The Boston Pops, "The Twelve Days of Christmas"
You’re generally not gonna see much orchestral stuff in this Substack, unless it involves Manoeuvres in the Dark. But today I want to write about our yearly outing to see the Holiday Pops at Symphony Hall here in Boston.
Not everybody is into orchestral music. I say “orchestral” here because “classical” is too narrow a term in a post about the Boston Pops, who play musical theater songs, jazz numbers, and film scores. But in a world dominated by Doja Cat, BTS, and whatever else, where even rock music is in decline and an afterthought, symphonies do still have their feet under them, somehow. You have to figure that’s at least in part because well-heeled sorts tend to associate acousting stringed instruments, brass, and woodwinds with high culture. So whether or not they actually like it, they aspire to having their names printed on a glossy program crediting them for supporting it. Now, as between feeding the hungry and funding performances of Rachmaninoff, it seems to me that one charitable cause far outstrips the other in importance. But I might feel differently if Kraftwerk tours weren’t self-sustaining ventures, and in any case a great many benefactors contribute equally to humanitarian causes and “the arts.”
I wasn’t around when the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra was formed way back in 1885, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to surmise that the object of the enterprise was to bridge a gap between hard-core symphonic performances, which had a super-niche audience, and the rest of America. This was during the Gilded Age, after all, so you were either endowing first violin chairs or face-down on a barroom floor eating sawdust. From this distance I couldn’t say if the Pops initiative (then called “the Promenade Concerts”) was a form of cultural paternalism—let’s give these people Handel and Haydn so they’ll stop brawling in the streets after these awful baseball games—or there was a notion that folks could dumb this stuff down just a little and make a buck or two, selling tickets to shows and/or some of the newfangled phonograph contraptions.
Today, though, it’s clear what purpose the Boston Pops serves. It’s like, classical music, you know, but kinda fun? My friend Giovanna volunteers at Symphony Hall. She told me Friday night that earlier this fall she helped out at a Star Wars movie screening with the Pops. The way it works is they unfurl a silver screen behind the stage. It’s a big one, covering the entirety of the organ pipes. Somehow they strip the recorded musical score out from the soundtrack, and as the movie plays behind them, the Pops musicians play the score, into the open air and in real time. We drove out I-90 to Tanglewood a few years ago to watch them do this with West Side Story. Tanglewood is an outdoor summer venue. A thunderstorm rolled in at the beginning of the second act, and that was the end of that for us.
But Star Wars? Dang it—I absolutely would have come to Symphony Hall to see that show, taking full advantage of its walls and roof. It bears mentioning that John Williams was the Pops conductor between 1980 and 1993, so there’s a real and abiding Pops-Star Wars connection here. Then Giovanna said it was the one where (spoiler alert) Han Solo dies, and I felt just fine about missing it. Give me Episodes IV, V, and VI. Otherwise, I’m out.
Of course, Giovanna and I were talking about the Boston Pops and Symphony Hall on Friday night because we sitting in the right balcony of Symphony Hall, waiting to see the Boston Pops. My uncle (see “The Whole of the Moon”), Giovanna, and our family of four go every year to see a Holiday Pops performance, usually in the second week of December, before Zio leaves New England behind to holiday in Florida. According to my Gmail, our Holiday Pops tradition goes back at least thirteen years, maybe longer—it’s enough to say it has passed into that zone of traditions where you can’t remember the first time you did it. The holiday shows run for something like three weeks in December. The all-volunteer Tanglewood Festival Chorus assembles behind the orchestra for these performances. Given the name, I assume most of the singers are from Western Mass, but still they play shows here in Boston pretty much every night up until Christmas Eve, with added matinees on weekends.
The programs are generally pretty consistent from night to night, but the matinee shows are marketed as “Kid’s Matinees,” which means they’re (1) shorter in duration and (2) more concentrated on what we’re there for in the first place: i.e., jazzy and jaunty orchestral arrangements of holiday tunes we know and love, augmented by readings (of, say, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Polar Express, or “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”), a visit from Santa, and a singalong with the audience at the end. For the longest time we went to the matinees, but in recent years we have felt our kids are of an age where it makes more sense to have an early sit-down dinner in town with Zio and Giovanna, then walk over to Symphony Hall together for one of the evening performances.
We may revert back to to a matinee next year. An informal poll taken at intermission yesterday delivered a general consensus that the first segment of the program was a bit of a slog—and isn’t that the case every year, kindasorta, but we forget all about it nine months later when we’re reupping for tickets? The Pops dig deep for new and different holiday-themed pieces, and that’s what you get in the first set. Here’s longtime conductor Keith Lockhart giving you a 50-word summary of a Bulgarian folk tale about the winter solstice, before name-checking a composer from the 1920s who filled the unmet need of putting that story to music. Then comes ten minutes of unfamiliar symphonic play in a minor key, very little of it suggestive of a celebration.
As a grown man with a churning mind and an incapacity not to have his mind occupied, I have figured out tricks to get through something like this:
Name a sea animal that starts with every letter of the alphabet, in order. Abalone, black bass—ooh, that’s a double—cuttlefish, dolphin …
Name all the Football Bowl Subdivision schools in each of the 50 states, starting with Alabama.
Or lately:
Name all the songs you’ve done a Substack post about.
My firstborn hadn’t developed these coping skills and would either melt down or shut down during these numbers, slumping over in his chair in the latter case—as all of us has done at one time or another in a theater or opera house.1
That said, the show always recovers its footing in the second set. This is the part where you hear the selections they carry over from year to year, such as Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride”—a very Boston Pops composition in that it was the Pops who first performed and recorded it; the singalong medley with “Rudolph,” “Deck the Halls,” and other holiday standards; and lately the Pops’ own arrangement, courtesy of Keith Lockhart, of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” (Apple Music, Spotify). The last of these is, to borrow from the local vernacular, wicked awesome. It’s so cleverly done and masterfully integrated. If the idea of a Beethoven-inflected five golden rings excursion doesn’t grab you, then surely the can-can and “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Apple Music, Spotify) bits will.
A few years ago I added “The Twelve Days of Christmas” to my Christmas Elf playlist (see “Father Christmas”), so that I’ll have played this track easily a dozen times in the weeks prior to seeing it live in Symphony Hall. But the visuals make it even better still. See below:
I’m not stretching the truth when I say that over the years, I have felt most like a parent—and more specifically, most like I have stepped into the shoes of my parents—on the days we go to the Holiday Pops. Back when I was Florian and Lila’s age, our family went to church every Sunday. It was an 11 AM service, but my teenage circadian clock2 was rolled forward three, maybe four hours from my parents’, so that I wasn’t remotely ready to get out of bed at 10:30, when they would first make a run at waking me up.
My father always approached my sister and me cheerfully on Sunday mornings, even though he knew a knock-down, drag-out fight was coming. Up and at ’em, he would say, gripping my calf and shaking it.
If God is omniscient, can’t he hear me praying from here? I loved this argument. I mean, I thought it was terrific: logically—and theologically—airtight.
Yet my mother was always ready with a well-crafted counter, which centered not on God’s capacity to hear me, but on the level of effort I owed Him. You have so many good things in your life, and it’s not too much for you to get up once a week and go to church to show some gratitude. So my genius made nary a dent in her resolve, and if by 10:45 Tia and I didn’t have our feet on the floor, demonstrating forward motion toward showering and dressing—and this was pretty much always the case—shit would go nuclear. We typically left the house at 11:05, the four of us piled into one car, Tia and I quiet and fuming while our parents complained that we had made them late yet again. At 11:15 one of a handful of smirking ushers would direct us into a pew with room for four, where my sister and I would sigh and pout for twenty minutes before the musical program got started and provided opportunities for us to laugh again (see “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”).
As the service proceeded, I would look through the bulletin and the hymnal, making note of what I thought were absurd idiosyncrasies of language that occurred only in church. Why say “partake of,” when “take” is more economical? Why is “heaven” suddenly a one-syllable word in all these hymns? And why do they always slant-rhyme it with “given?” Of course, none of these observations described any loathsome liberties taken with the mother tongue. It was just that I didn’t want to be there, and I thought the entire exercise was stupid. But I couldn’t take that position, certainly not aloud and not even to myself. So I fixated on particular words as outlets for my frustration. Nobody in this room would ever use the word “remembrance” in any other context, when “memory” would do just as well. But here they all are, swallowing down whatever whacked vocabulary The Liturgy feeds them.
The hymns sounded like dirges when we sang them together—all the voices regressing to a tuneless mean, except for the fireworks up front in the choir and a warble or two coming from behind us. I could never figure out if those warbles were affectations or just how certain elderly women’s larynxes worked (or didn’t).
Fast-forward thirty, thirty-five years to any of a half-dozen Saturday mornings trying to pull together the Pearl Street Gang to get downtown for brunch before the Holiday Pops show:
Florian is in a snit that he has to wear khaki pants and loafers. We’re five minutes from our drop-dead departure time and Lila has decided to blow-dry her hair. Everything my children have done and said over the course of the morning is screaming filibuster to me. They’re sandbagging us in the worst way, kvetching all the while about having to do any of this in the first place. And the delays don’t even make any strategic sense, because we’re in no danger of missing any of the actual performance. We are, however, in danger of missing brunch—and more specifically, the Grande Croque Madame with the steak on top of it that I wait all year to get at Brasserie Jo.3
And in this moment I hear words coming out of my mouth like:
This is a special day for your mother. It’s her favorite thing about Christmas, and here you are sulking about it, just like EVERY YEAR.
Or:
Once a year we ask you to get dressed up nice and be ready on time, and YOU CAN’T DO IT?
On this latter point, a fourteen-year-old rises up from deep inside me, with a pointed answer that fortunately only I can hear:
The answer is in the question, isn’t it?
And I am reminded again of every Sunday morning drive to Howland Community Church between 1985 and 1990, except this time I’m in the front seat, driving the car and doing the chewing out.
During those matinee years for the Pops, I had a foot in both camps. I was able to remember being that teenager, resentful about his parents lifting him all over the chessboard and second-guessing all the moves. And at the same time I could feel the urgent importance of having the four of us together for moments my children might or might not in the moment understand were special but decades from now would treasure and want so badly to claw back.
The 2024 outing marked our first year with Florian in college, so that Kate and I drove in from Belmont ourselves, leaving early. Florian rode the #1 Bus in from Cambridge. Lila was on her own timeline, having missed the train home from school. She ended up Ubering to the house, changing from school clothes into a red Christmas dress, then taking a second Uber into the South End where we had our dinner reservations. At the table, over antipasti, I joked to Zio and Giovanna that Lila’s charter flight from Concord was delayed. When we were finally fully convened, I had my immediate family back—not for the first time since Florian left for school: we’d met up for three birthday dinners during the fall, and of course he had been home over Thanksgiving. But starting in August I won’t ever take for granted having Kate, the kids, and me together in one room. And for all the drama we’ve carried through the years around Pops Day, and as often as Kate said to me over the course of the past week that Florian hates going to the Pops, both of my children showed up looking smart and from all appearances happy to be there.
This bore out during the performance. All of us delighted in “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” even as I myself appreciate that it’s too cute by half and something Teenage Iconoclast Brad would have begrudged at least as much as the word remembrance appearing in the church program. When a strange figure in a zoot-suit jacket and a unicorn-head mask entered from stage left during “Sleigh Ride,” expressing indignation at each crack of the percussionist’s whip, Florian and Lila didn’t roll their eyes—they laughed out loud. And I swear to God both of my kids sang joyfully through the entirety of the singalong, and when I declared to Florian that I wouldn’t be singing a word of “The Christmas Song” (links withheld) because it’s hokey as hell and I detest it, he looked at me like I was the party-pooper. Which of course I was.
After taking our leave of Zio and Giovanna—we’ll see Zio in Florida, after Christmas—the four of us walked down Mass Ave and St. Botolph Street to the car, so we could ride back to Belmont and Cambridge together. We talked about the show, laughed together about the Inverted Centaur and indulged in idle speculation about the trumpet he lifted to his horse’s lips at the end of the “Sleigh Ride.” Was it just a prop, or did he actually get it far enough inside his mask to play it? I used the remote app to preheat the seats, for which all were grateful. As we drove up Storrow Drive together and Lila and Florian laughed uproariously together in the backseat, Kate and I stole a glance at one another. We were clearly thinking the same thing:
This is as good as it gets.
For the life of me, as often as I have tried, I still can’t get more than halfway through Inside Out without nodding off.
Although I was not aware of it at the time, this was actually a metabolic condition. After Kate’s boss won the Nobel Prize (see “Dead Quote Olympics”), the Coolidge Corner Theatre invited him to give a brief lecture and introduction to Taxi Driver, as part of their “Science on Screen” series. In his presentation at Coolidge Corner Michael suggested that some amount of Travis Bickle’s spiraling psychosis may have resulted from working overnight shifts into the teeth of his circadian clock. Toward making his case, Michael needed first to offer some high-level insights about how circadian rhythms worked. While giving this background, he revealed that teenagers are subject to “circadian sleep delays” that put their hours out of whack with the general population’s.
Brasserie Jo closed in October 2018. This was a real kick in the nuts and I’m still not over it.
♥️