Angels We Have Heard On High
Most of Sufjan's Christmas music totters between self-conscious, understated, even contrived masterpieces of high-low weirdness and tiny piercing, brief glints of sincerity. This song, a fifty-two-second instrumental offering of Angels We Have Heard on High, is the purest form of the latter category. By sincerity, for what it's worth, I'm thinking as much of cloying, sweaty, effortful bursts of novice musicianship as I am of Linus, stepping into the light to deliver scripture right when it's needed in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
You know the scene. It's a cliche moment that yet transcends itself, like all stewards of Christmas try to do in protection of this strange and sacred season. Linus, sensing that he may have an answer to his anxious friend's hopeless question--Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?--steps into a mysterious spotlight and recites Luke 2 from memory, all while clutching his security blanket. If animation could break the fourth wall, Linus here would. But even that moment can't quite deliver the sense of surprise relationship that other media forms do when they look you straight in the eye (think Mr. Rogers). So the audience is left either unsettled or comforted by words far more ancient than Charles Schultz's. That unsettledness or comfort finds itself in the audience based on our own preparedness for the angels to enter our cozy space: for scripture to answer to all the unmet desires that Christmastime reminds us of. We listen to tunes and watch movies and are never alone doing so. Even solo, we live in a wobbly public or neighborhood of mostly locked doors sitting in front of tiny, pixelated hearths that were manufactured, plucked, stolen, harvested, whatever, by the working hands of others. That's the weird tension and promise of contemporary Christmas, actually: the feeling of being profoundly alone that threatens to pierce an atmosphere of promised overabundance.
Sufjan and my own theological tradition suggest that there are other ways of ritualizing connection to the divine that fill the holes better than secular folk enactments. But even if you're not into church, even if you hate God but can't let go of Christmas, paying attention to all the connections among us is still a useful tool to make it through this season and carry it with you for the rest of those 11 plodding months.
Clearly, this seasonal bouncing between the poles of comfort and obligation, the sacred and the mundane, the cultural and the scriptural makes a Sufjan-style 'riffing on the classics' uniquely satisfying. The constraints on covering a hymn are much more demanding compared to just choosing to write a love song or a song commemorating the dead. And yet, in multiple cases, Sufjan chose to cover a hymn twice, differently--Angels being one of them. This thickens our own mastery of the material by default: like everything else in our lives, actually, we bring other renditions of Angels to our listening of this one. We cannot escape our ghosts, our experiences of connection that resist capture or ownership yet linger on with us, sometimes knowing us better than we consciously know ourselves.
The objectively pleasanter version of his cover, the track of the same name from Silver & Gold (track #32), is in the first camp of Sufjan innovation. There he keeps the hymn's arc and language while extending both sound and word into the superbly vulgar livedness of a contemporary adult sense-maker (Angels we have heard on high / Singing for the earth's attention // And the mountains in reply / So much noise for my affection). He keeps the song but adds in all his ambivalence and desire for salvation on the ground. It's like he annotated it, and we're peeking at the marginalia, not unlike the container of story and signification that some of us call institutional religion. At its best, we can still see the source code(s) glimmering magically.
Then there's Sufjan's rendition in Songs for Christmas Vol II. I'll let this year's author of that track speak for themself about the pleasant, chime-y, 45-second instrumental piece.
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In the depths of Silver & Gold, at track #53, we find attempt number three. This fifty-two-second masterpiece, stripped of all language and sonic glow, has a different, somewhat commercially-alienating strategy. No ads on this Youtube video!
On my listen, I was transported to my fifth-grade Christmas band concert. Is the instrument supposed to honk, or does it need to be tuned? Are the pre-pimply musicians being led by the lilting smalltown eccentric, the all-grades music teacher vaguely conducting while he tosses a wink off to parents and buddies, occasionally forgetting to rope in the sections carrying the harmony? Are some of the flautists still in puffy coats, running in late to grab their seats?
At my fifth grade Christmastime band concert, I was the lone girl managing the brass section via a rental trombone. I felt great pressure to take up the girlier flute or the charged and exquisite saxophone. Yet, I fell in love with my brass, sliding wildly between notes like a zipliner. All told, the pack of us recess-avoiders sounded like shit in a room that was, only a few decades before, part of our Maine neighborhood's fallout shelter. Our parents filled the space and stared up at the kids they made (variously defined), kids they fed, kids they fought. Kids they sang to before bed, placing wafers of thought, language and spirit into us as we tucked in and grew neural pathways, coping strategies, vice proclivities. They looked up at stringbean gay girls on trombones and boys on marimba and the sole fourth-grader representing 'strings.' On each side of our ragtag line, we were upstaged by a ten-foot mural lauding regionally-specific laborers: on stage right, potato harvesters. On stage left, fishermen hauling full nets.
Because Charlie Brown wasn't the director of our performance, Linus didn't have a chance to steal the mediocre toot-and-squeak show with his redirection upward. Our own school closed down a few years later, and I dropped the trombone because I didn't like how heavy the walk home from school was with it in tow. Eventually, I (and a likely statistically significant portion of that crowd) transitioned expectations by transitioning genders. In my case, I emerged as an adult transsexual preacher, sort of despite it all.
Like so many hymn tracks, Angels We Have Heard on High does not need language because we are trained to make it make sense. When you love the performer or are delighted by the weirdness of the show you're at, you hear what's supposed to be happening alongside your assessment of what appears before you. The gap between mastery and reality is loved on, delighted in, witnessed in its hilarious fullness. There is no way that Sufjan wasn't trying to evoke a child's Christmas pageant in this rendition--the thumping drum barely holding pace beneath the piercing, competitive, high notes from instruments I absolutely can't make out or name for you. Instruments that are also absolutely familiar. It cloys and then smoothes. We make it through the fifty-two seconds, can tell you what was happening clearly enough.
In that mundane, comfortable, uncanny scene--the scene of track 53, the child concert, the return to a second cousin's house for eggnog, the queerness of childhood itself lingering on into our fumbling grey persistence--there is space to belong. Christmas draws out our universal unbelonging that then must, I suppose, be made into a ramshackle family party that sort of rocks. There is a wide atmosphere of material between, below, and above us--always an 'on high' to gasp at when it comes into view. This song celebrates the skyward veil's piercing for a handful of animals and laborers, shepherds in Luke 2 that are visited against their will with the immediate qualifier of "don't freak out…" It's not in the lyrics, but any casual once-a-year churchgoer can tie the angel's plea DO NOT BE AFRAID! with this hymn thanks to vague memories of shepherds being visited, memories forged from either kin retellings, secular Christmas objects, or the hybridity of all the above via Charlie Brown. Christmas is naturally psychedelic, which Sufjan not only harnesses but submerges himself into like it's a dare. I dare you too, then, to revisit these more challenging tracks. There's no way they don't belong.
Benny VanDerburgh is a queer and trans clergyperson at a large church in the city of Chicago. He is also an avid doodler, lefty, and graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is not super googleable (email via bevanderb at gmail), but you can try if you are kind.