Holiday Harmonies

Some people get aggravated by all the holiday music blaring in the stores this time of year. Personally, I don't mind it, I generally like it in fact, except I only wish they would get the harmonies right.

The mall at Columbus Circle has pumped in orchestrated versions of classic Christmas songs like "Come All Ye Faithful" and "The First Noel", and when I initially recognize the tunes I feel happy and start to follow along in my head. But then there's this grating unpleasantness, like someone replaced one of the violins with a car horn that only plays the theme from "The Godfather" -- something just doesn't belong, like vanilla ice cream on pizza, and it's the bass lines... they are all wrong! It's like nobody knows or understands basic contrapuntal voice-leading anymore. What's happening to our great musical tradition?

Western music (i.e. music descending from the European musical tradition) is unique in all the world for its use of polyphonic harmony and contrapuntal voice leading, and that's what makes it so exceedingly great, in my opinion. But you'd never know it from the noise emanating from malls and stores. Maybe it is a dying art. Now people toss in any schlocky harmony with zero thought for writing a decent or even semi-logical bass line, and no one seems to care or notice.

The same holds true for most of the "holiday choir" arrangements I hear at the various live performances in lobbies and public spaces. Plenty of high quality arrangements have been written for these tunes, but somehow these incompetent choir masters don't choose them. Sometimes they don't even bother with any bass or inner lines at all, and they just sing the tune in unison without harmonization. It's as if to them the bass and middle lines are just sound effects. I'd rather hear it sans-harmony than with the wrong harmony, though.

These are fine tunes that are being butchered, and it saddens and frustrates me because new ears unaccustomed to anything else might never realize what they've missed, and I feel that my own ears are being poisoned by hearing the wrong thing over and over, it dulls your mind over time. People are missing the opportunity to learn the grammar of this fine musical language, and worse still, they are actively being taught bad grammar.

Now I'm not a grammar snob in most contexts... I fully believe in the evolution of languages, and part of that natural evolution is that words and syntaxes must change. But in this case the grammar is not being replaced by anything better, it is simply being extinguished. And with it all the richness of expression afforded uniquely by the polyphonic Western musical tradition is dying too.

The irony is that the Columbus Circle mall is where Jazz at Lincoln Center is located, intended to be a cornerstone of the New York "high art" music scene. Why can't they get one of those fine musicians to come and rewrite the garbage playing in the commons downstairs?