An art blast from the past

It's not often one receives a present from one's younger self for Christmas, but so it was this year: my mom found a nativity set I'd made out of clay (each piece dutifully inscribed “DB 2000”, when I was eleven) and wrapped it for me. Here's a photo:

It's always interesting to see what one's younger art looks like (especially when you've forgotten about in it the intervening decades). I notice with amusement a few things that feel very familiar, such as minute details and texture in some places and nothing in other (for instance, all the beards have detail scratched into them in what is otherwise a fairly stylized production). There's also a rigid adherence to a small set of colors without any mixing, but utilizing them in imaginative ways; I count just six colors of clay (purple, brown, tan, yellow, orange, light blue), and it doesn't look like I mixed any to produce different shades. Both of these are things I still struggle with to an extent in painting: it's easy to get lost in details while neglecting larger parts of a composition, and I still tend to use a relatively small number of colors in any single painting session (though I at least do mix them, now).

On the positive side, I'm pretty impressed with how this came out. Even at eleven I was coming up with interesting little details like the different crowns on the magi or the decorations on their gifts. (I'm pretty sure from close inspection that the first one was supposed to be holding a gold bar, to go along with the frankincense and myrrh of the others.) Anyway, that's a little something to close the year out with. Hard to believe 2024 is finally over! A hui hou!

You should hear it in the original Greek!

Singing Angels We Have Heard On High in church this morning reminded me of something I thought of some years back when I was first learning Greek: namely, that you can replace the Latin refrain Gloria in excelsis Deo in the carol with the original Greek, Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ (Doxa en hupsistois theo). It's not quite a perfect fit since δόξα has two syllables to gloria's three, but it's generally less awkward to stretch a syllable slightly than to squash another one in. 

I've mentioned this curiosity to a few people over the years, but today it occurred to me that with LilyPond I could engrave some sheet music to demonstrate it. I brushed off my LilyPond skills (which I found surprisingly fresh for not having been used in a few years) and spent a few hours today making this lovely rendition:

Thankfully, I found a version of Christ, the Lord, is Risen Today I'd done a few years ago laying around which gave me a very useful hymn template, including useful features like multiple verses and a refrain; otherwise having to figure out how to do that would've taken me a lot more than a few hours. There are a few small cosmetic tweaks I could still do (the lyrics attach to the soprano voice so there are few choices which simplify the lyrics handling at the expense of nice-looking notes), but it should be performable. I hope. Let me know if you do.

Anyway, Merry Christmas! I know it's been pretty quiet around here, but there are positive developments which I hope to share in the not-too-distant future. A hui hou!

Edit: Actually, I forgot to mention the most interesting thing I learned while doing this, which is that the the way I grew up singing Angels We Have Heard On High is different from how the music reads. I'm short on time at the moment and it really needs some music to show visually rather than trying to explain it in words, so I'll return to this in the future when I have time.

Edit 2: Okay, here's a picture showing the music as traditionally written (top) and how I grew up hearing it. I'm just focusing on the melody here for simplicity:

This four-bar phrase gets repeated for the second half of each verse, so we can look at it by itself. The thing that immediately drew my attention is that in the traditional formulation the entire phrase begins and ends on the same note (A), whereas the way I grew up with it has the final three notes descend to the F below. To me, the traditional way sounded quite jarring at first (to the point I thought I'd made a mistake in transcribing the music) because it feels like there's no resolution: you begin on A, sing around it a bit, then end…back on A, where you started. The version I'm familiar with does that in the first half of the phrase (setting up a mild unresolved tension), but then resolves it in the second half at the end.

Of course, in music, there's no right or wrong, just different matters of taste. Having listened to a rendition of the traditional melody a few times I find it growing on me. The song is one whose origins have been lost in the mist of time, so we can't exactly ask the author(s?) what they were thinking. Perhaps the verses are intentionally set up this way to increase the emotional payoff from the spectacular resolution in the refrain, which is the kind of beautiful polyphonic waterfall of sound you no longer find in modern church music. Anyway, let me know in the comments which version you heard growing up, I'm curious if what I learned is widespread or some local phenomenon. I can't really trace it to a single source, it's just…how I know the song.