Today, it comes to the English songs. The concert are coming into the LOVE part. There are three English songs, “April is in My Mistress Face”"Fair Phiyllis”"Mother I Will Have A Husband”,then was a solo song “A Bay in Anglesey”, a song by four girls “Att Angora En Brygga”, then a song written by a muscian in our choir “Serenad för Två”

This song I will post today, “April is in My Mistress Face” was written by Thomas Morley and published in the year 1594. There are 8 versions of this song already in CPDL.ORG.

Here’s a piece of news: there will be a concert to celebrate 600 years of choirs in Shanghai. You can go and listen if you are intereted. The second song of the concert is “April is in My Mistress Face”.

The lyrics are very simple please listen:

April is in my mistress’ face,
And July in her eyes hath place;
Within her bosom is September,
But in her heart a cold December.

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The song is “Woke up in the Summer Time” in English. It is so hard for to translate the lyrics, my Swedish is not good, and my English is not so good yet, even if I translate the lyrics, it’s also hard to understand. So today I will use some key words to introduce this song. When we are singing you can here these words “sommartid (summer time)”,”skratt (have laughed)”,”tyst (quiet)”,”drömma (dream)”,”kysst (kiss)”,”solen (the sun)”,”ros (rose)”,”önska (desired)”,”livet (the life)”…

From these words, we can imagine a beautiful summer time. Lovers are sitting in the grass, murmuring; kids are lying in their grandparents’ arms, listening to the stories, giggling and falling asleep and having a sweet dream…

In the Spring, it seems that everything is activated, you can feel lives, just stand in the sun and enjoy the weather. After the dark and cold winter here in Sweden, and also the strange April, Swedish people love summer time so much. You will see many people jogging, playing on the grass, you will be impressed that there ARE so many people in Sweden. So SUMMER should be a component of the Swedish music. We can see the two words “solen” and “önska” are very Swedish, people love the sun. “Vakna” in the title of this song makes people have a scene in their eyes that, you finally wake up from the whole winter, it’s time to enjoy the beautiful summer, you want to sing but you are afraid of break the beauties, so you sing quietly and beautifully.

The Key in this song changes many times, starts from Tenor and Base in C major, then comes Alto, then Soprano sings the melody in A major, the following is F major telling a story, finally ends in D major. It’s hard to sing without instrument’s accompany. We planed to used guitar, but the loud speaker was so low, we couldn’t hear the guitar when we were singing. Anyway, we could sing it without the guitar, and we did.

Please enjoy…

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