Betelehemu: SATB: Vocal Score

Bethlehem from Boublil and Schönberg’s 1996 musical Martin Guerre is a great addition to any Holiday repertoire this season. The lesser known historical musical from the same creative team that produced Les Miserables and Miss Saigon features similar vocal monumentality as its predecessors. This piece is the best of both worlds combining the grand sound of musical theatre with the festive atmosphere of carolling and will be a welcome change to often overplayed and dusty Christmas programmes. In this edition Bethlehem is arranged for SATB (Soprano Alto Tenor and Bass) Voices with Pianoaccompaniment.

The full vocal score for Rutland's choral drama adapted from the Coventry Nativity Play. The play was first performed at the Glastonbury Festival School Somerset in 1915 during the Christmas festival.

This original a cappella work sings of the star above Bethlehem shining to lead all to the gift of love and light. A tinge of Appalachian style can be heard in this vocal setting and should be embraced. Optional percussion is encouraged bringing rhythmic life below the pulsed vocals. A perfect selection that fits nicely at any point during your program.

Bethlehem Baby He be born today! Wonderful lyrics of this Calypso-styled spiritual radiate the excitement felt by those who followed the star that special night! Optional solos. Available: SATB a cappella SSA accompanied (optional flute). Performance Time: Approx. 2:35.

Vocal score for Edmund Jolliffe's A Child Is Born In Bethlehem for SATB with Piano/Organ accompaniment.Edmund Jolliffe’s music embraces a huge range of styles from contemporary classical to songs for shows. He writes music for film and television but is also an award winning concert composer. His music is published performed and broadcast all over the world.

Remember Bethlehem was conceived after a conversation on the works of the late story-telling songsmith Jake Thackray. Thackray’s sometimes bawdy sometimes satirical and often hilarious lyrics are delivered in a lugubrious baritone and underpinned by a strong Yorkshire accent that led him to be dubbed the “North Country Noel Coward”. In his Remember Bethlehem heshows a more tender side and tells a story devoid of expletives and cutting social commentary of a “shabby little country girl” completely broken by the ardours of her journey arriving in Bethlehem as a distrusted foreigner to give birth to baby boy called Jesus. Whatstruck and moved me most about Thackray’s telling of the Nativity Narrative is the way he normalizes Mary. Rather than retrospectively beatifying her - telling her story full in the knowledge of the extraordinary thing she did (as most nativity stories do) – Thackray’s portrayal of her as young afraid and cold makes her achievement all the more astonishing. Indeed so out-of-the-ordinary is the gift given by this apparently ordinary girl that no one and no thing can ever forget it: “Even the stony old hills […] your shaggy old trees […] the sulky old sun Remembers Bethlehem.” My carol of the same name adapts a similar approach to telling Mary’s story. Musically I have only thinly veiled my affection for Peter Warlock’s miniature masterpiece Bethlehem Down and evidence of this can be seen not only in the choice of key triple metre and strophic setting but also in the resemblance of some of the cadential figures. A final strand of influence comes once more from Yorkshire and specifically Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. My wife is a literature scholar and pointed out to me the parallels between Mary’s plight in Thackray’s story and a scene from the novel in which Jane is lost up on the moors. Through her distrust of man she feels outcast and