Sweet Was the Song is one of the two 2007 carols chosen through the annual Welcome Christmas! Carol Contest. Additional performances occurred on:

Composer's Note:

Much of my recent work has been heavily influenced by my love of medieval music, especially the folk music of that time. It has a simplicity and earnestness of expression that resonates with me. Salient features include improvised melodic ornamentation, general homophony, and a harmonic reliance on the perfect fifth, often used as an accompanying drone or moving parallel with the melody. This seemed a good fit for a lullaby, so my aim in this setting was to synthesize these and other stylistic features into my own language.

Meanwhile, the celesta was invented several hundred years later, in France in 1889; I use it here mainly as a shimmering background, occasionally "commenting on" and echoing the vocal lines. Old, older, and new come together, and in the end my hope was that of portraying the atmosphere of mystery that surrounds the nativity, and to craft a tune that could have been sung, perhaps, in a rural street sometime in the 1590s, or even two millennia ago.