Music

Bei Mir Bistu Shein Though Time

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From Wiki:

“Bei Mir Bistu Shein” (Yiddish: בײַ מיר ביסטו שיין”Ž, “To Me You’re Beautiful”) is a popular Yiddish song composed by Jacob Jacobs (lyricist) and Sholom Secunda (composer) for a 1932 Yiddish comedy musical, I Would If I Could (in Yiddish, Men Ken Lebn Nor Men Lost Nisht, “You could live, but they don’t let you”), which closed after one season at the Parkway Theatre in Brooklyn, New York City. The score for the song transcribed the Yiddish title as “Bay mir bistu sheyn”. The original Yiddish version of the song (in C minor) is a dialogue between two lovers.

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Christmas 2015

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Newgrange  is  an ancient structure in Ireland so constructed that the sun, at the exact time of the winter solstice, shines directly down a long corridor and illuminates the inner chamber. More about Newgrange  here  and  here.

Grim  has an Arthurian passage about the Solstice.

Don Sensing has thoughts astronomical, historical, and theological about  the Star of Bethlehem.

Vienna Boys Choir, from Maggie’s Farm

Lappland in pictures…link came from the great and much-mourned  Neptunus Lex

Snowflakes and snow crystals, from Cal Tech. Lots of great photos

A Romanian Christmas carol, from The Assistant Village Idiot

In the bleak midwinter, from King’s College Cambridge

Rick Darby  has some thoughts on the season. More  here.

A Christmas reading from  Thomas Pynchon.

The  first radio broadcast of voice and music  took place on Christmas Eve, 1906.  (although there is debate about the historical veracity of this story)

An air traffic control version of  The Night Before Christmas.

Ice sculptures  from the St Paul winter carnival

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, sung by  Enya

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Jeff Sypeck  on a winter garden

Mona Charen, who is Jewish, wonders  what’s going on with the Christians?

Songs of 2015

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I’ve heard quite a few good new songs this year…not all “new” in the sense of being just-released, but at least new to me.  Some of them…

Della Mae  is an all-female bluegrass-oriented group.  Their songs include Hounds  (inspired by Francis Thompson’s poem ‘The Hound of Heaven’),  Some Roads Lead On,  Heaven’s Gate, and  To Ohio.

Reflections from the beyond of an Irish immigrant who fought in both the American Civil War and at Little Big Horn:  Mick Ryan’s Lament, sung here by John Sheahan, Jane, & Shane.

From Tom Russell’s new album:  The Rose of Roscrae  and  When the Wolves No Longer Sing.  (I’ve written about some of Tom’s earlier work  here)

Laura Orshaw:  Guitar Man

I heard this sequence of songs on the radio while driving home one foggy night:

John Prine, Clay Pigeons

Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams,  Midnight Highway

Jason Isbell,  Hudson Commodore

Nanci Griffith,  Waiting on a Dark Eyed Girl   (can’t find Nanci’s version online, the link goes to one by Kevin Welch)