The Twelve Songs of Christmas (and two more for good measure)

The Twelve Songs of Christmas (and two more for good measure)

A Tintinnabulum Christmas of classical tunes, traditional carols and medleys

The Tintinnablum sound is certainly capable of being festive, so it was more or less inevitable that an album of traditional Christmas and holiday music would turn up, featuring melodic percussion interpretations of all our favorites. The sounds of the holidays lend themselves wonderfully to this kind of instrumentation.

Needless to say, the album features Carol of the Bells. How we could leave that out and still look at ourselves the in mirror is a bit beyond me. We've also learned that this kind of orchestration lends itself wonderfully to interlocking rhythms that toss the music from one player to another, and I've turned that loose in two medleys, one of three of our favorite carols, plus another that recombines those carols with an old and well-loved dance tune, Sir Roger de Coverly. The holidays have solemn and pensive times, and we offer a pensive set of variations on Greensleeves and a solemn arrangement of Wind through the Olive Trees. Mostly, however, we like to brighten up and enjoy ourselves at this time of year, and that's what the whole rest of this disk is about.

Let me wish you a merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and an a time of peace and joy with our music.

The Tintinnabulum Project

When I was a child, I woke up on Sunday mornings when the church a few hundred yards away started playing hymns on their carillon. When I was in school, our "Chorus" class would always sing Christmas carols in the last few weeks before that wonderful, wonderful time, Christmas vacation. As I grew up, I heard the marvelous melodic percussion of Milt Jackson and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

When I was in graduate school, I spent many happy hours during the course of one year learning to play and enjoy the fascinating and exotic melodic percussion of the Javanese gamelan ensemble, and listened intensely to recordings of the Balinese gamelan and the other melodic percussion ensembles that form part of the sounds of traditional Asian music.

Eventually the idea start to form in my mind, very slowly, that music for melodic percussion ensemble could be a rich and highly enjoyable way to explore and re-explore music from many sources: classical, jazz, pop, traditional. So I began working on compositions and arrangements that drew their whole nature from the world of melodic percussion, and eventually found a name for it.

I called it The Tintinnabulum Project. This album is a part of it. Enjoy!