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Piano sheet music for kids · Carol · Level 3: Notes below middle C
In the Bleak Midwinter
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 4/4, 16 bars. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
About this arrangement
Gustav Holst’s 1906 tune for Christina Rossetti’s poem, one of the gentlest carols there is. It sits almost entirely in C position with the thumb on middle C: the little finger stretches up to A in bar 10, and the thumb reaches down to the A below middle C in bar 3 and to B at the end of line 3. The new rhythm is the dotted crotchet and quaver (eighth note) that starts most lines, long-short, and every line ends on a long note and a rest to breathe. In bars 11 and 15 one word is spread over two or three notes. The left hand plays chords that change in the middle of the bar.
Practice tip: Count the opening “In the” as “one-and-a, two”: the dot makes “In” long and “the” short. Lines 2 and 4 are the same music, so there are only three lines to learn.
The words
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago.
A short history
Christina Rossetti, one of the best-known English poets of her day, wrote the poem as “A Christmas Carol”. It was printed in the American magazine Scribner’s Monthly in January 1872 and in a book of her poems in 1875. Snow in Bethlehem is rare, and writers have pointed out that the frost and snow are Rossetti’s picture of a cold, hard world into which Jesus is born.
Gustav Holst set the poem in 1906 for The English Hymnal and called the tune “Cranham”, after the village of Cranham in Gloucestershire. Because the lines of the poem are uneven, the tune has to bend to fit them, which is why some words are sung over several notes.
A grander setting by Harold Darke, written in 1909, is often sung by cathedral choirs; Holst’s is the one congregations know.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Gustav Holst, 1906 (“Cranham”)
- Words
- Christina Rossetti, 1872
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 4/4
- Length
- 16 bars
- Tempo
- Gently, crotchet = 76
- Difficulty
- Level 3: Notes below middle C (piece 55 of 201)
- Type
- Carol
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
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