WHERE IS THE MUSIC OF THANKSGIVING?
You know Thanksgiving is coming when you hear Christmas music.
Really, it isn't fair. Thanksgiving is one of the year's best holidays, but it is musically ... uh ... undernourished. It is a great holiday not only because it is theoretically dedicated to the most heartwarming of human emotions, gratitude and recognition, but even more because it always falls on a Thursday. Still, it needs some great music.
In the last century, we have begun moving as many holidays as we can to Monday; this gives people a three-day weekend, which they like, and it avoids the kind of disruption you get when a business shuts down for a day in the middle of the week.
But Thanksgiving is even better than Memorial Day or Presidents' Day or Veterans' Day for a lot of us because it always happens on Thursday. For all students and for a lot of nine-to-five workers, that means a four-day weekend. And we can all use one of those now and again, particularly if we are going off to Grandma's to get overstuffed.
So, if it's such a great holiday, quick name me a universally beloved piece of Thanksgiving music. All right; musicologists can come up with some pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, maybe "Cantata 192," Nun danket alle Gott, but that isn't even in the Bach top-40, let alone the classical top-40, the way Handel's Messiah is. It is not part of people's lives, like "Silent Night" or "Deck the Halls." It is not a beloved tradition like Amahl and the Night Visitors or (in some places) Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ or Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols.
Somebody might mention that "Gloria in excelsis Deo," ("Glory to God in the highest"), which has been set to music by nearly everyone who ever composed for a chorus, is really a hymn of praise and thanksgiving - but it is a Christmas hymn, originally attributed to a choir of angels hovering over Bethlehem.
If you want to stretch the point a little, the Mass, which has been set to music thousands of times, is really a prayer of thanksgiving. It is called the "Eucharist" by theologians, and "eucharist" ("evkharisto," as it is pronounced today) is the Greek way of saying "thank you." But that is only a generic form of thanks, with no particular connection to a Thursday in November.
There are problems for anyone who decides to compose a piece of music for Thanksgiving - rather than one, say, for Christmas. For one thing, the observance of Thanksgiving is limited to one day per year - followed, as a rule, by several days of cold turkey - while the celebration of Christmas now seems to begin shortly after Labor Day. This means not only that there are a lot more opportunities to hear and perform Christmas music; it also means that the natural time for enjoying Thanksgiving music - the latter part of November - has already been captured by herald angels, jingle bells and red-nosed reindeer.
That is not entirely an accident, of course. Thanksgiving was originally established in New England by the Pilgrim Fathers not only as a way of thanking God for a good harvest but also as a kind of competitor for Christmas. They thought the observance of Christmas had become contaminated with paganism (they should see what it's like today!) and they hoped that a celebration coming a month before it might take away some of its impact. They didn't win that battle, though they did establish a permanent spot for their contender. They might have had better luck if they had gotten somebody to write a few good tunes for their holiday, but the Pilgrim Fathers really weren't very interested in music.
So we have a holiday with lots of good cheer but not much music - at least, not much on the level of Bach's Christmas Oratorio or even "Good King Wenceslaus." One problem, perhaps, is that Christmas had a big head start on Thanksgiving - 16 centuries, give or take a few decades - and its observance was spread through a variety of cultures and continents, sinking into people's subconscious awareness and generating all kinds of folklore spinoffs. So perhaps 1600 years from now, Thanksgiving will have acquired that kind of cultural patina.
It's partly a question of mystique. Christmas is, at least for believers, a subject of mystery, a celebration of the birth of a miraculous child, an instance of God reaching out to touch humanity. Thanksgiving can be (and for many of us is) no more than an excuse for overindulgence and a chance to watch football games.
But it is also a feast of mysticism and contemplation, a time - even now, in the midst of mourning over our great national tragedy - for reflection on how we have been favored; a time to express our recognition that some force larger than ourselves has, looked down upon us in our present sorrow and treated us kindly. That is a subject for great music.
16 November 2001
