Archive for What we're playing
Rocking Carol
The ‘Rocking Carol’ (often simply called ‘Rocking’) is a Czech Christmas carol that is also well loved here in Britain. It begins with the lines ‘Little Jesus, sweetly sleep, do not stir; We will lend a coat of fur, We will rock you, rock you, rock you. . .’ and this insistence adds to the [...]
Good King Wenceslas
This melody is said to have originated in the 13th century with the pretty title ‘Tempus Adest Floridum’ (’The Time For Flowering’) and as such was a spring carol. It appeared in the famous Finnish collection of 1582 entitled ‘Piae Contiones’ and it wasn’t until the 19th century that it gained it’s present title, along [...]
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ was one of the most popular carols that didn’t appear on our first disc ’I Saw Three Ships and other carols’. It is a rousing melody by Felix Mendelssohn and was originally composed as a chorus for a secular cantata in celebration of the invention of the printing press! It is well worth listening [...]
It Came Upon The Midnight Clear…..
The fourth carol on the album ‘It Came Upon The Midnight Clear and other carols’ is the title track itself. The words of this carol were written in 1849 by the Unitarian minister Edmund Sears from Massachusetts and these words spawned two separate melodies. In the United States it is widely known set to a [...]
Joy To The World - Lowell Mason
The third carol on our disc is a bit of a curiosity. I had always assumed that this universally loved Christmas song was written by George Frideric Handel. It contains many of his traits with more than a touch of the ‘Messiah’ about it and yet it is a pastiche concocted by the 19th century American [...]
Il est Ne, le Divin Enfant - French Carol
This popular French carol has a lively dance-like feel mixed with an elegance that makes it sound just as fresh for a string quartet as a choir. It has a two in a bar feel and my old music master Bill Llewellyn fancied that it would work equally well as a Gavotte.
This arrangement starts with [...]
Sussex Carol - English Traditional
This year has once again been very busy with the arranging and recording of a second volume of Christmas carols. The album is entitled ‘It Came Upon The Midnight Clear and other carols’ and is available from our website as well as on itunes, CD baby and Amazon in time for Christmas 2011.
Deciding which carols to include in this second volume [...]
Recordings start next week……
After three months of fairly continuous arranging work, we’re virtually there with the carols for the second volume to be released in time for Christmas 2011. With the daffodils out and the beautiful spring sunshine, it seems strange to be recording pieces like ‘See Amidst the Winter’s Snow’, but with all the production, design, replication [...]
Title for the second Christmas disc…..
Well despite the fact that Spring is well and truly in the air, we are hard at work preparing for a second volume of Christmas carols for string quartet. This second album will be a further volume as a follow up to ‘I Saw Three Ships and other carols’ which we released last year.
When the [...]
Loulie, Muller, Tasistro, Kalliwoda and Pichl
Yesterday, Adrian Smith (viola) and I had a get together and played through some rare and unloved pieces of music for violin and viola duo which had been languishing in my filing cabinet (and before then on the Petrucci music library site).
We began by sight reading through a duo by a composer called J.A Muller. [...]
