I just discovered that one of my favorite Christmas carols is obsolete. I’ve got a soft spot for Christmas carols that tell a story, specifically Good King Winceslas and I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day. The version of I Heard the Bells that I grew up with has been largely supplanted by a melody written in the 1950s.
This makes me unhappy, but hey, life is change.
This isn’t an actual poll, but are you familiar with both versions? Do you have a preference?
There aren’t lot of good versions of the older melody on YouTube, but in this one the Mormon Tabernacle Choir starts with early version and finishes with the new.
And if anyone is unfamiliar with the carol, it’s a poem by Longfellow that was later put to music. It was written during a troubled time in his life. His wife had died in a fire a few years early (he was burned trying rescue her), the Civil War was ongoing and his son --who had enlisted without telling him-- had been severely injured the prior year.
Familiar with both tunes. Always preferred the older one. Not that I have anything against the more recent one. (My father, born in the thirties, always hated the more modern one. Of course, given his general outlook on the world, if you’d been able to convince him that the older one was actually the newer one and that the newer one had been the original melody, he might have come down on the opposite side…)
It’s always interesting to me to see what melodies have come to fit texts in cases like these, where the poem was written without any particular tune in mind. Just among traditional-ish Christmas songs, I’m pretty sure our (Episcopal) hymnal has the two different melodies for “Little Town of Bethlehem,” also possibly two different ones for the hymn “While Shepherds washed Their Socks” and maybe even “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” (but I’m too lazy to look it up just now). “I Heard the Bells” isn’t in the Episcopal hymnal, but I suppose it’s possible it might be in other hymn books, or in other published nondenominational collections of Christmas songs–do you know of a book that has it, and if so which melody it’s associated with? Just curious!
Listening to the Mormon Tabernacle version linked in the OP, leads me to think the 1950s version might be more suited to choir singing. Less jumpy and without the big drop on the word “will.”
Addendum: listening to the midi of the Mainzer melody I can see it working for the blithe verses, but not the melancholy third verse.
That site also has a link to download scores, but they’re in the “nwc” format that I’m unfamiliar with.
Speaking of the melancholy third verse, a Johnny Cash/June Carter version on YouTube has Johnny (regrettably) speech-singing that part. I’ve never heard Elvis’ version but suspect that’s the kind of corn he couldn’t resist either.
My first thought is that the Mainzer melody isn’t very interesting, but perhaps it would grow on me if I listened to it more. (Never heard it with any hymn, actually.)
I think the Lutheran-hymnal tune is exactly the same as the others, but the harmonies are somewhat different, which leads to a different feel. This “Lutheran” version is certainly less complex harmonically–making me realize that the complexity of the chord structure as heard in the Baptist version is part of what attracts me to this particular melody, especially as compared to a lot of other Christmas songs.
What don’t you like about speak-singing a verse here and there, by the way? I’ll have to check out the Cash-Carter video, see how he does it and how it does or doesn’t work, but I’ve never thought of the technique itself as fatally flawed.
