Thirty Old And New Christmas Carols (Male Voices)

For Church, Home or Community Singing

By G Pitcher

A nice, reasonably priced collection for the TTBB men's choral croup at our church. Has practically all the traditional favorites and a few new ones as sell. A good value.

As amateur-choire from a little dutch village we have chosen this booklet because of the broad sortiment of carols. Broad , because the songs came from very divers lands of the european christ world. Even from the russian orthodox side. The only comment we have that we miss the original...

language of several songs. We mostly sing it in every original language: German,English,Italian,French or Latin, but some also in Dutch, because most of us have learned it as child in the dutch language.

This compilation of classic Christmas carols (almost all "sacred" rather than "secular") dates to the 1960s, but has aged well. The arrangements are friendly to the male voice; high tenor never goes above a G, and while low bass reaches a low E-flat in one or two places, bottoming...

out on a G is more usual. Although the pieces are scored TTBB, three basses and a single high tenor can perform them just fine. Harmonies are conservative and tight; if you require dissonance and "creative" chords to hold your interest, look elsewhere. The collection passes the melody back and forth among the three upper voices (low bass isn't featured much), so that interest is sustained for singers as well as audience. This is a fine reminder of days when the whole world sang without pretense, and I recommend it highly. Get together with three of your male friends for the holidays, grab some of these little booklets (on light and easily-carried, yet sufficiently robust, paper), and have fun.

A selection like this is hard to find. Well arranged for 4 male parts and a good selection of 30 pieces . In 50 years of choir singing, I have not come across such a fine book of carols for TTBB.

"New" needs to be removed from the title of this collection. But, it has good standard (nothing fancy) arrangements of many Christmas favorites. Not much for secular, though. Good for "pick-up" men's chorus caroling.