Recording

Merry Christmas Tonight The Isles of Rhythm

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Listen to a sample of Night of Silence / Silent Night

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This Christmas choral piece has been broadcast on PBS and NPR, and has been performed by some of the world’s leading choral groups and orchestras. As you can hear, it provides contrapuntal harmonies when sung with Silent Night. Daniel Kantor, who lives in the St. Paul/Minneapolis area, has a variety of interests including running an award-winning communications consulting company and creating crossword puzzles for Will Shortz in the New York Times. He is also the author of a book, Graphic Designs and Religion, published in 2007.

On Christmas Eve 1818, Josef Mohr, a priest at St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, Austria, had a problem. The church’s organ was not working and he didn’t want to have Christmas mass without music. So, he quickly wrote a Christmas poem, gave it to his organist, Franz Gruber, and asked him to put it to music and make it simple enough that the choir could learn it in one day. Gruber obliged and the result was Silent Night. The new song was performed that Christmas Eve with Gruber accompanying the choir on guitar. The song was spread throughout Europe by traveling folk singers, who probably heard it from the organ repairman who learned the song from Mohr when he came to repair the church organ. It was first recorded by the Haydn Quartet in 1905 and in 1935 it became the first Christmas song that Bing Crosby recorded. Today, it is one of the most popular Christmas songs in the world.

— Kevin Sanders, April, 2009