Carol of the Bells

Carol of the Bells began as Shchedryk, a Ukrainian song for the new year. The Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych built it for chorus on a four-note figure he found in a collection of folk chants, at the request of the conductor Oleksander Koshyts. The words tell of a swallow flying into a house to promise the family a bountiful year, and the name comes from the Ukrainian word for generous. Students at Kyiv University first sang it in December 1916.

Koshyts took it west with the Ukrainian National Chorus, on a tour that began in 1919 and was meant to win friends abroad for a newly independent Ukraine. The chorus sang it at Carnegie Hall in New York on October 5, 1922, and the audience took to it at once.

In 1936 Peter Wilhousky, an arranger for the NBC radio orchestra, wrote new English words about bells and caroling, and those words, Hark how the bells, are what made it a Christmas carol. They are still under copyright, and this page carries no words at all. The tune has been through everything since: George Winston's December in 1982, Mannheim Steamroller, John Williams's Home Alone score in 1990, and Savatage's Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 in 1995, the record that led to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

The whole piece stands on the figure, G, F sharp, G, E in this key, a quarter, two eighths and a quarter, around and around under everything else. On a mandolin in E minor that is the fifth, fourth, fifth and second frets of the D course, and the page keeps it going for most of the thirty seven bars. Pick the eighths lightly and land the quarters, and count in three even when the figure starts to feel like two. The scale in the middle starts on the B at the fourth fret of the G course, and it is the one stretch of the piece that climbs.