Instant Sheet Music

This is a PDF download for the sheet music "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day," arranged for solo piano. This is a digital file you print from home.

Performance notes: when I set out to arrange a Christmas collection, Longfellow’s lyric was one that I was determined to include. His timeless text has an amazing contemporary relevance and effectively communicates our inner longing for “peace on earth,” a longing that is especially poignant during the Christmas season.

Although bells are longer used in our culture as a means of announcing events, they once were. Before newspapers, television, the internet, or even a town crier, men rang bells. There were happy bells and sad bells. Bells for warning and bells for celebration. That’s the timeframe in which this carol was written.

You will best communicate the words of this carol by internally thinking the words that accompany the melody. Longfellow communicates nostalgia, joy, sadness, and then celebration; try to convey each of these emotions to your listeners through this arrangement. I get goosebumps every time on that final stanza, as the LH open fifths ring out like huge bells, and the melody sings, Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: / “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep. / The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, / With peace on earth, goodwill to men.”