Mark Gresham | 27 DEC 2021
Episode 12 of Earpiece, a series of audio and video presentations curated by EarRelevant’s publisher and principal writer Mark Gresham.
In this episode, we celebrate Christmastide through an arrangement of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for piano, four hands, by Susan E. Tempping.
“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is an English Christmas carol. The words, first published in 1780, enumerate a series of increasingly numerous gifts given on each of the twelve days that make up the Christmas season, starting with Christmas Day and ending on January 5.
Different melodies became associated with the words, but the best known comes from a 1909 arrangement of a traditional folk melody by the English composer Frederic Austin which remains the carol’s current popular form.
“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is a cumulative song, meaning that each verse expands upon the previous verses. Each of the 12 verses adds a new gift given on that numbered day.
In Tepping’s set of variations for piano, four hands, the tune is likewise cumulative, getting slightly longer with each iteration. The 1989 recording below is from a live 1989 performances by pianists Geoffrey Haydon & Cary Lewis at Georgia State University, where they and Tepping were all members of the music faculty at the time.
Dr. Lewis says of the late composer:
Cary Lewis has also recording a Christmas Suite by Tepping with violist Paul Murphy and cellist Dorothy Lewis, which reimagines a set of Christmas Carols in the for of a Baroque suite of dances. ■
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
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