So I was at the paidhi-girl’s school concert the other night. Very cute-- about 20 3-6 year olds singing Christmas carols. Then the older kids sang, and they did “Joy to the World,” which the program credited to Isaac Watts (of course) and…Lowell Mason? I’d always seen that tune with Handel’s name on it.
I know Lowell Mason wrote a lot of stuff, but did he write Joy to the World? And why does it show up so often credited to Handel? I did a search, and found mostly mentions of Handel, and two places where Mason was credited–once saying he’d falsely attributed it to GF because he was his favorite composer, and once saying he’d lifted (excuse me, adapted) it from somewhere in the Messiah. I don’t recall ever hearing that in there, but…what’s the story?
I know it’s not life or death, but it’s those little questions that bug you for days and days…
I seem to recall reading that the setting is an adaptation of “He Shall Feed His Flock” from The Messiah. I find this a bit of a stretch (the “feel” is radically different), but the two are similar.
Hmm. I just went and listened to “He Shall Feed His Flock.” And aside from the way the opening descends, I didn’t detect any real similarity, at least not to my ear. Perhaps its being in minor is tricking me. Maybe I should get the score out of the library, and compare the two by eye…
Now, I don’t take either Readers Digest or christianlaw.org to be experts in this particular field, but those were to only two references I found to the “took a melody from Handel” thing.
Quite a few web sites repeat the “homage to Handel” version of the story in varying degrees of detail. This “Joy to the World” site provides one of the more detailed versions. (Warning, it wants to play the song, for you.)
Several of the sites note that musicologists cannot find a single bar from “Joy” in any of Handel’s works.
Hoyt Axton also wrote a tune titled Joy to the World . It’s also popular with young choirs, and now I’m stuck humming the damned thing for the rest of the day. It’s that sort of tune.
As an aside, I always heard that the title should always be simply “Messiah” and never “The Messiah” for reasons of blasphemy…don’t know if it’s true or not (the story that is, not whether it’s blasphemy)
IIRC, the admittedly flimsy justification for attributing it to Handel was that the first 4 notes of the melody are identical to the first 4 notes of the tenor part of “Glory to God” (section 17, I think) from the Messiah.