Lego_Vik

(no subject)

Grr argh. I'm trying to remember a carol we used to sing at school. It wasn't in our normal hymn books, it was hand-typed and purple roneo'd (OK, dating myself here). I've never heard it anywhere else but as far as I know it wasn't written by our music teacher or anything.

All I can remmber about it is that as written each verse had four lines, but the third line I think was sung multiple times? And something about kings, and joy. And it had a bit that went too high for me to sing (not difficult) but it was still my favourite. I'm also getting a strong feeling of a key word beginning with mau..., or maybe just ma....

Funnily enough that's not enough information for me to track it down even with my l33t g00gl3 sKillz0r. Grr.
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    oldbloke
    Odds on your music teacher still being extant?
    Old school friends?
    sidheag
    This is the kind of puzzle that ends up bugging me until it's solved, so when you find out, do come back and tell us!

    I bet you can remember more about the music, and that might well help me. What kind of rhythm did it have? Fast, slow, bouncy, rocking? Three time, four time? And what kind of key or mode, or failing that mood? Was it a bittersweet joy or a plain old joyful joy?
    geekette8
    Heh, I will.

    It was relatively bouncy and joyful (as almost all my favourite music is!). I *think* 4/4, but could easily be wrong.

    Oh hey! I just remembered it!!! Trying to think of the time signature really helped. Thank you :-)

    Rejoice and be merry, in songs and in mirth
    Now praise our redeemer, all mortals on earth.
    For it is the [fx:squeak] BIRTH day of Jesus our King,
    Who brought us salvation, his prai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ses we'll sing.

    I think the last line was repeated rather than the third line, and I think the "mau" or "ma" word I was thinking of was actually "mirth".

    Now off to google it!
    sidheag
    Hee hee, I thought that might happen :-)

    Google seems to know it well, e.g.

    http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-346832-8.pdf

    Have to laugh at memory though. If I'd come across this, I don't think I'd have recognised it from what you said! I suppose your memory that it was about joy came from the instruction (what's the word for those words that come at the start of a piece of music to say how to approach it?) "Joyfully", the "kings" bit is the repetition of "Jesus our King" (I was looking for kings of orient...), and mirth was salient because of being the end of the first line?
    geekette8
    Hmm, Google calls it "the gallery carol" but has a completely different tune for it than we sang at school.
    geekette8
    Good find, but nope, it's not that version either (nor the first one you linked to). I wonder if our music teacher had written her own arrangement.
    sidheag
    Could well be, it's the kind of thing music teachers do, IME :-) Although, it *also* seems to be the kind of carol that many composers have a go at setting - actually, the first one I linked to was a 2004 setting, which I hadn't realised - so it may well be that the one you used to sung just gets swamped by more recent settings. Maybe try a college library for old carol books or something?
    geekette8
    More coming back to me now... we sang it as a 4-part round. When you reached the end you sang "Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!" in some chord progression or other, until it ended up with all four parts singing that at the end.

    The more I think about it the more I suspect she arranged it herself.
    (Anonymous)
    The version in the Oxford Book of Carols, in 3/4 (which also appears to be the tune I can find online) was the version we sang, also back in the days of purple roneos. Be very interested if you can retrieve the tune you sang it to.
    feanelwa
    It's not:
    God bless ye merry gentlemen
    Let nothing ye dismay
    For Jesus Christ our saviour
    Is born on Christmas day
    To save us all from Satan's power when we had gone astray
    O-o tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy
    O-o ti-i-dings of co-omfort and joy
    -is it?
    (I always used to think when I saw that one, good job it was on Christmas day, eh, otherwise he would have missed the turkey, arf arf)
    samholloway
    Now you've solved the carol conundrum, can we thread-drift to talk about the copier? When I was at primary school (second half of the 80s), the school didn't use photocopiers for duplicating material for pupils, and so we used to get worksheets with purple writing on them, often a bit faded. I have a dim memory that there was something unusual about the paper itself.

    Is that what you mean by a roneo'd copy? I've still never seen the machine that produced those copies, nor really thought about how it worked.
    samholloway
    OK, that sends me to 'Stencil duplicator'. However, there's a link on that page to the Ditto machine - a 'spirit duplicator'. That sounds more like what we had - I remember the smell of the pages now!
    tzf_frenchfry
    We called it a Mimeograph machine. Yes, I remember the smell too, and how the purple was always smudged.
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