Playlist
* Let Us See the Beauty - Laurence Cole and friends - 2:39
* Winter Solstice Chant - Susan T. Mashiyama - 3:13
* Gaia, Carry Us Home - MotherTongue - 3:29
Music notes
Let Us See the BeautyLaurence Cole didn’t write this to be a Winter Solstice song – it is an Every Day sort of song. On the front page of his website he explains why he composes this kind of music:
Part of my mission is to re-acquaint people with their birthright and natural ability to make beautiful and meaningful sound together. Most of the songs I’ve written are short, easy to learn, chant-like songs with several layers that fit over and around each other in interesting and pleasurable rhythmic and harmonic challenges that make them fun to sing. Group singing is one of the most ancient and primal “technologies of belonging” that we humans have been using since our earliest times, possibly before speech itself.
When we make joyous and passionate song together, it nourishes our souls and offers an enlivening gift back to the natural world that made us and gives us our sustenance and our very being. When such an exchange is genuinely made, and the song finds its natural ending, often there is a sweet, lively silence in which we simply stand and hold the “enchantment,” the sense of deep and genuine communion amongst each other and with the whole living world.
Laurence’s website is filled with inspiring songs like this, and he keeps adding more. And he doesn’t just post performances like this one. He has tracks for each of the separate parts in the voice ranges that suit them – soprano, alto, tenor, bass – to aide people in learning how to sing his songs. He also tells the stories behind their origin, and sometimes he even gives instructions of how they can be used as a ritual dance.
All of Laurence’s music is freely available to use. Again, in his words:
It’s the traveling of these songs that gives me the greatest joy. A multi-track recording with only a few voices is not nearly the same magic as many diverse voices singing together. It’s that large and lustrous group expression that gives us a sense of what the word “Universe” really means, “Unity midst diversity.” My fondest dream is that you take these songs and share and teach them with your groups and communities, workshops, festivals, rituals, families, etc.
The page for this song is here. His explanation for its origin that is that it is based on a fragment from a poem called The Invitation written by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. The poem is on the front page of her website. It begins:
It doesn’t interest mewhat you do for a living.I want to knowwhat you ache for,and if you dare to dreamof meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest mehow old you are.I want to knowif you will risklooking like a foolfor lovefor your dreamfor the adventure of being alive.
Reading the poem helped me to understand Laurence’s much more focused musical poetry: In its second part (the higher voices) he skips the “it doesn’t interest me” preamble and gets right to the nub of the matter: “I want know if you can see the beauty, even when it’s not pretty every day.”
The song only has two parts:
Part One:Let us see the beauty every dayAnd source our lives from its presence.
Part Two:I want to know if you can see the beautyEven when it’s not pretty every day.I want to know if you can see the beautyAnd source your life from its presence.
In his notes about the song Laurence says: “This is also a song that is lifted up by little improvisational embellishments. Have fun!”
Winter Solstice ChantI just discovered this one on YouTube a few days ago. I was looking for songs and tunes using “winter solstice” as my search phrase. That is a trick that I only recently began doing: Back when my annual Christmas and Midwinter music Samplers were on cassette, and then on CD, I almost always only posted music from my own album collection, or ones that had been sent to me by other Christmas music collectors. Mind you, back in those days YouTube mostly had low quality, low-bitrate copies of the music that fans had ripped from their vinyl or CD albums. These days, it is the performers themselves or their album labels who often post high-bitrate versions of their recordings online.
When I first saw the YouTube video of this song, after a lone-player Celtic harp introduction the image went into a multi-person mosaic of harpists and singers. That format of posting songs became so familiar during the Covid “social isolation” years of 2020 and ’21 that I immediately thought that it must have been made at that time. It was only when I opened the attributions and saw that it had been posted in 2018 that I looked at the people more closely and saw that they were all the same person!
The composer, musician and singers are all Susan T. Mashiyama who posts as susansharpsongs. Besides being a harpist and singer-songwriter, she is a music teacher and Unitarian-Universalist congregation music director who lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
Normally, unless songs are in a foreign language I’m pretty fussy about selecting ones that have sufficiently good enunciation that you can follow their lyrics without having to read them. That means I tend to avoid recordings like this that have heavy reverb or breathy singers. But the interlocking countermelodies and fuguing turned spellbinding, and reading the lyrics hooked me:
[Chorus] Chant the seasons all around us These words never will be stayed As the chestnut falls in silence We will catch the wind inside a whisper and a prayer Sleep and dream ye of peace
Now the day turns into darkness As the sunlight starts to fade Winter Solstice is upon us And the twilight stars are sparkling upon the air Chanting of trees Chorus
All the leaves are softly blowing Brown and red and gold they rustle everywhere ‘Tis the season to go softly Still into the night and keep each other in our care Go now in peace
Gaia, Carry Us HomeMotherTongue was a performance group affiliated with the non-profit organization EarthSpirit based in New England. That is a neo-pagan organization founded in 1977 dedicated to the preservation and development of Earth-centered spirituality, culture and community.
The word “pagan” comes from the Latin word paganus, meaning “country dweller” or “rustic”. Throughout the world, agricultural people have equated God with nature, and developed animist religious beliefs that honour Nature itself as it is embodied in the spirits of trees, places, animals and all things.
Part of pagan belief is veneration for, and the marking of, nature’s cycle of changing seasons. The people of what we now call northern Europe likened the annual cycle to the turning of a wheel: Indeed, the word Yule is believed to derive from the Saxon word for “wheel”. (I don’t know what they called the midwinter season before that late Neolithic or early Bronze Age technology was first introduced to northern Europe in the 4th century BCE.)
Our continuing tradition of Christmas decorating with circular wreaths made from evergreen boughs is rooted in this imagery. In fact, almost all of what we think of as traditional Christmas customs are descended from pagan rites and rituals, for the simple reason that until quite recently most European people were country-folk. Their animist beliefs lingered despite Christianization. I wrote a whole series of essays about that, called Ancient Origins, which I posted with my 2021 songs-of-the-day mailings beginning here.
While EarthSpirit is still in operation, MotherTongue appears to now be disbanded; at least, I cannot find evidence online of recent concerts or recordings by them. They appear to have been active from the early 1990s to about 2007. This song came from their excellent 1994 album This Winter’s Night: A Celebration of the Winter Solstice. The song was written in 1992 by Abbi Spinner & J. Magnus McBride, who were musicians with MotherTongue’s band. The intertwining lyrics are:
Gaia, carry us home.Mother, we are one.Remember the god,Remember yourself,Remember the goddess,Remember.
