Wassail! ABC Fakebook

My wife loves Christmas, and she loves singing, so every year she looks forward to singing Christmas carols with great anticipation, and I don't mean the Hollywood stuff like Jingle Bells or White Christmas, I mean the old carols from way, way back, like before the relentless march of technology replaced woad with indigo. Inevitably some time in early December she digs out the Oxford Book of Carols and asks me to accompany some singing on the piano. Now the Oxford Book of Carols is a great book, but all the music in it is in four-part vocal harmony, which is about easy to sight-read on the piano as climbing a mistletoe tree in a blizzard.

So this year (written in 2004) I'm getting ahead of the game. I've gone through a bunch of good Christmas songs and written them out in fakebook style, using the software I put together for my other project. These include some really amazing songs which are part of our common heritage and really deserve to be widely known, so while I'm at it I'm putting them out there for everybody else to use too.

Many thanks to my wife Anne for help with the chord arrangements, though the final decisions here are all mine, and my musical ability is pretty sketchy, so if you think the chords for a song are not what you're used to or are just plain wrong, you should blame me. I wouldn't take these versions as authoritative by any means.

The Tunes:

Pick your key and click on a format.

Adeste Fidelesxx: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	More Latin lyrics here, we need more Latin in the world, don't you think?
Angels We Have Heard on High: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	More French lyrics here
Boar's Head Carol: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Sung every Christmas at Queen's College, Oxford, first published in 1521.
Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	The tune was a medieval ritournelle, a lively court dance. The carol with words was first published in 1553. More French lyrics here.
Cherry Tree Carol: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	There are many carols with this name, this one just happens to be my wife's favorite.
Cutty Wren: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Ridiculous lyrics for a beatiful tune. See http://www.old-glory.co.uk/cutty.html. R. Vaughan Williams was much enamored of the tune, "Rafe's Waltz" is now an English Country Dance.
Deck the Hall: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Welsh New Year's carol
Gloucestershire Wassail: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Wassail, Wes hal, Old English, 'Be thou whole' (hale); a form of salutation.
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Pedants look here
Good King Wenceslas : abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Charles Wesley wrote the hymn in 1839, Felix Mendelssohn wrote the tune in 1840, and in 1855 W.H. Cummings put the two together.
I Saw Three Ships: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear
In the Bleak Midwinter: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	The history here.
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Lyrics by Edmund H. Sears, Boston, 1849. Tune by Richard S. Willis, 1850.
My Dancing Day: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Cornish carol from Sandys, Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern, published 1833
O Come All Ye Faithful: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	The non-Latin version.
Sussex Carol: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear
Sussex Mummers' Carol: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Sung by Christmas Mummers from the neighbourhood of Horsham.
The First Noel: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Says the Oxford Book of Carols: "The carol cannot be later than the seventeenth century."
The Holly and the Ivy: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Possibly originally sung as a dialogue, a dance between the lads and the maids.
Wassail Song: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Sources possibly old as Charles I, so think Shakespeare!
We Wish You A Merry Christmas: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Says the Oxford book: "still in all too common use by modern doorstep carollers."
Wexford Carol: abc pdf jpg midi See&Hear	Irish, County Wexford

More tunes may follow as I get the time to enter them, someday.

Jaypegs and midis and stuff, oh my!

What are all these three-letter acronym links on this page?

abc: ABC is a portable, human readable format for writing down music. It's very handy, easy to learn and use, and is supported by a ton of free software and shareware. If you're into music and you don't know about it, you should.
pdf: Stands for "Portable Document Format", readable by the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click on 'pdf' to get nice, printable sheet music. These PDF files were created by abcm2ps and Ghostscript
jpg: An image of the sheet music. You can use this if for some reason PDF doesn't work for you. To zoom in and make the images larger, try clicking on them--the zoom behavior depends on your browser. Also created by abcm2ps and Ghostscript.
midi: "MIDI" stands for Music Instrument Digital Interface. Clicking on the "midi" link in one of the tunes should make music come out of your computer. If it doesn't then give that friend of yours who knows computers a call.
I know mediocre midi is an abomination in the eyes of God (Calliope, anyway), and hardly qualifies to be called "music", but these midis might be helpful to those who don't read sheet so good. I find them helpful when trying to find the right range to sing a tune in.

How did you do all this?

If I have accomplished great things, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. --Isaac Newton

Actually, I did very little, but re-used a lot of very handy things. Here is a list of references and inspirations:

HTML::Mason is a set of Perl libraries for building web sites. Inspired by this article about using Mason to build a photo gallery, I used the caching and autohandling features to build this site.
I upload one version of each song in ABC format, and all the other formats in all the other keys are generated on-demand and cached. The cache is keyed to the original file, so if I make changes to it, the other versions are regenerated when they're requested.
ABC is a simple, portable way to transcribe music that's been around for more than a dozen years. Since it's simple and also open, it's inspired a whole bunch of useful free software around it, including some of the following.
abcm2ps is software that converts ABC music to PostScript, a printer format developed by Adobe. abcm2ps is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and PostScript is an open standard, and all these free and open standards make all this work possible!
abc2midi and abc2abc are programs from the abcMIDI project, also released under the GNU GPL. The former creates the midi files on the site, and the latter handles transposing keys.
Ghostscript is a PostScript interpreter, which lets me change the PostScript output from abcm2ps into jpg and PDF files. Did I mention the GPL?
The Stephen Foster Song Book, Richard Jackson, Dover Publications, 1974. This has been a primary reference so far. A very nice presentation of the original sheet music, I'd highly recommend it.
"A Treasury of Stephen Foster", Random House, 1946, is helpful and interesting.
Mark Twain's America, A Portrait In Piano" is an album by Jacqueline Schwab, highly recommended if you're looking for ideas and approaches to music of this era. Someday I expect Jacqueline Schwab's playing to be part of the dictionary entry for the word "sublime."

Can I Have One, Too?

Well, sure, kid. The ludicrously tiny collection of scripts that generates this site is available right here. It's under the GPL, too. Help yourself. Once your site is up all you have to do is copy .abc files into the abc-src directory and everything else takes care of itself.

Your comments are welcome: April 2004