This is a more sombre piece. Worth playing ken

https://app.box.com/s/ip3gbtrh0n2oy124jma1h94sm9ltq6bm

Hi Kens,


A very nice version of that lovely Christmas Carol.

Brian007

Melancholy chords indeed! Something from the middle ages?

Wikipedia says:

It is one of the oldest extant carols, dated to the 16th century or earlier. The earliest known printed edition of the carol is in a broadsheet dated 1760. The traditional English melody is in the minor mode. The transitive use of the verb rest in the sense "to keep, cause to continue to remain" is typical of 16th to 17th century language (the phrase rest you merry is recorded in the 1540s). Etymonline.com notes that the first line "often is mis-punctuated" as "God rest you, merry gentlemen" because in contemporary language, rest has lost its original use. This is the case already in the 1775 variant, and is also reflected by Dickens' replacement of the verb rest by bless in his 1843 quote of the incipit as "God bless you, merry gentlemen". The adjective merry in Early Modern English had a wider sense of "pleasant; bountiful, prosperous".

I think these days, if you are merry then you've had one too many!

Hugh