Given that I’m coming up with a post a day during Advent, I was going to put my Friday Fun on hiatus… but on reflection, that didn’t sound like much fun at all, so instead, I’m going to devote Fridays in Advent to interpretations of carols that are just plain weird.\u00a0 And what could be weirder than Sting singing medieval Advent Carols?<\/p>\n
[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tJbVj1gOIRc&w=420&h=315]Answer: Sting singing weird middle-eastern interpretations of medieval Advent Carols, that’s what.\u00a0 And do you know what’s really scary about this?\u00a0 He’s done<\/a> a whole<\/a> *bunch<\/a>* of them<\/a>.<\/p>\n I have to admit, I don’t like Sting’s interpretation at all – the middle-eastern\u00a0 instrumentation and style is actually really interesting, but his singing drives me right up the wall.\u00a0 But I somehow couldn’t let this discovery go by without sharing it, especially not now that I’ve been sitting here giggling and wincing at the awfulness of these songs for the last half hour.\u00a0 (Andrew, who has sitting next to me and being appalled did point out that it was unreasonable for me to sit here saying\u00a0 ‘make them stop’ when I am in fact the one in control of the mouse.\u00a0 He also says that they are both interesting and terrible and should be better than they are.\u00a0 Which is pretty much my critique, too, though I think he likes Sting more than I do.<\/p>\n Anyway, having inflicted that on you, I feel morally obliged to provide you with a saner version of that particular piece of music.\u00a0 So here, have a version by Chanticleer<\/a>, so you can hear what people normally do with those notes and words.\u00a0 And, just for variety, here’s a particularly beautiful modern setting of the words by Bonnie Miksch<\/a> that starts with plainchant winding around itself in canon, and then gets choral.\u00a0 Stunning, and beautifully sung.<\/p>\n Don’t you wish I’d found that before I found Sting?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Given that I’m coming up with a post a day during Advent, I was going to put my Friday Fun on hiatus… but on reflection, that didn’t sound like much fun at all, so instead, I’m going to devote Fridays in Advent to interpretations of carols that are just plain weird.\u00a0 And what could be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,80,102,108,135,670,712,766],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-advent","tag-bonnie-miksch","tag-carols","tag-chanticleer","tag-church-music","tag-sting","tag-there-is-no-rose","tag-what-was-he-thinking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}