Taking a Break and a Carol Remake

 I'm going to take a break through New Year's. I found more photos of the house building and it will take me a while to process them for upcoming posts. In the meantime, I wish you the best Christmas, and here is a little poetry for you!

Have you ever wanted to do something and your family just won't cooperate? I wanted to try singing the Christmas Carol, "Ding Dong Merrily on High." I think I first heard it on the '94 Little Women movie. Anyway, I found some music for it and put it in the list of our Christmas Carols. It met with, you know, those things people do when they are uncooperative.

 1 Ding dong, merrily on high!
In heav’n the bells are ringing;
ding dong, verily the sky
is riv’n with angel singing.
Chorus: Gloria, hosannah in excelsis!
Gloria, hosannah in excelsis!

We did okay on the first verse, the chorus was a bit acrobatic but with practice not unattainable.

2 E'en so here below,
let steeple bells be swungen,
And io, io, io,
by priest and people sungen.
Chorus

Here then was a mispronunciation of "io" (which as I understand it is Latin for Joy)...but when it is said as "I-owe" then the confusion starts. I did explain the pronunciation as "ee-oh but then references to Old MacDonald were brought up. Not to mention the archaic past tenses. 

3 Pray ye dutifully prime
your matin chime, ye ringers;
may ye beautifully rhyme
your evetime song, ye singers.
Chorus

Nobody understood "matin chimes." So here I proposed we just leave it at the first verse, but the question was  where does it say there were bells at Jesus' birth? There were plenty more Scripturaly accurate carols to sing instead of ding dong bells. 

Just singing the chorus was out of the question because it takes too much breath to get through it. 

So you see why this song didn't make the list. And I think we need up-beat songs between the slow ones so we don't fall asleep by the 4th verse of some of the others (I won't say which).

But at least the tune could be salvaged, and the next morning I re-wrote the words to be more up-to-date and realistic for modern people:

Ding Dong Merrily I Buy

Words by Elizabeth Humphrey 

 

1. Ding dong merrily I buy;

The cash reg’sters are ringing!

Ding dong! Verily the door

Is throng'd with Cred’tors singing!

Chorus:

Oh, you owe! Oh, you owe!

Oh, you owe! Oh, you owe!

2. E’en so ev’ry year

The credit cards are swipen!

And I-owe I-owe I-owe

Before the presents ripen!

Chorus:

Oh no I owe! Oh no I owe!

Oh no I owe! Oh no I owe!

3. Pray you dutifully Prime

Your frequent Am’zon orders!

Please come beaut’fly on time

Fedex and UPS drivers!

Chorus:

Oh no I owe! Oh no I owe!

Oh no I owe! Oh no I owe!

Bass Descant:

Credit Cards with Higher Int’rest

All Year Long I Owe I Owe I Owe

 -

Perhaps we have become a bit jaded, but the rewritten carol has been put back on the list! If you want to see the original carol, free sheet music can be found at this site, along with other classic carols. I printed many songs out and the music is clear and easy to read. 

I hope my readers have a great rest of the year!

-Lillibeth

 

Fancy Fiddle Case

What to do with an old fiddle case? One which was okay on the inside, but starting to get beyond "scuffed up" on the outside?

Handle wrap coming off the metal handle, the main clasp kind of "sticky" (have to use the side clasps...)

...back fabric peeling up...

I thought about putting the case on Craigslist. There may be someone out there who wants something like this. So I tucked it out of the way until I had time to list it. 
Months later, it occurred to me that I could renovate the still-unlisted case and make it uniquely my own! 
                           

It was all wood underneath the fake leather. The covering was fabric and bootblack maybe? I thought I would tear it off and paint the wood underneath. Whatever they used back in the old days to equate pretend leather, it came off almost in strips and left a lot of powder behind. 

  I didn't spend a tremendous amount of time sanding all the remaining glue off, so the surface was very rough. That didn't matter too much because I was going to decoupage the case. I painted the metal hinges and parts, rust and all. The rust does show through, but I was going for "shabby chic" style anyway.

Out came the scrapbook papers...

...and the bits and pieces of papers saved just for times like these... a paper bag from the music shop (printed with teal sheet music!), music score tissue-paper, doilies, stickers, clip art...

...I also printed some images of little girls with violins off of the internet, and hand-tinted them.

This little girl had three howling dogs with her, but I thought that was a bit too many...

...especially since the other little girl on the front of the case had a howling dog, too! 

The painting is by Charles Burton Barber, "The Broken String." The other painting had no title, but I suspect it is either by Charles Burton Barber or a Sir Arthur Elsley.

The Broken String

Charles Burton...

Buy This at Allposters.com

Isn't it a cute painting? You see the kitten is playing with the broken string. The poor little girl is trying to practice as best as she can on the remaining three.

Another print out from the web just fit on the side, it can be found here.

As the project came together, I discovered that it was no longer for me, but was claimed by a little fiddler of mine, so I wrote her initials on the labels. The dove is from a calendar, the labels made from various punches and dies. 

Sheet music from an ATC paper pad.

Stickers and doilies.

 The pink bit of paper "lace" came from packaging. Real lace and even a real chiffon ribbon rose glued on just fine, and are, after five coats of Mod-Podge, as stiff as a board. 

 I found a flourish printed on scrap-book paper and cut it out. A flourished-shaped die would be so handy to have!

This project took a couple of days just to "compose" the new covering, and then many more days to put on extra layers of Mod-Podge to make a clear finish. I hope it will last a long time. 

My best friends turned out to be the sheet-music tissue paper and the paper sack! They were great for moulding around hard-to-cover spaces, and yeilded themselves to be glued very nicely. I covered the handle with scalloped grosgrain ribbon from the dollar store. 

Overall, I am very pleased with how it turned out.

The only mistake I felt that I made was curving the paper around to the inside. You see, I did the whole project with the case open, flat on the table. It did not occur to me that the case might not close with layers of paper and glue added to it! I did some sanding and trimming of paper, but still it was a tight fit. I should have sanded the box down at the closure edges ahead of time to make room, or closed the box, marked where the lid came down, and only put the paper up to that point, maybe finishing off with some kind of decorative tape. 

And so, the shabby-chic-victorian-scrap-fancy-fiddle case is done, and it's a keeper. When not in use, it it sure does look nice laying around the house!

Beautiful Brahms Intermezzo

All Things Praise Thee

Buy This at Allposters.com




This morning at church we had an exuberant voice join in the singing. We were doing pretty well on the chorus, 


"Hallelujah, Thine the glory! 
Hallelujah Amen! 
Hallelujah, Thine the glory! 
Revive us again."


and then we heard a very loud but happy croaking. Most of the congregation kept their composure, though by the 6th verse even the song leader was having a hard time. The frog was keeping time with the music, interestingly enough, and had not betrayed its presence until it heard us singing. I think it was joining in the praise. After all, it is one of God's creatures too!


The question now is, do we count the frog as part of our attendance numbers for this Sunday morning, or not?

"Angeline the Baker" and "Come Thou Fount"

If I Had My Way

This song, written in 1913, is sung beautifully in this recording.

The Quebe Effect

Here at The Pleasant Times offices, we frequently suffer from The Quebe Effect. That is where someone starts a tune-- maybe just a couple measures-- of one of the songs that the Quebe Sisters sing, and that is all it takes for it to take over everyone's brain. Nothing will stop it but another dose of the Quebes on youtube or itunes.

This has happened to us with other tunes/singers as well, but we have never had a name for this effect before. Since it has been happening so often with this particular group, we will name it in their honor.

Here's another dose of the Quebes, just in case it's been happening to you, too:

The Quebe Sisters

Play that little piece of Kalkbrenner's....

For those of you familiar with the movie "Wives and Daughters," you may remember the time that Molly was urged to "play that little piece of Kalkbrenner's..." by her stepmother. I thought the piano piece was very beautiful, and spent I don't know how many fruitless hours trying to find some kind of sheet music by Kalkbrenner, hoping to stumble across THE song.

Friedrich Kalkbrenner was a contemporary with Chopin and apparently wrote an abundance of music, which I could not find. However, I need not have fussed over it, for I had the music in my shelf long before I had ever heard of Molly or Kalkbrenner.

It is called "Nocturne" # 5 in b flat major by John Field, and probably a better music student than I would have known that. I have passed this piece of music up for at least fifteen years, thumbing around in a favorite music book for other pieces to play. For some reason or another, I never wanted to try it. Out of boredom with my other songs, I decided to sound this one out. I was so tickled and it is a beautiful and not too difficult piece to play. The link above is to a free PDF download. Enjoy!



screen shot from http://caps.desert-sky.net/w&d.htm