Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The Christmas season always makes me think of music.
Not “Jingle Bells,” or “Frosty the Snowman,” but the sacred music that I grew up with in western Iowa and eastern Nebraska:
“O Holy Night,” “When Blossoms Flowered Mid the Snows,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Adeste Fideles,” “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella,” “What Child is This,” “Joy to the World,” and the most loved, “Silent Night,” to name a few.
To really get the full impact of choral music, and especially Christmas choral music, you need to hear it sung with all eight voices and an orchestra.
Doesn’t have to be a huge choir or orchestra, but you need all the voices and strings. Of course, you realize that this is the gospel according to Rube, so take it for what it’s worth.
On the other hand, I did sing in a choir that toured the U.S. for a number of years when I was a lad.
We learned the story of “Silent Night” when we were kids.
How the pastor of the church in the Austrian village of Oberndorf bei Salzburg needed a carol to be sung at Christmas eve midnight mass. Pastor Joseph Mohr had written a poem a few years ago and thought his friend and church choir master, Franz Gruber, could set the poem to music.
Since the church organ had been put out of commission due to flooding, Gruber composed the music for guitar accompaniment. Gruber wrote the music in just a few hours on Dec. 24.
And that’s how we got “Stille Nacht.”
All of us kids thought of the song as kind of a cowboy hymn because it had been written for a guitar.
During December, in the 1950s our choir toured widely in the Midwest where there were many German communities of varying sizes. Our Christmas program consisted of different songs sung in Latin as well as English. To close the program we did “Silent Night,” first in English and then in German.
I can still sing the German version (badly).
“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht
“Alles schläft; einsam wacht
“Nur das traute hochheilige Paar.
“Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar,
“Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!
“Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!”
It always brought the house down.
I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes after I think of “Joy to the world,” “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” pops into my mind.
Merry Christmas.
Rube Render is a former Clovis city commissioner and former chair of the Curry County Republican Party. Contact him:
