Christmas Carols in Classical Music
In the 1680s and 1690s, two French composers incorporated carols into their works. Louis-Claude Daquin wrote 12 noels for organ. Marc-Antoine Charpentier wrote a few instrumental versions of noels, plus one major choral work "Messe de minuit pour Noël". Other examples include:
- Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on Christmas Carols, 1912.
- Victor Hely-Hutchinson: Carol Symphony, 1927.
- Benjamin Britten: A Ceremony of Carols (for choir and harp), 1942
- Christina Rossetti's poem In the Bleak Midwinter has been set to music by (amongst others) Gustav Holst (1905) and Harold Darke (1911).
- Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki extensively quotes the Christmas carol Silent Night in his Second Symphony, nicknamed the Christmas Symphony.
Read more about this topic: Christmas Carol
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“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)
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—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)