At The Back Of The Northwind

What At The Back Of The Northwind Actually Is

It's a British folk carol, one of those tunes that shows up on every Victorian hymn collection but barely anyone actually sings anymore. The full title is "At the Back of the North Wind" and it tells the story of a boy who falls asleep and dreams he's being carried by the North Wind itself to heaven. Pretty bleak imagery wrapped in fairly pretty melody. The song is attributed to Matilda Betham-Edmonds, who wrote the poem in 1867 and set it to music under the name "M.B. Edmonds." It's been arranged by just about everyone who has ever touched English choral music — Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells all did versions. The tune itself is deceptively simple. It sits in a minor key for most of it, which is why it sounds so much darker than most Christmas songs you hear at the holidays. I've arranged this for a few church choirs over the years and the thing nobody warns you about is the range. The standard choral SATB version sits comfortably between G2 and D5, which sounds fine on paper. But when you actually have a small village choir with two tenors who can't hold a note and a soprano section that includes three people who are essentially reading shape notes for the first time, that D5 becomes a problem. It always does. My workaround has been to simply transpose the whole thing down a whole step to D major relative minor, which brings the top note down to C5. Nobody notices the difference and the sopranos stop sounding like they're in distress.

Where to Find It

You can find the original poem and sheet music freely on Project Gutenberg and the Hymnary.org database. For sheet music specifically, the best free source is usually the Choral Public Domain Library at imslp.org — search for the composer name "M.B. Edmonds" or just search the title. Multiple arrangements exist there, from solo piano to full SATB with organ. If you want something a bit more performance-ready, the Vaughan Williams arrangement published by Oxford University Press is widely available through standard music retailers. There are also decent recordings by The King's Singers, the BBC Singers, and a fairly famous one by the choir of St. John's College, Cambridge. The St. John's version is probably the reference point most arrangers work from because the voicing is clean and transparent.

How to Actually Perform This

The main challenge with performing At The Back Of The Northwind isn't the notes themselves. It's the tempo and the attitude. This song is not festive. It's not joyful. It's about a child dying in his sleep and being carried away by a cold wind. If you conduct it like a Christmas carol, it will sound deeply wrong to anyone who has actually read the words. Mark it around half note equals 66 to 72. Not faster. The words need space. "And behold, the face of the boy was as light as the light" — that line is the emotional turning point of the entire piece and if you rush it you lose the whole meaning. I always tell my choirs to think of this as a lullaby that slowly turns into a funeral dirge. That framing usually gets the right expression out of them without me having to beat too much sense into anyone. The harmony in the standard arrangements relies heavily on suspensions and delayed resolutions, which means your chord changes will feel blurry if you don't give each harmony its full value. This is where a lot of amateur performances fall apart. They treat the dissonances as mistakes to rush past instead of the emotional core of the piece. Listen to any recording and pay attention to how long the composers hold the suspended notes. They hold them as long as humanly possible.

Common Mistakes

The biggest mistake I see is tempo drag in the second verse. The middle section ("There are colder winds than January") is supposed to feel like the wind is picking up, but instead most choirs slow it down further and it just becomes a slog. Keep the momentum moving. The tension should build through harmonic density, not through slowing down. Another issue is the organ or piano accompaniment. In the Stanford arrangement especially, the left hand part has some thick chords in the lower register that tend to muddy the bass line if the player isn't careful with pedaling. I've had to tell organists more than once to lift the pedal on the change from the tonic to the subdominant in the final cadence. Letting it ring through just creates a muddle that makes the ending sound undecided instead of resolved. If you're performing this secularly rather than in a church setting, be aware that the religious framing of the lyrics will be noticeable to some audiences. The boy dies and goes to heaven. Some concert programs have dropped this from winter repertoires precisely because of that. It's worth deciding early whether you're presenting it as a cultural artifact or as a devotional piece, because the approach changes accordingly.

Why You Should Learn It Anyway

For singers, this is excellent breath control material. The phrasing demands long, controlled exhalations over a narrow dynamic range, which is actually harder than it sounds. For conductors, it's a good exercise in getting a choir to sing softly without singing weakly. There's a difference and this song forces you to confront it. For anyone interested in English choral tradition, it's practically required listening if you're going to understand where the Christmas carol repertoire came from. Most of the songs we associate with the season in their current form were collected or arranged between 1890 and 1930, and At The Back Of The Northwind sits right in the middle of that movement as an example of what happens when Victorian poets took folk melody seriously instead of just writing new jolly tunes over them.