The December Tune of the Month Is......

O Holy Night

"O Holy Night" ("Cantique de Noël") is a well-known Christmas carol composed by Adolphe Adam in 1847 to the French poem "Minuit, chrétiens" (Midnight, Christians) by a wine merchant and poet, Placide Cappeau (1808–1877).

In Roquemaure at the end of the year 1843, the church organ was recently renovated. To celebrate the event, the parish priest asked Cappeau, native from this town, to write a Christmas poem. Cappeau did it, although being a professed anticlerical and atheist.^[1]

Soon after, Adam wrote the music. The song was premiered in Roquemaure in 1847 by the opera singer Emily Laurey.

Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight,^[2] editor of Dwight's Journal of Music, created a singing edition based on Cappeau's French text in 1855. In both the French original and in the two familiar English versions of the carol, the text reflects on the birth of Jesus and of humanity's redemption. *

The above is a brief history of this song which I took from wikipedia so it may not entirely be accurate feel from to add any additional facts or amend to it should you know them.

Will Smith has a great version of it he has graciously allowed me to link to and has said that you can use to learn this great tune you can head right hear and click on the tab for O Holy Night 

http://www.autoharp-music.com/autoharp_christmas.html

Should you need it in a different key feel free to reach out and I'm sure either myself or another Autoharp player will gladly help you with transposing it.

Just a reminder you can send in your submissions either video or audio by December 31st and if you need assistance recording video or audio I will gladly help if need be. let's have fun!! I can't wait to hear how other harpers approach this beautiful piece!! 

The Official Autoharp Tune of the Month Blog!!

Hello friends I know I've been on a hiatus from the Bluegrass Fakebook Challenge for a few months with my work schedule and what not it's been hard to find the time to do it but I thought how much I enjoyed learning new tunes with my Autoharp friends and being challenged to learn them with a fellow Cyberplucker, Josh Birch started the tune of the month and it was really neat we as an Autoharp Cyber-community voted on tunes and people could suggest tunes and someone would always provide tablature or sheet music which was very easy to follow along with.

So I am officially creating this blog and re-starting Josh's brilliant idea! to the upper right of this post you will see a poll and while making it there's only one tune up there (I had to add one in order to created the poll) but what I'll do is I'll get suggestions from the Autoharp community on the Facebook groups and from Cyberpluckers and the poll list will populate with more ideas to vote on and what you'll do is you'll come here (to the blog page, I'll include a link) and vote on the tune of the month and whichever one has the most votes by the start of the month that will be the tune we will learn! As with the Fakebook challenge you can either send me your submission either audio or video and if you need assistance getting them together I will gladly help you and I'll also get tab together as soon as I can if you suggest a tune and you happen to have an Autoharp friendly arrangement of it you are more than welcome to share it and I'll post the tab for each month's tune here on the blog. I may try and find some backstory on some of the tunes as often times the history behind some of the tunes we love can be quite fascinating.

I've referenced the blog several times in my writing here that's because it will be the main hub for this fun little challenge so if you want to vote, suggest, get the tab for the tune, or see which tune has the most votes the blog page is the first place you should go and there is an option on the page to subscribe to this blog so you won't have to worry about missing any of the tunes or the updates I post to the blog.