December's most anticipated day has arrived again, and here at Taiko Time things will be different for once! Not only is this our first Song of the Week outside of the usual Saturday slot, but we are also doing something different than our usual multiple features!
Kiyoshiko no Yoru (きよしこのよる)| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x1 (14) | x1 (20) |
Taiko Beena
108
none
???Among the many versions of this game released on arcade and console, you can't possibly find a more basic and simple Taiko experience than the one on Ongaku Lessons, the Advanced Pico Beena game aimed at young kids. Today's featured song is one of them and a really fitting choice for today's worldwide celebration. Kiyoshiko no Yoru is the Japanese title of Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht (Silent Night), one of the world's most known Christmas carols, and this is an easier, 8-bit chiptune version of it.
The original idea of the song belongs to Father Joseph Mohr, an Austrian priest who wrote the carol's lyrics as a poem in 1816. Two years later, before that year's Christmas Eve, the young assistant priest needed a carol played with a guitar for the midnight mass in the small city of Oberndorf bei Salzburg. For that purpose, Mohr walked from his house in Oberndoff to the neighboring town of Arnsdorf bei Laufen, to ask his friend Franz Xaver Gruber for help. Gruber was a school teacher and the town's choir master and organist. With Mohr's old poem, Gruber composed Stille Nacht in just a few hours, right in time for the Oberndorf midnight mass of that year (1818).
While Gruber's original composition was meant to be a sprightly, dance-like tune in 6/8 time, the version most commonly played nowadays is a meditative, slow-paced lullaby (Taiko Beena's is this modern one). However, the song's influence only grew over time; the carol has since been translated into 140 different languages (with the English one being published in 1859 by Episcopal priest John Freeman Young) and it proved to be effective in bringing people together despite all the hatred on several occasions in history, most remarkably during World War I's first Christmas truce in 1914, when soldiers on both sides ceased hostilities and sung Silent Night in French, English and German simultaneously. Nowadays, both the lyrics and melody of Silent Night are in the public domain, as the carol was declared an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in March 2011.
Like every other song in the Pico Beena Taiko game, Silent Night only has Kantan and Muzukashii modes, featuring easy patterns to read on both difficulties for all the youngest players to catch the song's rhythms on Taiko. After all, learning the rhythm of music has to start from somewhere, right?
Merry Christmas by the whole Taiko Time staff! We hope you will enjoy the rest of this wonderful holiday with your loved ones and friends!
