New carol for Christmas

I am really excited about a new carol that I have been working on over the last few weeks. Let me give you a bit of background.

I have always loved Timothy Dudley-Smith’s hymns. Did you know he has written over 400 hymns? He is now a cracking 92 years old !

Anyway, as part of my ‘hymns to new tunes’, I wanted to include a TDS hymn. The one I have chosen is the carol ‘A song was heard at Christmas’. This goes through v1 ( the song sung by the angels ), v2 ( the star seen by the wise men ), v3 ( the tree that would become eventually the tree Christ was crucified on ), and finally v4 ( the child, Jesus Christ born to be our Saviour ). The words are great and give a lot of scope to a choral setting since we go through a number of different moods.

Anyway the main tune was hatched early on. In some ways it is familiar and people may think – ooh, I think I have heard that before? However, it has subtle differences to the tunes you may think of. Also the accompaniment takes it somewhere else. Catchy tunes ( which we need ) inevitably link with an old folk song or other in some way so there you go – I am probably doing unashamedly just that !

I am now in the final tidying up before ‘airing it’. So watch this space ….

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