The Bell Carol - David Hicken (Carols Of Christmas) Carol Of The Bells Piano Solo

"The Bell Carol" MP3, MIDI & HQ Audio Files: http://smarturl.it/bellcarol From the album "Carols Of Christmas" Arranged, Performed & Produced by David Hicken The Bell Carol is based on the traditional Ukrainian folk song “Shchedryk” which originally had nothing to do with Christmas. The folk melody, which was originally associated with the New Year, was adapted by Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych in 1914 using words by Peter Wilhousky, and became known as Carol Of The Bells. In 2013 I decided to write an album of Christmas piano arrangements based on the carols that I grew up with in England. I arranged ten traditional carols and wrote one original composition, and the twelfth and final piece “The Bell Carol”, almost never came to be. Carol Of the Bells was virtually unknown in England when I was growing up, and the first time I heard it was when I arrived in America. Although it has been popular in the U.S. for a long time, its popularity soared after John Williams used it in his score for the movie “Home Alone”. Over the years, I have taught the piece to many choirs, all of which struggled with the piece. As a choir director, I will admit that I found the piece very monotonous and didn’t pay it much attention. However, as my album was to be aimed at a mainly American audience, I decided to arrange the piece for piano anyway. I completed the arrangement in a couple of days and was surprised at the enthusiastic response that it received. It’s a fun piece to play, but there’s not much to it, and it’s not particularly difficult. It does require stamina, but a piece that requires stamina doesn’t necessarily mean that it is difficult. Of course “easy” and “difficult” are relative terms, but anyone who has had proper classical training for a number of years, and has studied scales, sight reading, music theory, ear training and varied repertoire, should have no problem with this piece. When I first released the piece, I did not include fingering, because I assumed that anyone attempting to play it would know which fingers to use. I did add fingering later as well as performance notes as to how to learn it. Soon after completing the piece, it was suggested that I make a video of it. Although I thought it was a great idea, I really didn’t think that people would be interested in watching me sit at the piano and play this carol, so I felt that a story was necessary in order to keep the viewers’ interest. It’s no easy task to come up with a story for a piece of music that has no lyrics, and although I struggled with ideas, a story was developed. Christmas was fast approaching, and it was necessary to film and release the video quickly in order to market and promote the CD as well as the video. Although Hawaii is known for its perfect weather, we filmed on one of the worst days of the year, and were lucky to have a two hour window where it didn’t rain. The strong winds that day were a little scary for the piano, but turned out to be advantageous for the shoot in some ways. We were not able to film everything that we had planned because we ran out of time, and it would not have been possible to fit everything in the video anyway. I was very much aware that the end result was a video that was random, but I decided to release it anyway and hoped that people would enjoy it perhaps as an “art piece”. It turns out that people really did like it, and I couldn’t have imagined just how popular it would become. Yes, I understand all the comments about “what’s up with the girl?” and “what’s going on here?”, and really I have no answer for them because it is what it is. If I could go back and do it again, there would be no girl and no randomness, but just me playing the piece. This latest video is my answer to that. Although it doesn’t have the beautiful scenery of Hawaii, pianists can more clearly see what I’m doing when I play the piece. Since releasing the piece in 2013, it has sold thousands of copies ...