A Child’s Carol
As a young pre-teen, I ‘invented’ on the piano (I had not yet learned to ‘compose’) a series of harmonies that I liked, and played them over and over for days if not weeks. When I became a church organist and choir director to help put me through music school (and discovered I LOVED it!) I composed a melody to these harmonies, and lyrics as well, and so created the Child’s Carol. Later on, when my first daughter was studying flute, I wrote a flute overlay for the carol, and started to adapt it for the many requests I had. A Child’s Carol is found in SSA, SATB and Unison Children+SATB versions with accompaniments for piano, guitars, harp and string orchestra. Along the way I added a second flute line. The ‘Island City Singers and Instrumentalists’, a choir I conducted for many years, performed and recorded a somewhat definitive version of the piece, accompanied by six guitars- three strumming ‘up’ and three ‘down’ which created an interesting harp like effect. My flautist daughter, now an architect, has appreciated the ‘additive architecture’ approach I took in building this piece up over half a century!
There are two clips of this piece. The first is the SSA version performed by the delightful FACE Treble Choir under Iwan Edwards while the second is the recording made in 1969 by the Island City Singers and Instrumentalists, referred to above. It is the original SATB version to which I added solo soprano and baritone lines with texts from the Biblical Christmas Story– available upon request. Soloists are Sharry Flett - currently starring in her twenty-first season on Canada’s Statford stage - and Jimmy Hutchinson now a veteran of many European opera stages. We often sang with The Canadian Brass Quintet, which is also heard on this clip.
Both clips start at the beginning of the carol and then move to the second half of the piece.
