For the antepenultimate installment of the Advent Calendar of Non-Overplayed Christmas Songs, I drag out from the vaults again my miniature shape-note carols, several settings of Nahum Tate's "While Shepherds Watch Their Flocks By Night" text, sung by my one man Glee club:
And here's another of my "Different Shepherds", settings of "While shepherds watch'd their flocks by night". (This mp3 downloadable here.)
I wrote some shape-note Christmas carols last year, which I'm happy to re-post for this season, in a series of Christmas songs leading up to yuletide.I used Nahum Tate's famous text (from 1700) to compose a series of "Different Shepherds":While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The angel of the Lord came down,
And glory shone around.
All glory be to God on high,
And to the Earth be peace;
Good will henceforth from Heaven to men
Begin and never cease!
Different Shepherds: On Christmas day I wrote four settings for the Nahum Tate text "While shepherds watch'd their flocks by night", & posted three demonstrative recordings in the following few days. I just scanned the scores of those & one more, here they are. Both printable pdfs & image files. & the three recordings of In Your Area, Fernside, & June Star are in that podcast player below.
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| From Western Harmony |
British Poet Laureate Nahum Tate's famous text "While shepherds watch'd their flocks by night" has been set to music many many times. I wrote four short ones on Christmas evening (after a half dozen glasses of chardonnay at my brother-in-law's family's house), &, after this, I'll try & record the last one before the twelve days of Christmas are over. (The first & third are here & here.) I call it "Different Shepherds", probably as part of the additional songs addendum to Western Harmony. I was formerly a little skeptical of composers attempting to write shape-note carols in odd meters, but I was inspired by the lovely free-feeling five of Neely Bruce's "Walkley" from the Northern Harmony; so "In Your Area" ambiguously switches between 3+2 & 2+3.
While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The angel of the Lord came down,
And glory shone around.
All glory be to God on high,
And to the Earth be peace;
Good will henceforth from Heaven to men
Begin and never cease!
The third setting of the text "While shepherds watched their flocks by night", from my quartet of Christmas carols "Different Shepherds". All four are short three-part shape-noted tunes for the "additional songs" appendices to the Western Harmony. "Fernside" is in the Lydian Mode (major with a raised fourth, which makes it sort of the major equivalent of the dorian which Sacred Harp singers often naturally sing in, sharping on the "fa".) For your convenience, this song is less than thirty seconds long.
While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The angel of the Lord came down,
And glory shone around.
All glory be to God on high,
And to the Earth be peace;
Good will henceforth from Heaven to men
Begin and never cease!
The text "While shepherds watch'd their flocks by night" has been set to music hundreds of times. On Christmas Day, 2008, I wrote four more settings, which, with a possibility of many more, I'll publish in the "additional songs" section at the end of the Western Harmony, under the title "Different Shepherds". They're all short three-part shaped-note carols & I'll publish the scores on this website as soon as I can get them scanned. (In the music industry, Christmas albums have to be recorded in June, so June Christmas Carols have to be composed & prepared by December.) So, I'll try & get recordings of the other three settings up at this blog before we hit the 308-post limit for the year. Download that mp3 here.
I use this variant on the text (the original psalm is by British Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, 1700):
While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground,
The angel of the Lord came down,
And glory shone around.
All glory be to God on high,
And to the Earth be peace;
Good will henceforth from Heaven to men
Begin and never cease!
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