A wizened old choral leader once told me, “If you’re in the choir business, you’re in the Christmas business!”. Meaning, of course, that Christmas music is a major money maker for singing organizations. He was/is right. In North America, there is a strong association between the Christmas Holiday season and the singing arts. The practical application of this observation is that, in December, people who don’t normally go to choir concerts will go to choir concerts in droves.
For years, I’ve written and toiled in cheerful ignorance of this phenomenon and it’s only now that I’ve finally pitched my contribution of repertoire appropriate for a Christmas concert:
A La Puerta Del Cielo is based off of a text that has its origins as a 16th century Spanish carol. Today, it’s commonly sung in Mexico as a children’s lullaby.
At first glance, the funereal key of my setting seems to run perilously perpendicular to the intention of the text (The characteristic of the piece is a brooding F minor). But we are still telling a piece of the nativity story: The world is troubled and a child born into it has the ability to change its trajectory to one lest sorrowful; the hero of the story is the watchful eyes and guiding hands that raise them, and the sonority that concludes the piece is a call out to the future self of a child destined to leave a mark on the world.
So it’s not exactly, “Jingle Bell Rock”…. not really.
Chris Sivak | Composer 