It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

About this arrangement

Richard Storrs Willis’s tune, the one usually sung in America, in a gently rocking 6/8: two big beats in each bar. It starts on a pickup, “It”, and then leaps a sixth from G up to E, so the hand moves straight away. In the third line, “Peace on the earth”, the tune drops to the E above middle C and climbs through two black keys, F sharp and G sharp, marked with sharp signs. Several words are sung over two notes joined by a curved line, and every line ends on a long tied note. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord, or two chords, in each bar.

Practice tip: Lines 1, 2 and 4 begin with the same two bars, so learn “It came up-on the mid-night clear” first. Practise line 3 slowly: E, F sharp, G sharp, A is a little climb with two black keys in the middle.

The words

It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold: “Peace on the earth, goodwill to men, from heaven's allgracious King!” The world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing.

A short history

Edmund Hamilton Sears, a Unitarian minister in Wayland, Massachusetts, wrote the poem in 1849, and it was printed in a Boston paper, The Christian Register, on 29 December that year. Unusually for a carol, it says little about Bethlehem. Sears was writing just after the United States’ war with Mexico, and the poem is about a quarrelling world that has not yet listened to the angels’ song of peace.

The tune was published in 1850 by Richard Storrs Willis, an American composer who had studied with Felix Mendelssohn in Germany. It began as a “choir study” with other words and became known as “Carol”. By the 1860s it was being printed with Sears’s poem, and it is still the usual tune in the United States.

In Britain and much of the Commonwealth the words are often sung to a different tune, “Noel”, which Arthur Sullivan adapted from an English melody in 1874.

Quick facts

Tune

Richard Storrs Willis, 1850 (“Carol”)

Words

Edmund Hamilton Sears, 1849

Key

C major

Time signature

6/8

Length

16 bars and a pickup

Tempo

Gently, dotted crotchet = 56

Difficulty

Level 6: Moving on (piece 179 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

Questions and answers