlooked except by Megan who had the honor this year of putting our tree topper on.  We have two small stuffed bear ornaments that we have always put on our tree.  One of those bears was to be Dallas Jr.'s first ornament about 25 years ago but he didn't survive birth so now you could say that he is the angel we like to remember at the top of our tree. 

So you see that our family has traditions intertwined through our family, especially at Christmas.  Sometimes as I grow older I forget some of the traditions but am glad they have meant enough to our children that they remind me and we keep them going.  Christmas has always been a spiritual and magical time in our family and I hope that it will continue to be that way maybe especially now that our first daughter won't be home for Christmas this year as she forges her new family and starts their own traditions.  I wonder how many will come from our family to get mixed with Mike's family traditions?