Brass Ensemble,Brass Quintet Horn,Trombone,Trumpet,Tuba - Level 3 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1136166 Composed by Lowell Mason (1792-1872). Arranged by Todd Marchand. Christian,Christmas,Holiday,Sacred,Traditional. Score and parts. 12 pages. Con Spirito Music #736195. Published by Con Spirito Music (A0.1136166). âJoy to the Worldâ 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 âThe Messiah's Coming and Kingdom.â The paraphrase is a Christological interpretation of the psalm â 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 âJoy to the Worldâ should be sung to any Common Meter (CM) tune â 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, âAmazing Graceâ and âO Little Town of Bethlehem,â for example â both very different from the tune commonly associated with Wattsâ 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 âANTIOCH,â the first in 1836 and attributed as being âfrom Handel.â Although Mason was a great admirer and student of Handel's music, and though the first four notes of Mason's âANTIOCHâ are the same as the first four in the chorus âLift up your headsâ from Handel's Messiah, the similarity ends there.This arrangement for brass quintet features a âbell-toneâ-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.©Copyright 2022 Todd Marchand / Con Spirito Music (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Visit www.conspiritomusic.com
