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Piano sheet music for kids · Hymn · Level 4: Up to the C above
Be Thou My Vision
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 3/4, 16 bars. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
About this arrangement
The Irish hymn, sung to the folk tune Slane. It moves in steady crotchets in 3/4, with a few slurred pairs of quavers (eighth notes) sung to one word, like “my” and “best”. The tune covers more than an octave, from the G below middle C to the C above, so the hand travels: down for “vi-sion, O” in bar 2, up for the third line, and back to middle C for the end. Most lines finish on a long note held for the whole bar. The left hand plays a waltz bass, a low note then a chord, through C, F, G and A minor.
Practice tip: Learn it line by line; each line is four bars and one breath. Let the long note at the end of each line ring for all three beats.
The words
Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart; Naught be all else to me, save that thou art; Thou my best thought in the day and the night, Waking or sleep ing, thy presence my light.
A short history
The words go back to an Irish prayer, “Rop tú mo baile”, in Middle Irish of about the 10th or 11th century and sometimes said to be by Saint Dallán Forgaill. Mary Byrne translated it into English prose in 1905, and Eleanor Hull turned her translation into verse in 1912, in The Poem-Book of the Gael. The words here are Hull’s first verse as the Church of Ireland printed it in 1919.
The tune is an Irish folk melody first printed in 1909 in Patrick Joyce’s Old Irish Folk Music and Songs, as “With My Love on the Road”. When it became a hymn tune it was named Slane, after the hill in County Meath where Saint Patrick is said to have lit a fire on Easter Eve in defiance of the High King.
The words and tune were first put together in the Church of Ireland’s hymnal of 1919.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Irish folk tune “Slane” (printed 1909)
- Words
- Old Irish, translated by Mary Byrne, 1905; verse by Eleanor Hull, 1912
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 3/4
- Length
- 16 bars
- Tempo
- Gently, crotchet = 88
- Difficulty
- Level 4: Up to the C above (piece 120 of 201)
- Type
- Hymn
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
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