We meet John Wheatcroft at a very snowy Crossroads, where he plays us an exclusive jazz -style arrangement of this perennial Christmas classic.
The popularity of the Christmas carol Silent Night is nothing short of phenomenal. It has been translated intomore 300 languages, with over 700 recorded versions in the last 45 years alone.
Bing Crosby’s version sold more than 30 million copies and it continues to be a cornerstone of yuletide celebrations all over the world. While many of the carols performed around Christmas can be traced back over a 1000 years, Silent Night dates back just a little over 200, composed initially as a poem in 1816 by Rev Joseph Mohr, and set to music two years later, on Christmas
TECHNIQUE FOCUS
When performing a melody it’s helpful to consider how you might keep things interesting and engaging for the listener by varying your delivery. It pays to consider your options, such as blending single notes with octaves, double -stops and chord fragments. Techniques such as sliding into and away from notes, hammering on or pulling off can help. Also, you could employ some muted percussive grace notes to help propel the music forward. Dynamics play a huge role here also, so consider just how quiet should quiet be and at what point is this appropriate in the arrangement and, conversely, give equal consideration to when the level and intensity needs to reach a peak. One thing that became apparent to me while I was transcribing this performance, which features improvised moments balanced with more composed and considered material, was the variety of rhythms employed, and often all within a single bar.
If you pay attention to these concepts when you’re woodshedding, they’ll begin to appear naturally in your improvisations and in your compositional ideas. Good luck!
Eve 1818 by Franz Xaver Gruber. It was performed that same evening at Christmas Eve Mass in the church of St Nicholas in Oberndorf, near Salzburg, Austria.
Part of the popularity of Silent Night could perhaps be attributed to its simplicity, with the initial performance featuring a simple choral accompaniment that the choir could learn in a matter of hours, rather than the usual weeks and, interestingly, Mohr and Gruber eschewed the tradition church organ, electing instead to use guitar. Reports vary as to the reasoning for this decision, but if you are ever in the neighbourhood of Hallein, Austria, you can visit the Silent Night Museum and witness the very same guitar that Joseph Mohr used to premier this legendary composition.
Our arrangement of Silent Night can be divided into a number of sections. While the main theme is performed in D with a 6/8 time signature, we start with a Django-style introduction setting up tension by resolving to A7, the V7 Dominant chord. Next up, we see a harmo
