It Came Upon the Midnight Clear for Clarinet Quartet

"It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" is a poem written in 1849 by Edmund Sears, a pastor of the Unitarian Church in Wayland, Massachusetts. Contrasting with many Christmas songs, this poem describes a dark world full of “sin and strife,” and looks forward to an “age of gold,” when there will be true peace on Earth. In 1850, a student of Felix Mendelssohn’s, Richard Storrs Willis, composed the melody of the Christmas song which he called Carol. This is the common melody that the poem is sung to in North America, while other countries have adopted a different melody entitled "Noël."