What is in this collection
101 sheets of German-language song: folk songs, children’s songs, seasonal songs, carols and chorales. Each sheet carries the melody in treble clef, the lyrics aligned syllable by syllable under the notes, and chord symbols above the staff. Seventy-five of the melodies are traditional tunes with no secure composer; of the remaining twenty-six the composer is known, most often Johann Crüger with four chorales, Carl Gottlieb Hering with three children’s songs and Friedrich Silcher with two.
The collection also contains the complete songbook, all one hundred songs in a single 102-page document. Compile a binder for a choir, a class or a family gathering from the volume; rehearse an individual song from the single sheet.
The holdings cover what is actually sung in the German-speaking world: “Alle meine Entchen”, “Alle Vögel sind schon da”, “Ade zur guten Nacht”, “Ach Elslein, liebes Elselein”, and the chorale melodies that have been in the hymnal since the seventeenth century.
Three chords, and why they are enough
Most of these songs need three chords: tonic, subdominant and dominant — in G major that is G, C and D. This is not a simplification for beginners but the harmonic reality of folk song. The melodies existed before the accompaniment and move almost entirely within the notes of the scale; every one of those notes belongs to at least one of the three primary triads.
On the page it works like this. If the melody note is scale degree 1, 3 or 5, the tonic fits. If it is 4 or 6, the subdominant fits. If it is 7 or 2, the dominant fits. Know that mapping and you can accompany a song with no printed chord symbols at all, which is the single most useful skill to have around a campfire or in a classroom.
The chorales are the exception. In Johann Crüger — “Nun danket alle Gott” is his best known — a four-part setting sits under the melody, with passing notes, suspensions and the occasional secondary dominant. That is textbook harmony and cannot be handled with three chords. Hans Leo Haßler, represented by two settings, goes further back still: his melodies date from around 1600 and retain traces of the church modes, which is why they partly resist major–minor logic.
From the lesson
With children, rhythm starts through language, not through counting. “Al-le mei-ne Ent-chen” is eight syllables of equal length — crotchets — and a child who claps the text while speaking it has understood the rhythm before knowing what a crotchet looks like. Only then does the sheet appear, with the question: can you see that every syllable has exactly one note head?
The same song works for first melody playing, because the opening four notes rise by step — C, D, E, F — and then two notes hold. On a glockenspiel those are four adjacent bars. “Kuckuck, Kuckuck”, by contrast, opens with a falling minor third, the most natural interval there is, which is why it is the standard anchor tune for that interval in ear training.
One classroom format works reliably: three roles from one sheet. One child sings the text, one plays the melody on glockenspiel or recorder, one accompanies with the three chords on guitar or piano. After two run-throughs they swap. All three are reading the same page and can see that text, melody and harmony are three views of one thing.
Common mistakes
The upbeat gets missed. “Alle Vögel sind schon da” and many others do not begin on beat one but before it. You can spot this from the incomplete first bar — and from the last bar being incomplete too, because together they make one full bar. Sing the upbeat as a full beat one and you are displaced by a beat for the whole song, and no accompaniment will line up.
Chord symbols get changed too late. A symbol applies from the note it stands above, not from the next barline. If the D sits above beat three, the accompaniment changes there, not in the following bar. With one chord change per bar nobody notices; as soon as two symbols share a bar it is audibly wrong.
In the chorales the melody gets sung while the four-part setting is played, and the two get confused. A group singing “Nun danket alle Gott” in unison over the keyboard setting is doubling the soprano — that sounds good and is entirely fine. It is worth knowing, though, that the three lower voices then function as accompaniment rather than as choral parts waiting to be taken.