This year for our church's Christmas program I was asked if I would perform a piano solo for the song "Once in Royal David's City." I wasn't all that familiar with this particular Christmas hymn, but I agreed to look at it.
After sitting down and playing through it a few times, I wasn't particularly excited about performing a solo to this hymn. It's a nice song, but not all that interesting if I were just to play it as it sounded right from the hymn book. So I decided to start improvising. I went through the song and wrote out all the chords and then just started playing with it. Eventually I came up with the arrangment that you hear in the video above.
By the time I got everything figured out, I was actually quite excited by the song. I recorded the arrangement, and then, by request of my sister Sharie, I turned the arrangement into sheet music. For the actual performance, I continued to just use the hymn book as my guide and play from memory, but this sheet music pretty much captures what I played.
Here's the link for the sheet music.
The actual performance last Sunday, along with the rest of the Christmas program went quite well. I was actually shaking a bit as I was playing the song, not because I was nervous, but because I was emotionally moved by all the great music from the program. I was also supposed to accompany a men's quartet who were singing "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night" but our lead singer got sick so I ended up taking his place at the last moment while someone else jumped into accompany us. There were a lot of other great performance that really made this one of the best Christmas programs we've had in years.
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