At this year’s Christmas Concert, the program accidentally included the lyrics to “Joy to the World.”  In the past, my students have played it as a singalong for the audience, but we haven’t done so in a few years.  I’m not sure why the lyrics got included in the program, but I briefly contemplated “winging it” and shouting the chords at my students while everyone sang.

I did not give into that temptation.  One that I have learned is that other people’s errors do not necessitate me fixing them in haphazard ways (usually).  We simply announced there was a mistake in the program and went on from there.

That said, the larger mistake was, indeed, mine—I should have put it in the Christmas Concert!  I love “Joy to the World,” and it’s really fun to play and sing.  I suppose next year I’ll have to toss it into the mix.

With that, here is 12 December 2024’s “TBT^2: Joy to the World“:

Tomorrow my students have their annual Christmas concert.  Neither of my Ensembles are performing “Joy to the World” this year, but it remains one of my favorites.  I love its rollicking and robust melody, which seems to charge forth, first with that delicious downward D major scale, and then it’s jaunty, bouncy return back up the scale in leaps.

I’ll have to dust this one off for next year’s concert, and I will certainly be playing it at church (if I have not already done so by the time this post publishes).  It’s one of the best to belt out with a room full of people.

With that, here is 14 December 2023’s “TBT: Joy to the World“:

Somehow, I have not reblogged my 2019 post about “Joy to the World,” one of my favorite Christmas carols, in four years!

I’ve always loved the bouncy, joyful nature of this piece, and I almost always program it for our annual Christmas Concert.  Indeed, this year my Middle School Music Ensemble students performed it.  While we’re working on the piece, I always give my students a little speech to try to get them into the spirit of the piece.  Essentially, I tell them to imagine what it would have been like to be a shepherd on that starlit night, and for a heavenly host of infinite singing angels to burst suddenly into the sky, belting out “For Unto Us a Child Is Born!”

Our goal, I tell my students, is to capture some fraction of the overawing joy and majesty of that moment when we perform “Joy to the World.”

With that, here is 10 December 2019’s “Joy to the World“:

The musical mood continues here at The Portly Politico—as does the joy (check out my “Joy of” posts here, here, and here).  The Christmas season always lifts my spirits, and the boost from my piece on Milo and Romantic music has further buoyed them (if you’d like to elevate my mood to transcendent heights, consider purchasing some of my music).

With yesterday’s post on Christmas carols, I thought it might be interesting to look deeper into the most joyous of them all:  Isaac Watts‘s “Joy to the World.”

Like many hymns, “Joy to the World” has a fixed lyricist, but the tune itself is a matter of some complexity.  Wikipedia credits George Frideric Handel’s “Antioch” with providing inspiration for part of the iconic melody, with American composer Lowell Mason arranging and adapting the tune.

What a tune it is.  It’s a testament to the brilliance of Handel and Mason that a descending major scale—it’s transcribed in the key of D in my Free Will Baptist Hymnal, and is in the same key in other hymnals I’ve perused—can have such impact.  Much of the tune is built around descending lines, like the song of the angels at Bethlehem showering down in light and joy on the shepherds below.

It’s little wonder, then, that “Joy to the World” is the most-published hymn, according to Hymnary.org.  It’s appeared in 1387 separate hymnals, per the website, though their list hasn’t been updated in a decade.  The next closest contender, the wonderful “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” isn’t even close, coming in at 974 hymnal appearances.  “Joy to the World” is the only one of the top twenty most popular hymns to break quadruple digits.

After those cascading descending lines, the melody settles into a chugging series of ostinato eighth notes, punctuated with some jaunty sixteenth notes, before the legendary octave leap (on “heav’n” in the first verse) before descending back to the tonic—all to start again, back up to the top of the octave.

“Joy to the World” is not my favorite Christmas song of all time—that’s “O Holy Night,” the operatic power ballad of Christmas carols that, I contend is objectively the best Christmas tune ever written—but it’s definitely near the top.  It’s certainly fun to play on any instrument, and challenging (see the aforementioned octave leap).  It’s simple harmonic structure makes it great to teach younger students, and its form is flexible to accommodate many styles.

Indeed, my middle school musicians will perform it at our big Christmas concert this Friday.  They’re doing a fairly straightforward version, and Southern Baptist style—we’re just doing verses one, two, and four (I don’t know the origins of this practice of skipping the third verse in favor of the fourth, but if anyone knows, please leave a comment).  It’s short, sweet, and joyous.

But one year, my high school class went really bonkers with “Joy the World.”  A longstanding tradition of my Christmas concerts is to incorporate some kind of classic 70s or 80s hard rock or heavy metal tune into a Christmas theme.  One year we did “The Final Countdown” into “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” for example.  Last year, a student rewrote the lyrics to “Crazy Train” to “Christmas Train,” which made for an explosive closer.

One year, we took some liberties with “Joy to the World” (my apologies to Watts and Mason).  We went from the buoyant D major of the tune into an abrupt D minor riff—that of Ronnie James Dio’s “Holy Diver,” which we changed to “Merry Christmas.”  The lyrics were altered to “Merry Christmas!/You’ve been down too long in the Arctic Sea/Oh what’s becoming of me”—etc., etc.

The crowd—especially the parents—loved it, and it’s gone down as one of my favorite Christmas concert memories.  There still exists a photograph of me playing bass back-to-back with a young guitarist.  The young man in question was nervous about standing and playing at the end of a long platform that jutted into the audience, but I told him to stand toward the finale.  The grin on his face is laser-etched into my brain.

If that isn’t joy, I don’t know what is.