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Piano sheet music for kids · Carol · Level 6: Moving on
O Little Town of Bethlehem
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 4/4, 16 bars and a pickup. 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
Lewis Redner’s 1868 tune “St. Louis”, the American tune for this carol and well known in Australia too, arranged in C major. It starts on a pickup, “O”, and the hand moves: the thumb sits on middle C for “lit-tle town”, the tune drops to the A below middle C in bar 2 and to the G below in bar 3, and climbs to the A above middle C in bars 5 and 14. Watch for the D sharp on “town” in bar 1 and “fears” in bar 13, and the pair of quavers on “we” in bar 3 and “-lent” in bar 7. The left hand plays chords in C, F, G7, A minor, D minor and E7.
Practice tip: Find the D sharp before you start: it is the black key just below E, and it comes back in bar 13. Learn the first line well: the last line starts with the same eight notes, and bar 6 repeats bar 2.
The words
O little town of Bethlehem, How still we see thee lie! Above thy deep and dreamless sleep The silent stars go by; Yet in thy dark streets shineth The everlasting Light; The hopes and fears of all the years Are met in thee tonight.
A short history
Phillips Brooks, the rector of Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia, rode on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 1865 and watched the stars over the fields where the shepherds were said to have kept their flocks. Three years later he wrote this poem for the children of his Sunday school and asked his organist, Lewis Redner, to set it to music.
Redner later said the tune would not come all week, and that he woke in the night before the service and wrote it down in a rush; the children sang it for the first time at Christmas 1868. The tune is called “St. Louis”, a playful spelling of Lewis’s name.
In Britain the hymn is usually sung to a different tune, “Forest Green”, an English folk melody that Ralph Vaughan Williams arranged for The English Hymnal in 1906. Redner’s is the American tune, and it is well known in Australia too.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Lewis H. Redner, 1868 (“St. Louis”)
- Words
- Phillips Brooks, 1868
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 4/4
- Length
- 16 bars and a pickup
- Tempo
- Calmly, crotchet = 88
- Difficulty
- Level 6: Moving on (piece 180 of 201)
- Type
- Carol
- 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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