Original arrangements of traditional Christmas melodies, with a focus on counterpoint. Digitally rendered, with care.

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Q&A With Rudi


Who are you trying to reach with this album?

Anyone who enjoys old Christmas tunes and would like to hear them in new arrangements. I also hope some of these pieces will appeal to listeners who share my passion for counterpoint, no matter the season.


What is counterpoint?

Most music has lots of "stuff" going on at any given moment, but the bulk of that stuff is usually background material that supports one tune in the foreground. In listening to a pop song, for example, you might direct your attention to what the guitarist is doing, or the drummer, or the bass player, but ultimately your attention is going to gravitate to the singer and the main melody. Some music, however, is constructed so there are two or more tunes you can hear at any given time, and they're each interesting enough to hold your attention -- that's counterpoint. You can focus on one tune, or on another tune being played simultaneously, or you can concentrate on how these two tunes interact, trying to perceive them both at once. There's less of a distinction between foreground and background -- anything can become the foreground if you focus on it. You need to be active as a listener to appreciate counterpoint, but the reward is great because there's so much to hear, and every time you listen you'll notice something different. Many of the arrangements here emphasize counterpoint -- my main effort as a composer has been to write the new bass lines and inner voices that you'll hear together with the familiar carol tune, and my challenge has been to do it in a way where the carol tune is still clear and easy to follow, and hopefully sounds even better in the presence of its new companions. In many cases I stick to two contrapuntal parts (In Dulci Jubilo, I Saw Three Ships, O Holy Night, Once In Royal David's City) but there are some places in the album where I move into three parts (Joy To The World, O Tannenbaum, Little Drummer Boy).


Is the album all about counterpoint?

No, there are also some arrangements here that focus on harmonic exploration and don't feature counterpoint at all (Silent Night, It Came Upon The Midnight Clear). In this style, groups of notes are used to support the tune and bring out shades of feeling, without themselves forming melodies that could stand on equal footing with the main tune. My taste in harmony tends toward the piquant, and some listeners who are used to more standard harmonizations of these tunes might find my versions a bit dissonant at first, but everything is firmly tonal -- in fact, all of my more elaborate harmonizations began as variations on plain-and-simple versions that I do as a first step in working on each piece. Greensleeves is one tune in the album that I handled in both ways: there's a version in two-voice counterpoint and another version featuring chromatic harmony.


What do you mean by arrangement?

In my mind there's no firm distinction between arranging and composing, except that in arranging you start with an existing tune.
In working on the pieces here, I began with only the raw tune in mind and kept it in its simplest, unaltered form, writing new music to go along with it. I took the old material -- the tune -- and without changing it, I placed it in new company. But this new company is not really meant to sound "new" stylistically -- I wrote whatever I felt complemented the tune. The word "arrangement" sometimes means varying or elaborating the original tune, and developing it into a full orchestration, but those aren't the directions I've gone -- my focus has been on writing counterpoint or chromatic harmony against the original tune and presenting it as an instrumental solo or as a very small ensemble.


How did you get started on this album?

I was working through The Jazz Harmony Book by pianist David Berkman. That's the latest in a steady stream of music theory books that I've acquired over the years. Really, I have so many music books I should probably call Amazon and see if they could use me as a distribution center. Only a few of these books have really "changed my life" though, and Berkman's is one that did. Berkman suggests that if you want to get good at harmony you should practice arranging carols and folk tunes, and with the book he includes his own demonstration of what can be done with Silent Night when you have a jazz palette at your disposal. I heard Berkman's Silent Night clip and thought "I want to do that." It was a little taste of the harmonic creativity that I remember from Bill Evans' resplendent version of Danny Boy. So I started writing my own versions of Silent Night, originally just as practice, but as I continued I realized I was creating some music that I wanted to hear again, and friends responded well to it, so I kept going. I completed my first Silent Night arrangement October 20, 2014 and worked pretty-much nonstop through November and into December.


Did your approach change at all as you worked on the album?

The arrangements that feature the more dissonant harmonies here are generally the ones I wrote earlier in the project, as I was exploring concepts from jazz harmony; the more consonant arrangements emphasizing counterpoint are generally the ones I wrote later on in the project, as I increasingly drew upon techniques from earlier in music history, which I had also studied earlier in my own musical journey.


Are you a fan of Christmas music?

I grew up in a non-religious family but we always celebrated Christmas. I have warm childhood memories of being with family around the Christmas tree and enjoying seasonal music in the background. As an adult though, I've sometimes found Christmas music grating, particularly the way it is overplayed in saccharin arrangements every year. I understand people who are averse to all holiday music. There's a danger that the music itself becomes associated with the superficiality and hyper-commercialization of the season. But I think at its core, the old carol repertoire, and much of the repertoire that came later in the 20th century, is great -- there's a reason why these tunes have endured. With every arrangement I’ve done, I started by hearing something in the tune that I really loved — a reason to work with it for hours on end — and while I’ve tried to give alternate, occasionally humorous perspectives on the tunes, my intention has never been to parody them but always to enjoy them as music. I can't say I ever expected I'd create a Christmas album, but I'm very happy to have done it.


How did you choose which tunes to include?

I spent months traveling to old European libraries to study original carol manuscripts. Well, no, basically I worked at home, looking over the list of traditional Christmas tunes on Wikipedia and sometimes listening to performances on YouTube to refresh my memory of the tunes and see which ones stuck in my mind. With a few exceptions I stuck with tunes that were written before 1900, often much earlier. I only worked with tunes that "caught" me. There were a bunch of tunes I had known since childhood (Silent Night, O Tannenbaum, Jingle Bells) and some I had only come to know later on record (Here We Come A-Wassailing) and others I noticed for the first time in working on this collection (Zu Bethlehem Geboren).


What is your favorite tune, independent of arrangement?

I think O Holy Night is one of the most stunningly beautiful tunes -- it's also one of the longer and more complicated ones. Alongside it I'd place In Dulci Jubilo, ravishing and deceptively simple.


Which arrangements are you happiest with?

I have different favorites for different reasons. I like the exuberance of I Saw Three Ships and how the simple tune is repeated with an increasingly complex bass line. In Little Drummer Boy I'm happy with how a third contrapuntal voice emerged, and also with the effect of timpani and toy piano. I'm proud of Carol Of The Bells where I took only the four-note bell motif and worked it into a canon that modulates through multiple keys. Shorter arrangements like Deck The Halls and The Twelfth Day of Christmas were fun to do from a humor standpoint. Basically, each tune became my obsession for the time I was working on it, so I can look back and say that every piece in the album has at one point been my favorite.


Were there any tunes you were reluctant to work with?

Jingle Bells is so overplayed every season that I wasn't sure I'd be able to stomach working with it: I knew this would involve listening to my drafts dozens of times, and hadn't I already suffered from overexposure to Jingle Bells just by living through a couple dozen winters? But when I started working with Jingle Bells my apprehension went away and, actually, I had lots of fun with it.


What is your background in music?

For a brief time in grade school I lugged a French horn (huge case on that thing) on the bus back and forth to school, and I used to create chaos with an out-of-tune piano in our basement. The first instrument I studied with passion was classical guitar, which I took up at 15, inspired by listening to Flamenco. Later in high school I recognized that my dream in life was to be a composer, so I took up private lessons with composer Stephen Siegel who first introduced me to the study of counterpoint. In college I took harmony courses, sat in on Ben Verdery's guitar workshops, and studied with guitarist Scott Sanchez. By the end of college I found myself on a different path, headed towards grad school in theoretical computer science, and I had become disconnected from my musical dreams. One of the first things I did after leaving grad school a few years later was to get a MIDI keyboard and a synth module and see if I could rekindle my efforts at composition, but the path was rocky -- I kept getting stuck. In my late twenties, as I worked in technology, I returned to guitar and took private lessons with lutenist Olav Chris Henriksen and virtuoso guitarist Jerome Mouffe. I became increasingly interested in improvisation, and had always been fascinated by Indian classical music, so I began studying South Indian (Carnatic) music with Prasanna and eventually North Indian (Hindustani) music with Amit Chatterjee, who became my primary teacher, and Warren Senders. In three years of study with classical vocalist Amy Dancz, starting in my late thirties, I not only overcame my longtime insecurity about my singing voice but actually visited each piece in Schubert's Winterreise cycle. I've also studied Persian setar with Nima Janmohammadi. And I've had a chance to learn through several online forums, including broadening my knowledge of tuning theory through the Xenharmonic Alliance group and exploring jazz improvisation through Gary Burton's Coursera course and a jazz study forum that emerged from it. And I recently joined my first singing group, which focuses on Renaissance madrigals.


How did you produce the sounds on the recording -- are you performing?

I notated all the music using the score-editing software Finale, and I worked with the software's playback system, Garritan, to generate the audio directly from the notation, after which I made adjustments in Audacity. Each individual note you hear on the album comes from a sample prepared from a recording of a real instrument played by an expert -- but those notes are not being played live as far as the album is concerned. In these clips you're hearing the work of humans who conceived these wonderful carols, the work of the human who created these arrangements (me), the work of the human who controlled the tools to get the renderings to come out well (also me), and the work of the humans who created the tools that allowed me to do this in the first place.


How do you feel about digitally rendered performances?

I grew up listening to the Switched-On Bach albums by Wendy Carlos, so I've long known that it's possible to create engaging performances using virtual instruments. However, I always thought it would would require a massive effort to get anything remotely decent-sounding, including playing each line on a MIDI keyboard to gather live timing and dynamics, and then spending a huge amount of time editing. In working on this album I was surprised that I could obtain performances I enjoyed listening to using software playback with some finessing but not a ton of fuss. The software tools I'm using are sophisticated systems that have been developed over many years. Still, as a fan of physical, acoustic instruments and live performance, I thought it was going to be nearly impossible to please my ear. Many of the sounds that came out as I worked were positively atrocious, that's true, and I left those out of the album! There were also things that sounded quite good right off the bat, without much of my intervention in the rendering process. I think there are a few reasons for whatever successes you find in the renderings, aside from the quality of the tools I'm using. First of all, I paid close attention to timbre choices and registration, trying to find the best sound combinations for each particular piece. I've chosen timbres that sounded realistic to me -- often those with quick attack and no vibrato -- avoiding the complexity of continuous pitched instruments like violins or flutes, except for a few specific places in the album where it worked (O Little Town Of Bethlehem, Es Ist Ein Ros). Second, I've always felt there are some kinds of composition that come alive as long as they're given an accurate performance, whereas other kinds of composition demand the shaping that only a live performer can do. That's to say some musical scores are "explicit" while others are "implicit" and require a performer to unlock their meaning. I think that when there is significant contrapuntal complexity and rhythmic play in the score, this material can be offered to the listener in a fairly unmediated way and it can still be engaging.


Do you want to hear live performances of these pieces?

Of course. I think of the album as a first step on a journey with these pieces, and I hope that journey leads to a follow-up that could feature live performances. That said, I've only offered tracks here that bring me pleasure as a listener, so if something is in the album, that means I already like enough about how the digital rendering sounds to want to hear it many times. As for why I didn't perform myself, quite honestly my keyboard skills aren't up to the task. Some of the lines could work on guitar, my main instrument, but hey, I promised myself I'd get the thing done in time for Christmas 2014 and I needed the two months I had available to write the music.


What will you do with proceeds from the album?

I'd love to be able to use whatever I make from the album to pay other musicians to help me along in my musical path -- that includes taking lessons from musicians I admire and possibly supporting musicians to do live performances of some of my work. I'd also like to cover some of my expenses in producing the album so I can get to work on another one.


What other Christmas music do you like?

My longtime favorite Christmas album is A Medieval Christmas by the early-music group Pro Cantione Antiqua, but that's an earlier repertoire than what I've addressed here. I really like the album All Hayle To The Days by a group called Harper's Hamper, available on Magnatune -- it has one of my favorite versions of Here We Come A-Wassailing. For large scale works I can't get enough of the Bach Christmas Oratorio -- I've been listening to the Harnoncourt version for years. And of course I love Messiah and pretty much any oratorio Handel ever wrote. In working on this album I gained some new favorites: I really like Songs for Christmas by Sufjan Stevens, available on Bandcamp, and his version of Once In Royal David's City is what got the tune caught in my mind. And in years of listening to choral music I had somehow missed out entirely on the U.S. Army Band Chorus -- what a wonderful chorus! They have some great a capella carol recordings that don't seem to be out in an album right now, but you can find free tracks attached to several Wikipedia entries, like a beautiful rendering of Hark The Herald Angels Sing.


How long does each piece take to write?

Somewhere between 1 and 3 days of intense effort usually gets me to a draft I'm happy with. (It would take longer if I were working with extended forms or doing more elaborate orchestrations.) But the hours add up after that as I refine the scores and prepare the sound files.


What is your composition process like?

I start with the raw tune and try to write the simplest bass line I can, using the longest note durations that work. Then I begin elaborating and refining the bass line -- this is the most important step. By making subtle changes in the bass line, I try to get the tune to "sing." Every time, as I work on the bass line I feel like I cross a magical threshold, where the tune and bass line start to jump alive, to be in conversation. Once I'm happy with the skeletal bass line, I'll either use it as a basis for doing a vertically-oriented harmonization or I'll take it as an outline for developing a counter-melody. In the early stages of work I usually have a clear analytical sense of what I'm trying to do -- that's to say I'm trying to apply the principles of harmony and counterpoint in very specific ways and I could explain what I'm doing if I had to -- but after working for some time with each piece I usually reach a point where I stop thinking and rely on my inner sense of what sounds good.


What is it like to write counterpoint?

When you first start studying counterpoint the whole subject seems like it's nothing but rules, prohibitions. Open a textbook and it says "You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't do that, and by the way, you also can't do that!" The range of what you CAN do seems so narrow that you wonder how any interesting music could ever come of it, and yet the music is there to hear, in Bach, Handel, Purcell, Josquin, Obrecht, Ockeghem, Machaut, Stravinsky, Shostakovich. I struggled with counterpoint in my first exposure as a teenager -- the guidance of an excellent teacher notwithstanding -- and while I retained my fascination with music theory and my passion for counterpoint as a listener, I basically gave up on writing it. These days it doesn't seem as impossibly hard as it used to, though it's still demanding -- it helps to have mulled things over for twenty years or so. If I were guiding someone else through it, I think I could offer a much more direct path than the one I followed.


Did you have any specific stylistic or artistic goals in your approach to arranging these tunes?

My goal was to expose the essence of the tune as I hear it. This involved finding a style that seemed appropriate to each tune (so, for example, God Rest Ye has a rhythmically elaborate contrapuntal line that pushes and pulls against the steady quarter notes of the tune, while Once In Royal David's City has a simpler contrapuntal line that tries not to get in the tune's way). I wasn't trying to put my "stamp" on the arrangements as much as I wanted to do the best I could to bring each tune to life.


Are you aiming for sparsity?

As a listener I love solos and small ensembles, and I love music where every note counts, and I try to create music that I'll enjoy as a listener. So, yes. But music that's sparse in terms of instrumentation, texture, and number of notes, might not be sparse in other ways. I've always thought that if you take a good tune by itself, even if it seems simple harmonically, you can find endless interest there as you start noticing subtle details, the relation between its rhythm and melodic shape, the way the phrases connect and contrast. Now combine a good tune with a good counter-melody, and there's an explosion of interactions that start taking place between the two. If the music is well constructed you don't "need" anything more. Composers who work in a contrapuntal style often write in three or more voices and save two-voice passages as interludes, but when I listen to the great works of Renaissance polyphony, for example, I always find myself looking forward to those two-voice passages: the simpler texture offers enough "space" that I might actually hear more than I'd be able to hear in a denser texture.


Why do you always put the tune on top and your countermelody on the bottom?

Actually, in Carol Of The Bells the tune constantly switches between the top and bottom voices, so there's an exception. But there are specific reasons why I kept the tune on the top in all the other cases here. First, I wanted to give my own interpretation of each tune while maintaining a sense that you're still hearing the tune you know. Since the top line is usually what stands out most, it's a bit more radical to place a new melody above a tune than to place a new bass line below it. Second, it often turns out to be harder to pull off. One can always write a good bass line to support a good tune, but not every good tune can function as a compelling bass line (I'm not sure how to explain this an a precise way, but I'll think on it). Some listeners have asked whether I could just swap the top and bottom parts after the fact. Usually that doesn't work. If I've written a bass line for a tune, I can't just move it the top and use it as a soprano voice -- it won't sound good. This kind of swapping only works if you've written the countermelody following specific restrictions that make it "invertible."


How did you choose the title?

My initial requirements for the title were that it should have the word "Christmas" in it, as well as my name, so I guess you could say I found the title by negating my initial requirements.


What's the deal with the cover art?

I closed my eyes and saw a note superimposed over a Christmas tree. That became the basis of the design. I put it together using the open-source graphics software Inkscape. The star came very close to being edited out, but a friend convinced me to keep it. The red around the border ended up there after many failed attempts to put red in other places.


Are you done arranging carols?

No, in fact I'm taking requests for additional carols to add to the album as bonus tracks. And as a follow-up album, I'd like to create some arrangements that I could perform myself with voice and guitar.


What is your next musical project aside from Christmas music?

I'd like to write some fugues.