My family has a lot of musicians and we do a fair bit of performing. We recently got asked to do a Christmas gig.
I have always loved the old traditional Christmas songs…not the Santa Claus stuff but the really old tunes. Stuff you would hear in the background of an old Charles Dickens movie. You know, things that would sound good with whistles and fiddles and flutes etc…
Any recommendations would be appreciated.
Thanks much,
Doc
BTW, I would particularly like to learn some old Welsh holiday tunes.
The Chieftains have a great Christmas CD out there - possibly titled the Bells of Dublin - which has some great tunes you could learn. I’m not sure if there are ABCs out there for some of the tunes, but it’s worth a shot. This is my all-time favorite Christmas album.
Mercy…I play bunches of them, but none of them are written down. Perhaps you can find them on the web, either in ABC format or in notation. Some that would go well would be:
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Good Christian Men Rejoice (In Dulci Jubilo)
Blessed be that Maide Marie
Adam Lay y Bounden
I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In
The Holy and the Ivy
The Sussex Carol
The Sans Day Carol
The Boars Head Carol (perhaps a bit boring as a pure instrumental)
Here We Come a Wassailing
I Wonder as I Wander (not Dickensian, but a good instrumental)
Silent Night
O Holy Night
Greensleeves/What Child is This?
Joy to the World
By the Father’s Love Begotten (plainchant)
There are a lot more…I’ll have to pull out my old list from last year (I had a list of all the carols I knew and the starting note for each). But that’s enough to get started with, at least.
There’s a good one in the Clarke tutorial. Can’t think of the proper Gaelic name - “Og’ something Bethel”, I think - it was translated as “That Night in Bethlehem”.
Are you playing this on whistle, keyless flute, or ??? Because I believe some of the pieces mentioned (Greensleeves, for sure) will need cross-fingered/half-holed accidentals. Some of them are probably better on a keyed flute or recorder.
It’s do-able - it’s just that I first learned this tune on the recorder and there are perfectly good non-half-holed fingerings there
Also, IMHO, this is a tune that sounds perfectly at home on recorder. I still prefer whistle, most of the time - but except for half-holed C-nats and D-sharps I think accidentals are easier on recorder. (Though if you’re playing a low whistle the half-holing gets a lot easier)
Ooo! Ooo! I just thought of another that works well on the whistle! “Angels from the Realm of Glory” (“Angels We Have Heard on High”). Oh, and “Away in a Manger”…all three commonly used tunes work well on the whistle, and I actually like to do a medly of all three.
Some great ones already mentioned. Here are some more:
O Come O Come Emmanuel
Once in Royal David’s City
We Three Kings
Bring a Torch Jeannette Isabella
King Holly King Oak
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
The Fist Noel
In the Bleak Midwinter
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
If you can get your hands on almost any hymnal, you’ll find some of these. And there is a website called the Cyber Hymnal. I forget the URL, but a web search should find it.
Ooo yes! And your mention of “Un Flambeau, Jeannette, Isabella” reminded me of “Patapan”, which is particularly effective with just the whistle and a drum.
The Oxford Book of Carols is also a wonderful resource.
Here is the link for Cyber Hymnal. There also used to be a wonderful Anglican Cyber Hymnal, but it seems to have gone belly up:
I like this one because it will show you a score, and if you have Scorch, you can print the scores. It also allows you to transpose the music into various keys.
Christmas Carols are songs many folks know by heart. I makes them easy to pick up on whistle, since you already know the melody. The hard part for me was finding a key and the beginning few notes. I created this cheat sheet 2 years ago. It gives you the name, key, and first few notes of several carols that work well on whistle. I know it’s early but thought folks might like to see it again. For us ssslllooowww learners it will give us enough practice time to get them down before the season starts in a few weeks.
I started working on my X-mas carols about two weeks ago. It isn’t early at all! I busked last year and had to use sheet music because I was a super beginner and didn’t know all the tunes. This year, I’m memorizing them all (about 35). So, no, it’s DEFINITLY not too early to start on this.
Remember, it’s Halloween then blink it’s Thanksgiving then blink it’s Christmas!
LOL! I just saw this thread! Glad it’s here. I was tempted to start one. I picked up my low d and started practicing Christmas music last night. Then I told my mother that we ought to do a piano/whistle duet. “You’d do that?” lol…shocked her socks off.
I have a (potentially dumb) question about keys. I’m new and confused. Most of my whistles are Soprano D. I read somewhere that a D whistle will play in the key of G. How do I do that? Do I just use the fingering I’d normally associate with those notes? I noodled around with “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” from your cheat sheet for a while last night and it kinda sorta sounded okay. (not exactly Mannheim Steamroller, but my wife could recognize it.)
I used this fingering to start.
Does this work or should I wait for my music theory book to arrive from Amazon?
Start on G (XXX 000), then play up the scale to second octave G, being sure to play a Cnat instead of a C#. You’ve just played a scale in G major on your D whistle. You can transpose tunes you know in D by thinking of G as your bell note and working from there, always remembering that the C is natural in this scale.
For “God Rest Ye Merry,” the easiest fingering is starting on E, so the first few line would be:
EE BB AG F#E D EF# GA B
Basically, what you’ve got in your diagram there.
Remember it’s a single jig, so your rythmn is dih-DAH, dih-DAH. Don’t play it with the straight rythmn you so often hear it sung in…it sounds bashy.
“You’d do that?” lol…shocked her socks off.
