Piano Albums
In December of 2010, while living on the 3rd floor of an old house on Jefferson Avenue in Duluth, MN, with the magical Lake Superior just in view over the rooftops, I recorded my first Christmas piano album, Christmas on the Northshore. My dad had just been diagnosed with the cancer that would claim his life a year and a half later, and I was in the middle of my Masters of Music program at the University of Minnesota Duluth. I sat down and recorded the album in a matter of days on my Yamaha Clavinova CVP-107. I had also just finished a NaNoWriMo that saw the completion of a fantasy novel many years in the making. I guess it was just a very creative period of life. While the album has many flaws, including some glaring clipping problems and a tendency to roll what feels like 90% of my chords, it is still a beloved project.
The opening Veni, Veni, Emmanuel gets the album off to a rocking start. The arrangement was used annually at my church as it lends itself well to a full worship band experience. The rest of the album is straightforward enough, until the final song (excepting the Postlude), Stille Nacht. To the musically untrained, something may just sound quite off. The melody is all there. The accompaniment sounds normal, but an uneasy feeling overwhelms from the outset. The gimmick was having the accompaniment separated from the melody by an entire tritone, or in an entirely different key – in fact as far apart as you could possibly get. With each successive verse, the melody and accompaniment merge a half step each towards each other, until they converge at the final verse into a cathartic resolution of a unified key.
I didn’t return to the “recording studio” of my Clavinova until 2016. This time, the new setting was Green Bay, WI. I was in the middle of my second year of medical school (everyone always asks how I ended up in medicine from music – the short version of the story is that God just kept opening doors, I had no idea that I would ever become a doctor). I found time between the long hours of studying to sit down and reconnect with my musical training. And so Christmas on the Bay was born.
Not wanting to break with a tried and true recipe, I started the album off with another rocking arrangement of a Christmas classic in E minor, this time going with God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. My favorite selection of the album is In the Bleak Midwinter/Going Home, a long form fusion of the Largo from Dvorak’s 9th Symphony with the less well known carol (which I had first fallen in love with after hearing Julie Andrews’ recording). The melodies are so similar that it was easy to effortlessly flow back and forth between the A and B themes. It begins and ends with the rich chords that bookend the Largo. It’s a wonderfully aimless meandering through some gorgeous melodies that sets up a satisfying conclusion to the album.
In 2020, I realized that I had recorded a Christmas album in every city I’d lived in since Duluth, and that time was running out on making a Christmas album as I was my final year of living in Appleton, Wisconsin. I certainly wasn’t about to break this newly minted, if entirely self-imposed tradition. So, in the middle of my final year of residency when, as my wife put, I actually wasn’t working 12+ hour days all the time, I decided to flesh out this website, write my advent liturgy, compose my annual Christmas carol card, make a surprise (even to myself!) Thanksgiving EP piano album, arrange my yearly Nutcracker piece, and in the final days before Christmas, I squeezed this in too: Christmas in the Valley. My deepest thanks to my dear wife for her utmost patience in putting up with all the time I spent on these projects this year, never once did she complain that I should have been relieving her from her 24 hour a day job of being a stay at home mom to two little boys, though it would have certainly been justified. And so the recording came in fits as time allowed, but I procrastinated on the three “Christmas Improvs” that have been on each album. I was really at a loss for what to do with them. I won’t deny that my creative juices were feeling a little empty at the end of this process. That’s when I realized I’d already come up with three original pieces this year in my Advent liturgy, and I could just incorporate them into the album. A convenient, if uninspired solution. Overall, I can definitely recognize that my technical chops have diminished as I’m not doing music full time like I was 10 years prior. But I think there’s maturity and less urgency in this album. It feels very comfortable with itself. That’s not to say there aren’t a few moments of intensity. But it just feels cozier. Hopefully, in this year where spending time with one another was especially challenging, it feels like maybe you invited me into your living room for a little spontaneous fireside performance.
MP3 Player on The New Carolers (with download links):
As a little bonus, here is that short little EP for Thanksgiving:
One Comment
Jim Denman
Matt, love this and thanks for sharing. God Bless brother….