The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #107311 Message #2224559
Posted By: Ron Davies
29-Dec-07 - 05:01 PM
Thread Name: Chords Add: Silent Night
Subject: RE: Silent Night - dont tell the folk police
The arrangement for guitar which seems to have been used at the time was also somewhat different in chording and tempo than what we normally sing these days--and if anything, even simpler.
Every year my group's Christmas concerts are sponsored by a different embassy. Recently it was the Austrian embassy. So we did an arrangement of Stille Nacht very similar to the original, I understand. Magical--it really did transport you--- one guitar and two voices, as I recall--in front of the packed Kennedy Center Concert Hall. The rest of us just did a second "Schlaf in himmlischer Rueh'" (echo). It really had a flavor of a gently rocking song--and what I might describe as a Tyrolean waltz approach--which I gather would have been close to the original.
A small group of us also sang at the embassy a few days before. The ambassador told us about the problems she had had looking for a Christmas tree on 24 December--which was their traditional time to put it up--not before. Also a lot of families evidently have poems which are traditionally recited at the same time.