Carol of the Bells (Piano)

This is the Carol of the Bells piano sheet music, and the score above is playable. Click it and it opens in your browser, where each note you press gets checked against the page.

The tune has nothing to do with bells, originally. It is Shchedryk, a Ukrainian New Year song about a swallow that flies into a house to tell the family they will have a good year. The composer Mykola Leontovych spent years reworking the old folk melody, and his choral version was first sung in Kyiv in 1916. Twenty years later, in 1936, the American choir director Peter Wilhousky wrote new English words for it. He decided the repeating figure sounded like bells, and his is the version everyone in the English-speaking world grew up with.

What he was hearing is a figure of four notes in 3/4 time, and the whole piece is made of it. It goes: a note, the step below it, the first note again, and then a drop of a third. In the original key of G minor those notes are B♭, A, B♭ and G. Everything else in the piece happens around them. So any drift in your timing is audible at once, which is uncomfortable and also the reason the piece teaches so well.

C major, 78 bars. The four-note figure from Shchedryk never stops. That is the shape you need before you play a note.

Read the key first so you know which black keys are in play. Count the meter out loud. Then look at how many bars you actually have to learn.

Work through this tutorial in the order below. Fifteen minutes a day for a week is enough to get Carol of the Bells under your hands if each chunk is actually learned.

Play it with the notes graded as you go, no account.

The key is C major: no sharps and no flats. The notes are C D E F G A B. Anything outside that list in the score is an accidental. Mark it.

The score is 78 measures long. Number them in pencil. Starting at bar 9, when you need to, is the point of the numbers.

Set a tempo you can play the hardest bar at. The easy bars will feel slow. That is correct.

Split Carol of the Bells into chunks of 8 bars and learn one chunk per session. A chunk you can play three times without a mistake is learned. A chunk you can nearly play is not.

Practice the last bar of one chunk and the first bar of the next as a chunk of their own. The joins are where it breaks.

Carol of the Bells sits in C major. These are the chords that key is built from. Knowing them makes a slip easier to recover from, because you can hear where you are.

Play the melody in your right hand and just these chords in your left. The written left hand can wait. Hearing the harmony is the useful part.

Two hands on Carol of the Bells are two problems. Solve them one at a time.

1. Right hand alone, slowly, until the chunk is clean three times.
2. Left hand alone, slowly. Give the left hand that has to stay even under the ostinato more time than it feels like it needs.
3. Hands together at half the speed you managed separately. If it falls apart, go back to the weaker hand.
4. Speed up in small steps, only from a tempo where nothing goes wrong.

If a bar still will not lock, play the right hand and tap the left-hand rhythm on the piano lid. The problem is usually the rhythm.

Fifteen minutes a day for a week:

1. Day 1: the key and the first eight bars of the four-note figure, hands separately.
2. Day 2: chunk 1 hands together, chunk 2 hands separately.
3. Day 3: join chunks 1 and 2, then learn chunk 3.
4. Day 4: the second half, same routine.
5. Day 5: the joins, and only the joins.
6. Day 6: the whole piece, slowly, once. Mark the two bars that went worst.
7. Day 7: those two bars, then the whole piece at tempo.

Play Carol of the Bells in Chordzy and it will mark which notes and timings were off.

Musicians call a figure like this an ostinato, which is Italian for obstinate, and the name fits. The same four notes fill one bar of 3/4, then the next, then the next, while the harmony and the other voices change around them. You can learn the figure in about a minute. Keeping it even for the three minutes the piece lasts, without the hand slowly tightening, is the actual work. It is most of what the piece has to teach.

Play it slowly at first. Listen for four notes of the same weight rather than four fast ones. In my experience the third note is the one that gets clipped, because it repeats the first and the hand is already thinking about the drop to the fourth. When the hand does tense up, stop, shake it out, and start again from the bar before.

Through most of the piece the left hand has one chord per bar and keeps the pulse with it. The right hand has the four-note figure, and later the melody on top of it. If the two hands are the same volume the bell effect goes and what is left sounds like a drum, so the balance between them is worth some deliberate work.

I would learn the left hand on its own first, until it runs without you thinking about it. Only then add the right hand, about one dynamic level louder than the left. It should be clear rather than loud. When it is working the hands feel like two gears turning together at different speeds.

The original starts pianissimo, grows through the middle to fortissimo, and dies away to pianissimo at the end. Play it at one volume and nothing in it is exciting.

Write the dynamics into your copy so they are decided before the run-through rather than during it. The one that matters most is the bar before each crescendo: ease back for that bar and the crescendo sounds intended.

Less than you think. The repeated notes need definition, and pedal blurs them into a wash that loses the bell.

Use short taps of pedal, or none at all in early practice, and add it back only when the fingers are doing the work. Your ear will tell you when it is too much, because the bells stop ringing and start humming.

Read it in chunks. The figure appears in the right hand, then in the left, then an octave higher, and in each place it is the same four notes with the same rhythm. Once you have seen it you have seen most of the page, and the rest is spotting where the melody enters over it.

Playing the sheet music online helps with this, because you can loop the few bars where the figure moves between the hands, take them slowly, and let the shape settle before you go on.

Choirs take it at around 160 beats per minute. Most piano editions mark something close to that. It is fast for a hand that has to play the same figure for three minutes, so I would stay well under it for the first week. Learn the notes at a speed where nothing tightens. Then add a few beats per minute each day.

One exception I find useful is a single run-through that is faster than comfortable. Then go back to the slower tempo. The fast run shows you which bar loses control. In this piece that is nearly always the bar where the figure crosses from the right hand into the left. Fix that one and the others tend to follow.

The risk with a piece made of repetition is that the practice becomes repetition too, and after ten minutes of the same four notes the attention wanders and the playing goes mechanical without you noticing.

Chordzy is a way round that, because the score reacts to you: click the sheet music and it plays in your browser or in the app, with each note lighting up as you reach it, and there is no account to create first.

At some point in the second or third week there is a bar where it all lines up, the figure steady, the hands loose, the crescendo arriving where it should, and the piece stops sounding like effort and starts sounding like Christmas. That is the ordinary result of the practice above rather than luck.

When you are ready for a run-through, click the sheet music and let Chordzy keep the count.