This is a traditional Basque carol called Birjina gaztettobat zegoen. The variations are based on the music for this carol in The Shorter New Oxford book of Carols. Edited by Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott. 1993, Oxford University Press. 316-317. The notes from the Book of carol indicate it was first collected in the late 19th century, but is at least a hundred years older than that.
I first heard this carol in the late 80s and looked for the music off and on until the Book of Carols appeared. The arrangement I made for guitar was first done around Christmas 1995 and I have tweaked it a bit before making it available here.
I used Coda's Finale to make the score and exported the pages as TIFF graphics then converted them to GIF using GraphicConverter. To make the graphic easily printable on Macintosh I had to increase the size of the margins and reduce the page size to 90% in the Finale file before exporting it. It is possible to view the files using Netscape or GraphicConverter. When printing from a Macintosh these files may print a blank, or nearly blank second page. Feel free to tell the printer to only print page 1 of 2. Printing from PCs shouldn't be a problem.
I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I do.
Suky Morita
9 March, 1997
