This time of year, it’s amazing to me that everywhere I hear mostly the same handful of songs I’ve been hearing for my whole life. Now I know that one of the main reasons they’ve lasted is that they’re so well-made. Beautiful melodies with well-matched lyrics.
Take, for example, ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ (Blane/Martin). In the ‘A’ section the melody rises, in masterful fits and starts, to a soaring Bridge melody (‘Here we are as in olden days…’).
Or the long, slow-building verse melody of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ (Davis), ending every two bars with ‘pa-rum-pa-pum-pum’, and then, the fourth time, extending that phrase in a long descent.
A great example is ‘Sleigh Ride’. Originally written as an instrumental piece by Leroy Anderson, lyrics were added by Mitchell Parrish a few years later.
The melody overall is pretty rangy (an octave and a fourth). The Verse melody jumps around a lot (think of the drops in “I hear those sleigh bells jing-a-ling, ring-ting-ting-a-ling too”), followed by a Bridge melody that lingers around the same repeated notes quite a bit “There’s a happy feeling nothing in the world can buy…”, etc.), culminating in exciting arpeggio-type leaps of 4ths in a range of an octave (“These wonderful things are the things we’ll remember all through our lives”).
The lyrics throughout ‘Sleigh Ride’ are a model of descriptive and singable words that, because of how well they match the melody, are always clear, although the song is often sung at a breakneck pace. See, as an example of this, the lyric in the last line of the previous paragraph. Everything is sung the way it would be pronounced if spoken (that’s prosody!), and the accented syllables of the words (as spoken) match perfectly the high notes of each melodic phrase:
“These wonderful things are the things we remember all through our lives”
The sound and flow of the words, and the meaning of the words, are one with the music. Nice job!
Finally, a personal favorite… what’s maybe the ultimate beautiful/melancholy Christmas song, sung by the singer who in his lengthy prime could sing a laundry list and fill it with longing –