The Wexford Carol is a traditional Irish Christmas song that was likely composed in the 15th or 16th century. It’s a beautiful melody and, at least in my part of the world, not nearly performed enough. An Irish organist named William Grattan Flood transcribed a singer performing this carol and then published it in 1928, which helped it to become more popular around the world.

It’s popular enough that Lenoir Sax asked me to write them an arrangement of this piece for their upcoming Christmas concert. I finished it a few days ago and they had their first read-through of it last night. Here’s the MIDI realization.

Arranging carols and hymns can be challenging because they are usually the same musical material over and over, just with different text on different verses. Arranging them as instrumentals requires doing something more or different in order to keep it interesting. With this arrangement I added some new musical material to use as an introduction, interlude, and coda (which is in a different meter than the carol, just to provide a little more variety). I also modulated the keys on repeats and orchestrated and harmonized things differently to help keep it from getting too repetitive.

I’ve written a bunch of arrangements for Lenoir Sax. I think this is the third Christmas carol arrangement I’ve done for them.