Silent Night

Carol in 6/8, D major, 40 bpm

At a glance
Key	D major
Level	Beginner
Type	Carol in 6/8
Tempo	40 bpm
Position	First position, up to the fifth fret
Also	Gruber and Mohr, 1818; Twelve bars, no repeats

Joseph Mohr, an assistant priest, wrote the poem in 1816. Two years later, on Christmas Eve 1818, he took it to the schoolmaster and organist Franz Xaver Gruber and asked for a melody and a guitar accompaniment in time for that night's mass. Gruber wrote it the same day and the two of them sang it that evening at St Nicholas's church in Oberndorf, near Salzburg, with Mohr playing the guitar. The earliest manuscript that survives is in Mohr's handwriting and was dated by researchers to about 1820. It turned up in 1995.

The carol went out through the Alps with traveling singing families and spread from there. What reached the world was not quite what Gruber wrote. His setting is a siciliana, marked moderato, a rocking pastoral dance in 6/8 with more decoration in the melody than the version we sing. Through the 1800s the ornaments fell away and the tempo slowed until it became the lullaby everybody knows, and that smoothed version is what is written out here. UNESCO put the carol on its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2011.

Twelve bars and no repeats, which makes it the shortest thing on this shelf and one of the most useful. Four of the twelve bars are the same bar note for note, and two more are the same idea with one note fewer, so half the carol is under your fingers as soon as the first line is. What is left is the pair that carries "round yon virgin", the three that carry "sleep in heavenly peace", and the last bar.

On a mandolin in D nothing goes below the open D course and nothing goes past the fifth fret, so the left hand can be left alone and all the attention goes to the right. The held note that ends each phrase is a dotted quarter, three eighths long, and the one that ends the carol is twice that, which at this speed is a second and a half of silence unless you tremolo it. That is the whole exercise: get the tremolo started cleanly on the held note, keep it even, and stop it before the next phrase lifts in. Play it once a night through December and the tremolo will be there in January.

Mandolin tab and sheet music

Both parts, written the way the app plays them: standard notation on top, mandolin tab underneath, chord letters over the bars where the chord changes.

Tuning G D A E. Every note sits in first position, so nothing here moves past the fifth fret. On a phone, drag the sheet sideways to read across a line.

mandolintrainer.com/tunes/silent-night/

Tempo40BPM

Both parts, repeats and allThe melody only, so you can hear the shape of the tune before you pick it apart. The numbers count the dotted quarter note, two to a bar, which is the rocking beat of a lullaby: 30 is slow enough to tremolo every held note, and 50 is about where a room sings it.

Think you have it under your fingers?

Mandolin Trainer listens through your microphone and grades every note of the tunes on its shelf, so you find out where a tune falls apart before the jam does. This one is not on the shelf yet. Free while it is in beta.

Play it in the app

Runs in your browser. The audio never leaves your device. iOS app coming soon.

More tunes

What else is written out here, and what is next in line.