SKU: A0.1136166

“Joy to the World� is, perhaps, the most widely performed Christmas carol, having appeared in nearly 1800 different hymnals since its initial publication, according to hymnary.org.

The text was written by the prolific English hymn-writer Isaac Watts (1674-1748) as a paraphrase of Psalm 98 and published in his Psalms of David Imitated (1719) under the heading “The Messiah's Coming and Kingdom.� The paraphrase is a Christological interpretation of the psalm — i.e., an understanding of a passage of Old Testament scripture as pointing to the Christ of the New Testament.

As hymn texts and tunes were often printed separately, Watts indicated that “Joy to the World� should be sung to any Common Meter (CM) tune — a poetic meter consisting of four lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Consider the CM tunes, “Amazing Grace� and “O Little Town of Bethlehem,� for example — both very different from the tune commonly associated with Watts’ text today.

That tune was written, or at least arranged, by the American hymn-writer and music educator Lowell Mason (1792-1872) and published in The National Psalmist (Boston, 1848). Mason had published three earlier arrangements of the tune he named “ANTIOCH,� the first in 1836 and attributed as being “from Handel.� Although Mason was a great admirer and student of Handel's music, and though the first four notes of Mason's “ANTIOCH� are the same as the first four in the chorus “Lift up your heads� from Handel's Messiah, the similarity ends there.

This arrangement for brass quintet features a “bell-tone�-like fanfare in the introduction, interlude, and ending; textural contrasts between high and low brass; and tasteful re-harmonizations of the tune in the middle and concluding verses.