Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for the outgoing month of November; and 🎄 for the first Sunday in Advent, so the beginning of the religious Christmas season — focused on the Christ child — that ends on Epiphany, January 6th; and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 St. Andrew’s Day, 11/30, the national day of Scotland, so break out the thistles; meanwhile, 🦃 the follow-up to (US) Thanksgiving continues, on what I like to think of as Black Sunday (in the Long Black Weekend: “She walks these days in a long black veil”)

At my house, the adventures in leftover Thanksgiving food — originally, soy sauce and black vinegar roasted chicken (10-12 pieces, mostly thigh meat) on a bed of japchae (crunchy veg on Korean glass noodles, thin noodles made from sweet potato starch) — continues; the chicken has come to an end, but the japchae made the base for a fantastic herbal soup that has so far provided two meals and will give me two more. All of this done with takeout, household staples, and a microwave. I do not cook — that’s long gone — but I am a demon assembler.

Like modern American Christmas, modern American Thanksgiving is an event celebrated with food, companionable gatherings, and pageantry, but Christmas also has tons of music, in a variety of genres. Which Thanksgiving largely lacks. A fact that led Laura Whitton Bonnett to post on Facebook on the day itself:

We were trying to find Thanksgiving music to enjoy during cooking.

LWB then offered a few suggestions for appropriate Thanksgiving music, taking the search into two genres; and I ventured into two more. Suggestions that are no longer of much use this year, so save this posting for next November.

Heartwarming classics and broad comedy. LWB’s first suggestion:

If you use Amazon music, you might like to ask Alexa to play “heartwarming classics”

Presumably to buttress the companionable side of the occasion. I don’t tangle with Alexa, but I did consult Spotify to check out its album of “the most beautifully heartwarming classical music” – some of it played straight, but a lot in arrangements by Martin Jacoby.

Then she solicited songs for a list that began with two items of broad comedy: “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Eat It” (1984) and Adam Sandler’s “The Thanksgiving Song” (1993). I await her final report.

Songs of thanks and songs of food. From my 11/2/14 posting “Sacred Harp by Cantus”:

Caught on WQXR (classical music radio in NYC) a few days ago, just as I was waking up: what was clearly the shapenote song A Thankful Heart (a favorite of mine), in the Sacred Harp (p. 475) harmonization, but sung by an all-male chorus in a professional-chorus style. Yes, the announcer verified, that was John Hocutt’s shapenote song, as performed by Cantus on their latest album (A Harvest Home, 2014).

It’s a Thanksgiving album, featuring songs of thanks and songs about food (including “Food, Glorious Food” from Oliver!). A Thankful Heart is, as you can tell from the title, a song of thanks. The album has another Sacred Harp song on it, Holy Manna (59), which is, in a way, a song about food; it has a totally different feel to it from A Thankful Heart

The posting has more about Cantus, and more about the two Sacred Harp songs.

Then I reflected on hymns of thanksgiving, and immediately hit on “We Gather Together”. From Wikipedia:

“We Gather Together” is a Christian hymn of Dutch origin written in 1597 by Adrianus Valerius as “Wilt heden nu treden” to celebrate the Dutch victory over Spanish forces in the Battle of Turnhout. It was originally set to a Dutch folk tune. In the United States, it is popularly associated with Thanksgiving Day and is often sung at family meals and at religious services on that day.

… In anglophone hymnology, the tune is known as “Kremser”, from Eduard Kremser’s 1877 score arrangement and lyric translation of “Wilt heden nu treden” into Latin and German. The modern English text was written by Theodore Baker in 1894.

The hymn as it appears in my Hymnbook 1982 of the Episcopal Church (United States):

This entry was posted on November 30, 2025 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Dutch, Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and food, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.