The Holly and the Ivy
Loading the instrument… Pitch runs up the page and time across it. Touch a note to hear it, or play the whole melody. Sound could not load.
How hard is it?
Medium, and not because someone remembered it that way. These five numbers come off the melody itself, the same way the app grades its lessons.
- Fastest passage
- 278 ms
- Ornaments
- 0
- Quick leaps
- 4
- Span
- 14
- Black keys
- 0%
per note, at 108 bpm
nothing to decorate
of a fourth or wider
semitones, G3 to A4
it never leaves its key
- its quickest passage asks for about 278 ms a note
- 4 quick leaps of a fourth or wider relocate the hand
- it spans 14 semitones, wider than an octave
- it covers 59 notes across 10 phrases, which is how it is taught in the app, one breath at a time
What you can play it on
6 of the instruments in the workshop can teach this tune. Where the number differs from "all of them", the reason is the instrument, not the song: a diatonic kalimba has no sharps, and a pentatonic handpan or guzheng has no fourth or seventh at all.
- Piano at written pitch
- Guitar at written pitch
- Kalimba up 1 octave
- Violin at written pitch
- Xylophone up 19 semitones
- Accordion at written pitch
- Handpan not this one
- Guzheng not this one
- Drums not this one
Where this transcription came from
Traditional English carol, public domain, from the Mutopia edition in F, read down five semitones into C: mutopiaproject.org/ftp/Traditional/thehollyandtheivy - midi_read.py thehollyandtheivy.mid 0 59 --track 2 (-5) The edition is the carol line alone - no accompaniment staff - so the backing is the drone tier, like the Lullaby. Verse then the "rising of the sun" refrain; the page turns at the verse's close.
Every melody in this catalogue is public domain and was transcribed from a named source, then checked against it by a tool rather than by ear. None of them was written down from memory - which is the usual reason two versions of a folk tune on the internet disagree.
Learn it properly
Tapping the ribbon is not the same as playing it. In the app this melody arrives as a lesson: the notes fall in time on the instrument you picked, the board waits when you miss, and it counts the phrase again rather than moving on.