Back, inspired and renewed – a happy Hi and the first opening post of 2014! What I love this winter time for is the great amount of holidays it’s filled with – so many festivities during the winter period – Christmas, New Year’s, St. Valentine’s, and so on and so forth – and all within only two months – you can hardly close one holiday when the next one is already at the door – the lovely winter!
Comparing the fun secular holidays with religious ones, I’ve always found the latter more mysterious. Probably because they have a longer, memory-embedded tradition behind and are always charming to re-discover every year. Right now we are at the threshold of one of such holidays that is called Epiphany and falls for Jan 6 this year. If Epiphany doesn’t sound too familiar to someone, the other popular name for it is Three Kings.
The Bible puts it that after the birth of Jesus three mighty kings – Casper, Melchior, and Balthazar – saw the Star of Bethlehem and came to visit the great king bringing him presents of myrrh, frankincense and gold.
The most successful carol featuring this story was written in 1857 by John Henry Hopkins Jr and is called “We Three Kings” (“Three Kings of Orient” originally). Hopkins used to work as a journalist, lawyer, rector at church and a music teacher. Back at his time it was quite uncommon for a composer to write both music and lyrics for a carol, but Hopkins did both. He actually composed this song only for himself and his family and friends to enjoy. But everyone liked it so much that they ‘forced’ him to publish the work and it soon reached people far out of the Unites States (first of all to the UK) and became one the most popular Christmas Carols.
The original carol’s melody takes you back to the Middle Ages, sounding sad and wistful. But as it often happens with songs as popular as that, it brought about lots of curious arrangements, sometime quite unexpected instrument- and genre-wise. You may even hear music arrangements in the style of hip-hop (which, I must admit, sound unexpectedly good).
Comparing the fun secular holidays with religious ones, I’ve always found the latter more mysterious. Probably because they have a longer, memory-embedded tradition behind and are always charming to re-discover every year. Right now we are at the threshold of one of such holidays that is called Epiphany and falls for Jan 6 this year. If Epiphany doesn’t sound too familiar to someone, the other popular name for it is Three Kings.
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| Three Kings |
The most successful carol featuring this story was written in 1857 by John Henry Hopkins Jr and is called “We Three Kings” (“Three Kings of Orient” originally). Hopkins used to work as a journalist, lawyer, rector at church and a music teacher. Back at his time it was quite uncommon for a composer to write both music and lyrics for a carol, but Hopkins did both. He actually composed this song only for himself and his family and friends to enjoy. But everyone liked it so much that they ‘forced’ him to publish the work and it soon reached people far out of the Unites States (first of all to the UK) and became one the most popular Christmas Carols.
The original carol’s melody takes you back to the Middle Ages, sounding sad and wistful. But as it often happens with songs as popular as that, it brought about lots of curious arrangements, sometime quite unexpected instrument- and genre-wise. You may even hear music arrangements in the style of hip-hop (which, I must admit, sound unexpectedly good).