Frère Jacques

Background

"Frère Jacques" is a French song about a friar (a monk) who has overslept. The singers ask him whether he is asleep and tell him to ring the bells for matins, the very early morning service, while the bells go "ding, dang, dong". In English it is usually sung as "Are you sleeping, Brother John?". Who wrote it is unknown, and its exact origins are uncertain; it was already known in France by the late eighteenth century.

It is one of the best-known rounds in the world. A round is a song where several voices sing the same tune but start at different times, and it still fits together. Here each new voice comes in two bars after the one before, so up to four people can sing it at once.

The tune has a surprising afterlife in concert music. Gustav Mahler used it in the third movement of his First Symphony, first heard in 1889, turning it into a slow, eerie funeral march in a minor key that begins with a solo double bass.

How to practise it

This arrangement is sixteen bars for the right hand: four short lines, each played twice, so there are really only four bars to learn.

Lines one and two sit in C position: thumb on C, so C, D, E, F and G are fingers 1 to 5. The third line is the busy one, with four eighth notes and a reach up to A. Rather than moving your whole hand, open it slightly: keep the thumb on C and put fingers 2, 3, 4 and 5 on E, F, G and A. Now the line falls neatly under the fingers.

The last line dips below middle C to the G below. Move the hand down for this line so the thumb sits on that low G; then middle C falls under finger 4.

The hand changes are the only real difficulty, so practise each one on its own:

1. Play line two then line three, opening the hand during the half-note G.
2. Play line three then line four, moving down during the quarter note C.
3. Join all sixteen bars at 60 beats a minute, then 76, then the full 92.

Keep the eighth notes in line three light and even, like a ripple of bells.

Once it is secure, try it as a real round: ask someone to sing from the start when you reach bar 3, or play along with a recording of yourself two bars late. It tests whether you can keep going while other music happens around you.

The hands-together and eighth notes unit uses this tune for its quick eighth-note line.