In 1846, the Mormon pioneers left behind their beautiful city of Nauvoo, Illinois and headed west towards an uncertain future in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Some pioneers traveled in covered wagons, while others pulled handcarts or simply walked.
The journey was rough, and fraught with hardship. Many pioneers never made it to the Salt Lake valley, and their loved ones buried them along the way. In the midst of all this sorrow and hardship, William Clayton penned these words of hope and faith, and the Saints sang them to sustain them on their journey. William Clayton's hymn has become an anthem of the Latter-Day Saints, and one of their most beloved hymns.
I wrote this arrangement for Pioneer Day, 2002. I used a children's song, "Whenever I Think About Pioneers" to introduce the hymn, and I used the chorus of "The Handcart Song" as a bridge between the third and last verses, to draw both children and adult listeners into the hymn. The voices and piano accompaniment surrounding the last verse came to me first, in a flash of inspiration so intense that I almost couldn't write it down fast enough.
The last verse starts out with the joyful cadence of "The Handcart Song", but it quickly descends into a funeral dirge, "And should we die, before our journey's through ..." This changes to a hymn of joy, "But if our lives are spared again, ... Oh how we'll make this chorus swell" with carillon bells pealing wildly in the piano accompaniment. The chorus does swell (without missing a beat) on the first "All is well", and then after a pause to reflect, the song finishes with a quiet, introspective "All is well" by the choir in unison. The piano seals it with its own "Amen".
This hymn was included in the first LDS hymnbook, compiled by Emma Smith and printed in 1835.
I wrote this arrangement for Thanksgiving, 2002. I had recently been called to serve as the choir director for our local congregation, and was casting about for a good Thanksgiving hymn. All the selections in our meetinghouse music library were too "familiar", and I was looking for something different. I looked in the topical index in the LDS hymnal, under "Gratitude" and "Thanksgiving", and the songs listed there were also too familiar.
I happened upon "God is Love" during church services one Sunday, and I was struck by the message of the song. I was reminded of God telling Moses "All things bear record of me" (Moses 6:63), of Alma testifying to Korihor "Yea, and all things denote there is a God" (Alma 30:44), and of the psalmist singing "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork" (Ps 19:2, also Psalm 8). The traditional Thanksgiving hymns talk of these same things, so it seemed like a good match.
The tempo range given in the hymnbook is fairly broad, 84 to 104 beats per minute. The hymn is written in 3/4 time. For the first two verses, I added a piano accompaniment in 6/8 time, and sped things up a bit, to 110-120 bpm. The first verse is women in unison and 2-part harmony; the second verse is men in 2-part and 4-part harmony, with the women humming in the background. The third verse is four parts plus piano, straight out of the hymnbook. After the third verse, the piano plays a 6/8 ending and the choir echoes the last line: "God is love".
Don't let the 6/8 and 3/4 time thing fool you. An eighth note is still an eighth note. Listen to the MIDI file and you'll understand.
According to Christie's and Mike's Christmas Page (now a dead link on the Web), "Carol of the Bells is an adaptation of an ancient Ukrainian folk song called a "shchedrivka". An arrangement by Mykola Leontovych (1877-1921) was popularized in the 1930's by Oleksander Koshyts (1875-1944), a Ukrainian choir director who worked in the US and Canada. It has since become an American Christmas classic."
Very few Christmas carols are written in a minor key: Coventry Carol, What Child is This, Pat-a-Pan, Farandole, We Three Kings, ... okay, more than I would have guessed. Most of the songs on that list are very old, aren't they? "We Three Kings" is one of my favorites.
My youngest daughter asked if I would put together a duet for her and a friend to play on marimba at the high school Christmas concert. For some reason, this combination of "Carol of the Bells" and "We Three Kings" came immediately to mind. I worked on it, off and on, for two days and this is the result.
The trio arrangement adds chimes, or tubular bells, to the duet.
Created by Ray Depew, 29 July 2002