2023 Round 2 Results

Round 2 is now closed!  Thanks to all who participated.  Round 3 will be open later today.  Were there any upsets?  Who made the Sweet 16?  And since this is a music geek activity, shouldn't we call it the "Suite 16?"

Results and comments below. 






The lesson for this week is "Your vote matters."  Three matchups were decided by a single vote.  
If you didn't vote this round, please jump in for Round 3!



"Midnight Clear" is on a nice little Cinderella run.



"Joy to the World" with yet another early exit.  Am I the only one surprised that this hymn hasn't made it further in these tournaments?


Santa has left the building.



"Sleigh Ride" with the statement win.  I am a little worried about this.  If the same song starts winning every year, the whole enterprise becomes a lot less interesting.



You love to see it.




Someone had to win.



"Carol of the Bells" with the biggest margin of victory this round.
(By the way, the correct answer to last week's "Ding Dong" thought experiment is...ocarina.  
I am not accepting questions.)




Old Whatsisface is sent packing.



This matchup had us all seeing red!


Who would win:  Three royal bois...or capitalism?



Sorry, Brandon.  The people have spoken.




Another hot take:  The Mannheim Steamroller "Stille Nacht" is cheesy, dated...and absolutely beautiful.



If you think about it, that whole Nutcracker thing is pretty unhealthy.  
Someone ought to redo it with kale and tofu and lentils. 




Comments

  1. Matthew SaundersDecember 7, 2023 at 5:43 AM

    OK... some good some bad.
    Pardon my politicking.
    Really? "The First Noel?" It's the carol that gets thrown in because it's the Fourth Sunday of Advent and we've already done all the good ones, except the ones we save for the 24th and 25th! And once again, it's greedy! Why does one song get to tell the whole story, and with horrible text-setting!
    If you don't like having "Sleigh Ride" win every year, maybe drop the Final Four and swap in some others? I'd be here for that. However, the match up was definitely a 1v16 situation. "Jingle Bell Rock" shouldn't even have advanced once. What is a "jingle horse" anyway? (If you want something really weird, take a look at this week's Billboard 200 (the album chart). Because of the way streaming is counted, all the albums that contain all the Christmas music we hear are on the list, including, yes, "The Best of Bobby Helms," coming in at No. 57: https://www.billboard.com/charts/billboard-200/)
    I'm totally cool with "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" losing--I think it might actually be a Halloween song: who is sitting around the Christmas tree telling "scary ghost stories?" If you do a Halloween bracket (which might be fun and get people to go listen to some new stuff), I would totally put "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" there in it.
    "O Holy Night"--OK, as long as we don't try to sing it as a group. It's definitely a solo piece.
    I guess there might be some people here who don't know me: among other things, I'm a community college music professor, and my bread and butter course is history of popular music (those who knew me when know that this means the Universe has a tremendous sense of irony). So I actually think about Christmas music a lot through the year, because it's so reflective of so many things about our society. One of these days, I'm going to teach my entire class in Christmas music: it wouldn't be that hard.

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