Return to composition list: By Genre / By Opus
For Any Combination of Instruments
Duration: 4'5"
Our high school hired a new principal, Michael Flanagan, at the beginning of my freshman year. At his old school, students had played seasonally appropriate music in the lobby as students entered in the mornings, so Mr. Flanagan approached our band director, Jason Bielik, as the holiday season drew near to ask for some holiday cheer. Although not a cheery person by disposition, Mr. Bielik agreed to try it out. He had some books of quartet arrangements available. However, they were written very simply in chorale style, and I found them to be insufficiently interesting. Therefore (with Mr. Bielik’s blessing), I went home and wrote some of my own.
Ultimately, we only got to play in the lobby one morning due to the New England ice storm of December 2008. (And we never got to test out Mr. Flanagan’s idea of having wandering minstrels serenade through the halls the day before winter break!) The idea was not brought up the next year, and Mr. Flanagan was gone the year after that.
The following winter, my teacher Elizabeth Ferguson (née Page) approached me in the library one day. She had heard about my arrangements and was interested in using them for her string trio at church. I was happy to oblige, resulting in the trio settings.
Many years later, the arrangements were still sitting around and, looking back on them, were really not all that bad. In the course of preparation for publication in 2015, some few edits were made with my newfound knowledge (for instance, functional harmonies and bass lines…), but the spirit of each remains intact.