s Thoughts from the Physics Chick: Christmas carols: Infant holy

Friday, March 06, 2009

Christmas carols: Infant holy

"Infant holy, infant lowly" is the English version of the traditional Polish carol "W żłobie leży." (If you can pronounce that, you're more talented than I am; I had enough trouble just finding the proper diacritics.)

This traditional carol first appeared in English in 1921. In the spirit of improving your music snobbery, I must inform you that the final notes are generally sung wrong in English. Due to an early misprint, the last three notes are often sung F-D-C (where the song is in the key of C), but they should actually be sung E-D-C. (It's a shame, because that quirky cadence is actually one of the things I like best about the song.)

Here's the original Polish version (with the words, so you can sing along!):



And here are two English versions:

East Nazarine College a capella choir, 2007:




AcaBella, 2006:




Bonus: Singing Christmas Tree, Broadway Church, Vancouver, BC, 2006:



This is a very nice rendition but the setup of the "Singing Christmas Tree" is more than a little quirky. It's kind of like "Hollywood Squares" meets Christmas.


Honorable mention:

This is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing beautiful arrangement by Mack Wilberg. I can't embed it because of copyright reasons, but do click on it if you get a chance.

2 Comments:

At March 14, 2009 12:41 AM, Blogger Th. said...

.

I love this song, but I didn't recognize it at all listening to the Polish version first.

 
At March 20, 2009 4:28 PM, Blogger Katya said...

Yeah. It's kind of crazy how wrong they got it. Good thing the English version is right.

 

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