Silent Night — SATB Choir Sheet Music, A Cappella

Yes, and it is a real performance. The player near the top of this page is the Artyfile Choir’s studio recording of this exact setting — four voices, unaccompanied, in the printed key of C major. It is not a synthesised playback, which is what almost every free or catalogue edition of this carol offers instead. The recording also streams uncompressed on Artyfile Stream, Paul Lorenz’ own lossless hi-fi service.

One PDF: the complete SATB choral score on two A4 pages. Twelve bars in 6/8 at ♪ = 60, C major, with all three verses underlaid, closing on a ritardando under fermatas. The setting is a cappella — there is no piano or organ part, because the arrangement does not have one. The four voices are engraved together in score; there are no separately extracted voice parts, and none are needed for a two-page piece.

C major throughout, so every singer reads an open key signature and the pitch centre sits comfortably for an unaccompanied choir. There is no divisi anywhere — one line per voice from the first bar to the last, which is what makes the setting usable by a choir of sixteen as well as one of sixty. The tenor is notated in the octave-treble clef, as choral editions conventionally do.

The score is underlaid in English — “Silent night, holy night”, all three verses. If your choir needs to read “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” from the page, write to us before you buy and we will set the German text under the notes for you. That underlay is part of the customization service, not an extra product.

No. That is the difference between this edition and a printed octavo. One purchase of €9.90 licenses the arrangement for performances by the purchasing choir, and you print as many copies as you have singers. A printed octavo of the same carol typically costs between €1.50 and €2.50 per copy, is frequently sold with a minimum order of ten or twenty copies, and still has to be shipped to you.

Grade 2–3 — accessible to a good church, community or school choir, and detailed enough to reward a professional one. The notes themselves are not hard. What the piece asks for is a cappella discipline: clean tuning held across three slow verses, and inner voices that listen to each other, because the alto and tenor lines carry real harmonic movement rather than padding. A choir that can hold a chord without accompaniment can sing this.

Most choirs have it standing in two rehearsals and polished in three. It is twelve bars of music, strophic, in C major and with no divisi, so the reading session is short; the time goes into intonation and into shaping the three verses as one arc rather than three repetitions.

The original carol by Franz Xaver Gruber and Joseph Mohr, first performed in Oberndorf bei Salzburg on Christmas Eve 1818, is in the public domain. This arrangement is Paul Lorenz’ own, and your purchase includes the right to perform it with the purchasing ensemble — public concerts, church services and professional engagements included. Performing rights in the work itself are administered by the collecting society in your territory (AKM, GEMA, SUISA, ASCAP, BMI, PRS), and the organiser reports the performance to them as usual. For a commercial recording or a broadcast, contact us directly.

Yes — this is a core service at Paul Lorenz Music, not an afterthought. A German text underlay, a transposition for a choir whose basses sit low, a divisi to fill out a large ensemble, an organ or string accompaniment for a cathedral acoustic: describe what you need and Paul Lorenz edits the score by hand. Write to us before you buy so the edition arrives ready for your rehearsal.

Because the product is a digital download, refunds cannot be offered once the file has been accessed. That is precisely why the whole first page of the score is shown above at full resolution and why a real recording plays on this page: you should be able to decide before you pay, not after. If anything is still unclear, write to us first — we would rather answer a question than process a refund.