George Butterworth | On Christmas Night | String Quartet

After purchase, you will receive the digital sheet music, and rehearsal play-along recordings created with NotePerformer 5.

As you click on the image's right arrow, you will be able to listen to this piece on YouTube.

Bring an English pastoral classic into the chamber repertoire with this elegant String Quartet arrangement of George Butterworth’s "On Christmas Night" (Sussex Carol). This arrangement is a faithful, idiomatic quartet transcription that captures the rustic warmth and modal simplicity of Butterworth’s choral setting while exploiting the expressive colours of two violins, viola and cello.

This arrangement would be perfect for Holiday and Advent concert programs or chamber music evenings focused on English music or folk-influenced works.

George Sainton Kaye Butterworth (1885–1916) was an English composer, folk-song collector and country dancer whose music drew heavily on English folk material and pastoral imagery. He collected dozens to hundreds of folk songs, worked closely with contemporaries such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, and helped found the English folk-dance movement before his life and promising career were cut short on the Somme during World War I.

String Quartet

1.      Violin

2.      Violin

3.      Viola

4.      Violoncello