I’ve often wondered why musicians, even Via Salzburg, turn to the Baroque during the Christmas holidays. It seems that the holiday spirit is synonymous with the music of Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel. Even Handel’s Messiah has been drafted into the Christmas season, despite the fact that it was written as an Easter oratorio. So why so much Baroque at Christmas?

There are a few possible answers to this question. The first would have to be that the music is very beautiful and ornate, much like the Christmas holiday itself. Really, all one has to do is listen to some of the heavy ornamentation and embellishment in any reputable performance of Baroque music in order to come away with visions of fabulously glittering Christmas trees in Times Square in New York or some comparable location. Much Baroque music can sound very much like a Christmas tree if you think about it. It’s also very listenable: consonant but serious, with just the correct amount of gravitas to make even the most ardent atheist a little bit humble in the face of it. It is, essentially, very religious sounding music, even if much of it was not only extremely secular but was written during a period when the very idea of God was being challenged by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the power of the Church was under threat from all sides in an increasingly Humanist European society.

I think the answer is much simpler than that. Christmas, for some, is about an ancient tradition that continues to live today because of the authenticity and purity of the events and philosophy for which it stands. The spirit of Christmas is the same today as it was some 2,010 years ago, so the idea goes. Baroque music is similar in that it is the furthest back most of us care to go musically before we run up against the nebulous and distinctly non-commercial sounds of the Renaissance or the Middle Ages. This despite the fact that the spiritual purity we might associate with the Christmas season was more readily to be found in these earlier periods than it was in the Baroque. We might celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ with a re-imagining of the day of his birth two thousand years ago, but even if we knew more about the music from that period, most of us wouldn’t want to hear it. No, Bach is about as early as we can go and still retain some familiarity with the musical terrain. I think that we have come to imagine that it was the music of Bach and his Baroque buddies that has come to resemble most closely the spirit of Christmas in sound because it is music at the limits of our imagination. Christmas is old; the Baroque is as old as we can tolerate before the music becomes too “other”; therefore Baroque music is the music of Christmas. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is another fascinating example of the way that our tastes and associations define for us that way traditions are constructed.