What Child is This?

(1865)
 

Lyrics: Wm. C. Dix (1837-1898)

Music: “Greensleeves” (Anonymous)

Arr: Ruth Randle

William Dix was born in Bristol, England where he received his education. Although he managed a marine insurance company in Glasgow, Scotland for a period of time, he is remembered as a poet and composer with more than 40 hymns and books to his credit. He selected the traditional English tune “Greensleeves”, then already some 300 years old, as the music for his verses for What Child is This, published in 1865.
 

Ruth has arranged this Christmas carol for a D-F#-A tuning, with the melody played in the key of Bm. (Those with some understanding of music theory will recognize that Bm is the relative minor of the key of D). The arrangement plays easily and is quite enjoyable. In measures 3, 11, 21 and 29 Ruth shows optional chords involving notes requiring the 1+ fret. Those not having that fret may ignore this option and simply play the melody note shown in boldface notation.

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Now for a brain-teaser, for those interested: Here we are dealing with music composed during the lifetimes of both Shakespeare and King Henry VIII of England (about 1560).
 

Some feel that Henry himself composed the music, possibly for the lute, but this isn’t confirmed. We do know that the Puritans “brought” the music for Greensleeves with them when they landed in Plymouth in 1620, and it was played extensively as far south as Virginia. Was the tune already chromatic? (Notice the numerous A# and G# notes in Ruth’s arrangement. If so, this melody line couldn’t have been played on the early scheitholts or dulcimers available at the time, nor until late into the 1800’s. This is because those instruments had no frets beneath the middle and bass “drone strings”. All the scales available were diatonic, in different modal spacings on the melody string. The dulcimers catalogued in collections verify this.
 

Many dulcimer arrangements of folk music indicate that Greensleeves is a classic example of music to be played in the Aeolian mode. For a “D” tuning, this means D-A-c, with the keynote D falling on the first note of the melody string, the scale being what we would today call Dm: D-E-F-G-A-Bb-C-D (this is the same scale for F Major).
 

Included with this month’s selection is Merv’s arrangement of Greensleeves in D-A-c, played using only the melody notes accompanied by open drone strings. When you play this, you will realize that this version has no chromatic notes whatsoever. The only way those chromatic notes in today’s version of Greensleeves can be played on the diatonic dulcimer is to find them on the middle string. This, of course requires full-width frets, a feature that became standard during the 1950’s.