We thought you’d enjoy knowing Grant’s thoughts on programming holiday concerts. This article originally appeared in the KUSC Members Newsletter and is reprinted with permission.

A Season of Plenty
by Grant Gershon

For any working musician, December is a seriously crazy time of year. Just like Target and Toys-R-Us, many of my singer friends make half of their yearly income between Thanksgiving and Christmas. December can be a mad scramble just to get to the next gig on time (wait, is this O Holy Night or Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel !?) while trying to keep up with all of our “civilian” obligations like family, shopping and trying to stay healthy until the 26th! And yet we all know that great music can make this season a joyous and deeply meaningful part of our lives.

Christmas can also present us with some pretty jarring aesthetic incongruities. Any holiday that has inspired both Charpentier’s Midnight Mass for Christmas Eve and I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus clearly confronts a music director with some stark quality control issues! In my role at the helm of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, I often point out that what makes programming holiday concerts both easy and excruciating is that there are roughly 1,000,000,000 possibilities to choose from. How then does one narrow all of this down to a single concert event? The simple answer is—I don’t!

One of my most vivid musical memories dates from my sophomore year of high school. I had already become a bona fide choral geek and was quite active in the music program at Alhambra High School. The father of a good friend of mine was a member of the Southern California Mormon Choir, which performed a colossal version of Handel’s Messiah at the Music Center every December back in those days. My friend told me that, according to her father, the group was desperate for tenors (some things in the choral world are eternal) and would I like to sing in the concert. Not being a Mormon, I wasn’t sure if there was some mysterious ritual involved in joining the choir (there wasn’t), but I was certainly game for the experience. Well, there is simply no way to adequately describe the feeling, especially at 14 years old, of stepping onto the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to sing one of the world’s great masterworks with orchestra, soloists and a gigantic choir. This is something that I think about every time I lead the annual Sing-Along Messiah performances at Disney Hall. There is nothing like the thrill of being a part of a choir of 2,000 fired-up singers raising the rafters with peals of “Hallelujah”!

Similarly there is something magical about the reassurance of traditional holiday carols and songs. In the same way that familiar tastes and smells trigger sudden memories of forgotten moments, music of the season, whether it’s O Come All Ye Faithful or Rock of Ages also transports us back to earlier times with family and friends. This is the music that steadies our lives and helps to provide an emotional signpost of the passing of the year. Again, at the Master Chorale we honor this aspect of the holiday experience with a matinee program of our favorite traditional carols along with some evocative newer seasonal music from around the world.

Finally, there are the classic major works of the season. These run the gamut from the Christmas oratorios and cantatas of Bach, Respighi, Saint-Saëns and Honegger, to the suites and medleys of carols by Vaughan Williams, Holst, Conrad Susa and countless other wonderful composers. These are the kinds of pieces that truly lift up the spirit and remind us of the power of great music to whisk us outside of our ordinary lives and to open up endless vistas. When we surrender to this beauty we become part of something bigger than ourselves. Personally, these are the moments that sustain me throughout the year and make December a time of such richness and warmth.