Christmas, public domain
Christmas carol sheet music: keys, ranges and notes
Free public-domain Christmas carols sheet music with letter names: Silent Night, Jingle Bells, Joy to the World and more, with key, range and PDF.
One page: every carol with its key, time signature, range and level.
Download the PDF
Free to print and share. No sign-up, no e-mail, no watermark. A4 for most of the world, Letter for the US and Canada; both are black and white, with the fonts embedded.
Quick answer
9 public-domain Christmas and New Year songs, with the key, time signature, range and level of each, the words and tune credits, and the edition the notes were read from. 8 of them have their own page with the melody on the staff, a letter name under every note, a version you can play, a note-name worksheet and the checks that were run. The narrowest tune is Jingle Bells (7 semitones, G4 to D5); the widest is Silent Night (17 semitones, B♭3 to E♭5).
Christmas carols: key, range and level
9 public-domain carols · musictheoryprint.com
| Carol | Key | Time | Range | Level | First notes | Words and music |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Silent NightStille Nacht, heilige Nacht | B♭ major | 6/8 | B♭3 to E♭5 17 semitones | Harder | F G F D F G F | Joseph Mohr, 1816; Franz Xaver Gruber, 1818 |
| Joy to the WorldAntioch | D major | 2/4 | D4 to D5 12 semitones | Medium | D C♯ B A G F♯ E | Isaac Watts, 1719; ANTIOCH, arr. Lowell Mason ("from Handel"), 1830s |
| O Come, All Ye FaithfulAdeste fideles | G major | 4/4 (pick-up) | D4 to D5 12 semitones | Medium | G G D G A D B | Latin hymn; English by Frederick Oakeley, 1841; ADESTE FIDELES, printed by J. F. Wade, 1751 |
| Hark! The Herald Angels SingMendelssohn | G major | 4/4 | D4 to E5 14 semitones | Medium | D G G F♯ G B B | Charles Wesley, 1739; Felix Mendelssohn, 1840; adapted by W. H. Cummings, 1855 |
| Jingle BellsThe One Horse Open Sleigh | G major | 4/4 | G4 to D5 7 semitones | Easy | B B B B B B B | James Lord Pierpont, 1857; James Lord Pierpont, 1857 (this chorus: by 1898) |
| Auld Lang SyneShould auld acquaintance be forgot | F major | 4/4 (pick-up) | C4 to D5 14 semitones | Medium | C F F F A G F | Robert Burns, 1788; Scots folk tune, printed with the words 1799 |
| It Came Upon the Midnight Cleartune CAROL | B♭ major | 6/8 (pick-up) | D4 to D5 12 semitones | Medium | F D A C B♭ G F | Edmund H. Sears, 1849; CAROL, Richard S. Willis, 1850 |
| O Little Town of Bethlehemtune ST. LOUIS | G major | 4/4 (pick-up) | D4 to E5 14 semitones | Harder | B B B A♯ B D C | Phillips Brooks, 1868; ST. LOUIS, Lewis H. Redner, 1868 |
| The First NoelThe First Nowell | D major | 3/4 | D4 to D5 12 semitones | Easy | F♯ E D E F♯ G A | Traditional English; Traditional English tune, in print 1823 and 1833 |
Level: Easy = 0 or 1, Medium = 2 or 3, Harder = 4 or 5 of: range over 9 semitones; range over an octave; notes outside the key signature; sixteenth notes; a leap of 8 semitones or more. Notes are given in scientific pitch notation (middle C = C4).
Keys, ranges and notes are computed from the melody of each carol, read from the editions named on the carol’s own page (The Army and Navy Hymnal 1920 on Wikisource, the Mutopia Project, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia). Free to print and share. musictheoryprint.com/charts/christmas-carols-sheet-music
The carols, easiest first
Sorted by level and then by range. A carol with a page has the notes on the staff, a letter under every note, a play-along, a worksheet and the checks; the others are listed with the same facts and a page is planned.
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Jingle Bells
Easy · G major · 4/4 · G4–D5
B B B B B B B …
James Lord Pierpont, 1857. James Lord Pierpont, 1857 (this chorus: by 1898).
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The First Noel
Easy · D major · 3/4 · D4–D5
F♯ E D E F♯ G A …
Traditional English. Traditional English tune, in print 1823 and 1833.
Notes read from Mutopia Project, "The First Noel (hymntune)" (Steve Dunlop); 1 of 1 other editions agree on every pitch.
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It Came Upon the Midnight Clear
Medium · B♭ major · 6/8 · D4–D5
F D A C B♭ G F …
Edmund H. Sears, 1849. CAROL, Richard S. Willis, 1850.
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Joy to the World
Medium · D major · 2/4 · D4–D5
D C♯ B A G F♯ E …
Isaac Watts, 1719. ANTIOCH, arr. Lowell Mason ("from Handel"), 1830s.
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O Come, All Ye Faithful
Medium · G major · 4/4 · D4–D5
G G D G A D B …
Latin hymn; English by Frederick Oakeley, 1841. ADESTE FIDELES, printed by J. F. Wade, 1751.
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Auld Lang Syne
Medium · F major · 4/4 · C4–D5
C F F F A G F …
Robert Burns, 1788. Scots folk tune, printed with the words 1799.
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Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
Medium · G major · 4/4 · D4–E5
D G G F♯ G B B …
Charles Wesley, 1739. Felix Mendelssohn, 1840; adapted by W. H. Cummings, 1855.
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O Little Town of Bethlehem
Harder · G major · 4/4 · D4–E5
B B B A♯ B D C …
Phillips Brooks, 1868. ST. LOUIS, Lewis H. Redner, 1868.
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Silent Night
Harder · B♭ major · 6/8 · B♭3–E♭5
F G F D F G F …
Joseph Mohr, 1816. Franz Xaver Gruber, 1818.
How high and low each carol goes
Each bar runs from the lowest to the highest note of the tune. The lines mark C4 (middle C), E4, G4, C5 and E5. If your voice or instrument has a smaller range, move the whole carol up or down until the bar fits.
Which keys the carols are in
| Key | Carols | Which | Share of art songs | Share of Mutopia pieces |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| G major | 4 | O Come, All Ye Faithful, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Jingle Bells, O Little Town of Bethlehem | 8.1% | 14.5% |
| B♭ major | 2 | Silent Night, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear | 4.8% | 4.8% |
| D major | 2 | Joy to the World, The First Noel | 6.8% | 9.9% |
| F major | 1 | Auld Lang Syne | 8.9% | 9.5% |
How the level of a carol is worked out
A program counts how many of these five things are true of the tune, using the notes printed on the carol’s page: 5 possible points.
- Wider than a major sixth: the lowest and highest notes are more than 9 semitones apart.
- Wider than an octave: more than 12 semitones apart.
- Notes outside the key signature: sharps, flats or naturals that the key signature does not give.
- Sixteenth notes (or shorter) in the tune.
- A leap of a minor sixth (8 semitones) or more between two neighbouring notes.
Easy is 0 or 1 point, Medium 2 or 3, Harder 4 or 5. It measures the notes only (range, accidentals, note lengths, leaps), not hand position, fingering or the difficulty of an accompaniment, so a teacher’s judgement comes first. Here 2 carols are Easy, 5 Medium and 2 Harder.
Where the notes come from
The melody of every carol is read by a program from a machine-readable edition that may be used freely, never typed in or remembered: the 1920 Army and Navy Hymnal (a US government book, transcribed by volunteers on Wikisource), the Mutopia Project (typeset editions, most in the public domain), public-domain or CC0 MIDI files on Wikimedia Commons, and the scores printed in Wikipedia articles. A second program then compares the melody with the other editions, note by note, and the result is on each carol’s page, including the places where editions disagree.
Christmas carol sheet music: questions people ask
Which Christmas carols are in the public domain?
A song is free to use when its words and its tune were published long enough ago. In the United States that means anything published in 1930 or earlier (as of 2026); in countries that count life plus 70 years, the writer must have died before 1956. Every carol in the table above was published before 1900 (the oldest tune is in a book of 1751). Modern arrangements, new translations and recordings are separate works with their own rights, so the table names the edition each page uses.
What are the easiest Christmas carols to play?
By the rule explained on this page, Jingle Bells and The First Noel are the easiest here (at most one of the five difficulty points). Joy to the World, O Come, All Ye Faithful, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Auld Lang Syne and It Came Upon the Midnight Clear are medium, and Silent Night and O Little Town of Bethlehem are harder because they have a wide range or sixteenth notes. The chorus of "Jingle Bells" uses only five notes, G A B C and D, so it suits a first piano or recorder lesson.
What key is each carol in?
In the editions used here: G major: O Come, All Ye Faithful, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Jingle Bells and O Little Town of Bethlehem; B♭ major: Silent Night and It Came Upon the Midnight Clear; D major: Joy to the World and The First Noel; F major: Auld Lang Syne. Any carol can be played in any key; the notes keep their shape and only the starting note moves, and a key that sits in your voice is better than the printed one. The key pages (linked from the table) list the scale and chords of each key.
Why do two editions of the same carol sometimes differ?
Because carols have been copied by hand and by hymnal editors for centuries, and each copy can carry a slip. On this site every melody is read by a program from one edition and then compared note by note with other editions, and the differences are written on the page. For example, in the hymnal edition of "Joy to the World" used here, two other editions each differ at one note, in different places; for "O Come, All Ye Faithful" the common Mutopia typesetting leaves out a stretch of notes that three other editions have. The page for each carol shows these checks.
Can I print and share these pages?
Yes. The sheets are made by this site from public-domain sources and are free to print and share, with no sign-up. Each carol page has two A4 and US Letter PDFs: the melody with note names, and a worksheet with the names left blank. This page has a one-page list of all the carols with their keys and ranges.
Which carols are not here yet?
Not every famous carol has an open, machine-readable edition that can be checked. "O Holy Night" has no such edition that could be found; the melody of "Greensleeves" differs between editions at several notes; "Deck the Halls" has only one open file. The English words of "Carol of the Bells" (Peter Wilhousky, 1936) are still protected according to Wikipedia, although the tune, the Ukrainian folk song "Shchedryk" arranged by Mykola Leontovych, is not. These are on the list for later.
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Christmas carols and real music: the numbers
The carols sit in 4 keys: G major (4); B♭ major (2); D major (2); F major (1).
The keys of these carols against real music
| Key | Carols here | Share of OpenScore Lieder songs | Share of Mutopia pieces |
|---|---|---|---|
| G major | 4 | 8.1% | 14.5% |
| B♭ major | 2 | 4.8% | 4.8% |
| D major | 2 | 6.8% | 9.9% |
| F major | 1 | 8.9% | 9.5% |
Shares are counts of key signatures (with major or minor estimated) in the collections the site has measured. Hymn tunes sit in the keys that are comfortable for congregations, so they cluster in G, D, F and B♭ major.
How wide each carol is
| Carol | Range | Semitones | Art-song vocal lines that are narrower |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jingle Bells | G4 to D5 | 7 | 0% |
| Joy to the World | D4 to D5 | 12 | 3% |
| O Come, All Ye Faithful | D4 to D5 | 12 | 3% |
| It Came Upon the Midnight Clear | D4 to D5 | 12 | 3% |
| The First Noel | D4 to D5 | 12 | 3% |
| Hark! The Herald Angels Sing | D4 to E5 | 14 | 16% |
| Auld Lang Syne | C4 to D5 | 14 | 16% |
| O Little Town of Bethlehem | D4 to E5 | 14 | 16% |
| Silent Night | B♭3 to E♭5 | 17 | 49% |
Range = lowest to highest note of the tune. The last column is the share of the 1,458 first vocal lines in the OpenScore Lieder Corpus whose lowest-to-highest range is smaller.
Method
- Keys and ranges come from the melodies decoded for each carol page (the notes are read from the editions named there).
- Art-song and Mutopia numbers come from the published statistics files of this site.
Data: computed from the OpenScore Lieder Corpus (CC0), 1,462 scores. Snapshot: commit 6b2dc542ce (2026-04-07).
Background
Excerpts from open reference works, reproduced as published (references, images and tables removed). Every excerpt names its source, licence and original article.
Christmas carols in general
Overview
A Christmas carol is a carol on the theme of Christmas, traditionally sung at Christmas itself or during the surrounding Christmas and holiday season. The term noel has sometimes been used, especially for carols of French origin. Christmas carols may be regarded as a subset of the broader category of Christmas music.
History
The first known Christmas hymns may be traced to 4th-century Rome. Latin hymns such as Veni redemptor gentium, written by Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, were austere statements of the theological doctrine of the Incarnation in opposition to Arianism. Corde natus ex Parentis (Of the Father's heart begotten) by the Spanish poet Prudentius (d. 413) is still sung in some churches today.
In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Christmas sequence (or prose) emerged in monasteries of Northern Europe, developing under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux into a liturgical sequence composed of rhymed stanzas. In the 12th century, the Parisian monk Adam of Saint Victor began incorporating melodic elements derived from popular songs, creating musical forms more closely resembling the traditional Christmas carol.
By the 13th century, a strong tradition of popular Christmas songs written in regional vernacular languages had developed in France, Germany, and particularly Italy, under the influence of Francis of Assisi. The earliest English Christmas carols appear in a 1426 manuscript by the Shropshire chaplain John Awdlay, who recorded twenty-five “caroles of Cristemas”, likely sung by groups of wassailers traveling from house to house.
The songs now identified as Christmas carols were originally communal festival songs performed during seasonal celebrations such as harvesttide. Only later were they adopted for church use and associated specifically with the Christmas season.
Source: Wikipedia, “Christmas carol” — CC BY-SA 4.0 — text excerpted; see the article for the full text and authors. Revision of 2026-04-17.
Sources and licences for the text, scores and recordings on this page are on the credits page.
Sources: The Army and Navy Hymnal (1920), Wikisource, The Mutopia Project, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia: Christmas carol.