Fantasy On An Old French Carol

"Il Est Né Le Divin Enfant" (He is born, the divine Infant) is a favorite carol, not as often heard in educational settings. So we are glad to create this interesting arrangement for orchestra and your recorders. As we have done in recent years for holiday tunes and some others, we have written this so that you can do it with beginning students, more advanced players, and/or alto recorders in virtually any combination.

Recorder 1 is for your more advanced players, including the notes low D, G, A, B, C, high D, and, optionally, high E. Recorder 2, however, only requires G, A, and B, and you can play this arrangement with just those players, and it will sound great. (We think you'll agree that Paul is truly the master of writing for beginning players by using rich settings and orchestrations that fit the recorders in just right.) If you'd like to follow along the piano/recorder score, you can get a copy of it at our web site. See page 77 for details.

For programs that have some players learning to play alto recorder, we have a part that works well with even limited players. As always, it is quite optional. So are the divisi notes at the end of the piece, though they are easy to accomplish.

(By the way, for those of you who have need of several holiday works for beginning recorder, we can highly recommend John Riggio's Dreaming Of A BAG Christmas, newly published this year. You can hear excerpts from it and our many other recorder resources at MusicK8.com)