This piece is an arrangement of the well-known, traditional French carol Il Est Ne, Le Divin Enfant. I took a stab at my own translation, starting with Google translate, then trying to make it a bit more poetic. I wanted to keep the English words close to the literal French meaning (e.g. Divine Infant vs. Infant King). The harmonization is my own — at least I sat down without any music in front of me, and wrote something out. Hopefully it doesn’t exactly duplicate any harmonization out there already.
I intend to use this piece during Christmas caroling this year. Free PDF (Creative Commons) is available at the bottom of this post.
Translation Notes
In many translations, including the ones on CPDL and Wikipedia, “musettes” translates as “bagpipes.” This may, indeed, be the most literal translation. I just can’t quite imagine being able to hear oboes (hautbois) over even one bagpipe, let alone a chorus of bagpipes resounding. And what a noise for the little infant! So I went with with “hornpipes”, adding “jubilant” to rhyme (sort of) with infant.
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About the Featured Image
The featured image is The Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico. It is in the public domain according to WikiArt.
