54. So easily assimilated

For this year’s Christmas music post, I decided to look more deeply into a Polish carol that is familiar in English-speaking countries with the words “Infant holy, Infant lowly.”  That text, penned by Edith Margaret Gellibrand Reed, dates only as far back as 1920.  A mystery I’ve been unable to solve is why Reed’s setting appeared first in an American publication (Primary Education, December 1920), and not in her own UK periodical (Music and Youth) until twelve months later.  Both appear below.  The first publication is marred by a number of infelicities (I assume misprints) which are rectified in the later publication.  I have marked those changes are in red, as well as some changes to the lyrics.  But notice the last three notes of Reed’s version of this melody—I’ll come back to them later.

SOURCE:  composite image, (l). scan of p. 641 of Primary Education (December 1920); (r) cropped scan of p. 945 of Music and Youth (December 1921).  [For larger image, click here.]

Reed’s text aimed at a G-rated children’s carol, and it has the usual suspects of the nativity pageant:  divinely well-behaved Baby in manger, lowing cattle, amazed shepherds, radiant angels, and stunning news.  The Polish text (or at least the only Polish text I have found associated with the melody) is “”W żłobie leży” [“He lies in a manger”].  I have not had the means to do a comprehensive search, but the earliest source I have located was a hymnal printed in 1838.  It includes three distinct but related melodies for the text:

SOURCE:  scans from the Biblioteka Narodawa of Śpiewnik kościelny czyli Pieśni nabożne z melodyjami... ed. Michał Mioduszewski (1838), pp. 30, 31, and 32; the final stanza concludes on p. 33.  The footnote on p. 30 indicates that the first tune is the most commonly used.

I know no Polish, but with the help of a number of friends I learned that the original text is very different from the innocent (even innocuous) English.  The first few verses are cast in the first-person plural:  we will sing for the baby, we will follow the shepherds, we will make him happy.  But then it turns to the second person singular, asking pointed questions:  Why are you in a manger?  Why does the world not accept you?  Then, finally, we have a response from the baby:  He foretells a blood bath such as will make the weeping in Ramah seem trivial by comparison; yet it is the bath in my blood that brings salvation. 

This is to say that “W żłobie leży” is much more substantial and challenging than “Infant holy, Infant lowly.”  But it has been assimilated into a different culture—a comfortable, early twentieth-century middle class culture which didn’t want any reminders of weeping in Ramah [Jeremiah 31; Matthew 2].  I had a little trouble associating the melody with anything except a lullaby, at least until I started looking at some Polish organ settings of the tune which ended in grand ff statements.  (If you’re interested, see the two settings in IMSLP #791869.)  And these reminded me of another organ setting of this tune, in a collection of noëls by Alexandre Guilmant.  He begins quite portentously:

SOURCE:  Guilmant op. 60, book 2, no.1 (bb. 1-9), from IMSLP #03921, a reprint of original 1886 Schott edition.

(Here’s a good performance.)  Eventually Guilmant gets around to stating the theme:

 SOURCE:  Guilmant op. 60, book 2, no.1 (bb. 20-37), from IMSLP #03921, as above.

The heading describes this piece as “based on an old Polish carol”; at the presentation of the theme, there is an asterisk referring the user to this footnote:

 SOURCE:  Footnote on the page of the above example, from IMSLP #03921

Guilmant reveals his source for this “ancien noël Polonais” (thus evidently not in a common repertory in France at the time) but what Fr. Victor Thirion’s source was we do not know.  Guilmant gives us a French title for this tune:  “Accourez bergers fidèles, l'heure bénie a sonnée” (roughly “Hurry, faithful shepherds, the blessed hour has sounded”—in any case, nothing like either the Polish or the later English texts).  Most important, however, is the re-barring of the music:  unlike the Polish source above (and, indeed, the early publications of “Infant holy, Infant lowly”), Guilmant starts the melody on an up-beat.  My guess is that Fr. Thirion’s communication to Guilmant was an aural transcription—that he heard it as an upbeat, and notated it that way.

This metrical dislocation appears in a considerable number of hymnals and carol books that use Reed’s “Infant holy, Infant lowly” text—but it is striking that in the earliest printings of her version the carol starts invariably on the downbeat.  Indeed, the earliest version I have located of the English “Infant holy, Infant lowly” text with the tune shifted a beat over à la Guilmant is not until 1950 (well after Reed’s death), where it appears in the Armed Forces Hymnal:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Armed Forces Hymnal, p. 211, from Archive.org

The harmonization is here attributed to David Hugh Jones (a professor at Westminster Choir College); the copyright at the bottom of the page indicates “Words from Kingsway Carol Book.”  (I have not yet gotten my hands on that source, but a copy is on its way and I will add an addendum below if there’s anything useful to report.) 

So how did this change happen?  My guess is that Fr. Thirion’s communication to Guilmant was an aural transcription, although it just as well might have been an intentional change by either Thirion or Guilmant (or somebody earlier in the transmission chain).  In any case, I am quite certain that the change happened in France, not in Poland:  that it was an act of assimilation to make the tune more readily comprehensible to French ears, just as David Hugh Jones (or whoever it was) acted in the same way to make it more readily comprehensible to American ones.  The opening melodic gesture—the move from the fifth scale-degree up to the tonic—is (I pronounce, as if ex cathedra) more commonly found crossing the barline (i.e., upbeat to downbeat) in the Western European and American hymn and carol repertories.  More than this—although one can certainly find the rhythm 

in Anglo-American hymns—almost all the examples that occur to me are iambic rather than trochaic, thus preceded by a quarter-note upbeat:

I’m thinking of examples like AZMON (a tune particularly associated with “O for a thousand tongues to sing”) and SOLID ROCK (William Bradbury’s tune for “My hope is built on nothing less”).  The sole trochaic exception that comes to mind is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s splendid KING’S WESTON, which rescues the 6.5.6.5.D text “At the name of Jesus” from a myriad of tunes that all give the same prosaic and predictable pattern (essentially the rhythm of Sullivan’s tune for “Onward, Christian Soldiers”):

... but I digress.

The point I’m trying to get to is that the metrical shift imposed upon the “W żłobie leży” tune is something akin to what the officers at Ellis Island did to surnames as they processed the immigrants entering the country:  they regularized them into something more familiar, maybe with the intent of making them easier for others to spell and pronounce, or maybe because they transliterated what they perceived as the names were pronounced.  Or they were lazy.  Or they didn’t care.  And it worked, and this tune has become a regular fixture among the Anglo-American carol repertory.  Like the Old Woman in Bernstein’s Candide, it is easily assimilated.  (A long way from Rovno Gubernya, indeed.)

I have referred before in this blog to the generally excellent New Oxford Book of Carols by Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott.  Here is their comment about this item:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of The New Oxford Book of Carols p. 605.

This note leaves quite a lot to be desired:

1. The misplaced bar-lines are in fact extremely common in the US, although granted the tune is now appearing with the (Polish) down-beat beginning with increasing frequency in US hymnals.
2. Reed’s version didn’t appear first in Music and Youth—although, again, I cannot explain how it made it (flaws and all) into Primary Education the previous year.  (For that tidbit, I thank the Hymns and Carols of Christmas website.)
3. Keyte and Parrott say that Reed’s text “was written for the mis-stressed version,” but her version is like the Polish sources (beginning on the beat), and it’s not clear that she would have known anything else.  (While some sources refer to the mazurka rhythm of the original, Reed’s commentary in Music and Youth actually describes the “W żłobie leży” tune as a polonaise specifically, rather than a mazurka.)
4. They also refer to an “obvious misprint” that led to the wrong notes at the ending (as given in Reed’s version).  I don’t know that this could have come from anyone other than Reed, and it seems not at all to be a misprint:  

SOURCE:  detail of p. 945 of Music and Youth (December 1921)

This is the 1921 printing; not only is this ending not “corrected” from the 1920 reading, but it is confirmed not only in the piano accompaniment and the Tonic Sol-Fa notation (which reads fa – mi – do), and the two-bar piano echo.  If this is a misprint, it must be from a source prior to Reed and upong which she based her text.  Such has not been located.  Maybe instead this is Reed’s own “improvement”?

That piano echo (preceded by the deceptive cadence under the last sung note) seems to have been Reed’s creation, and it is probably another element of assimilation, stretching the fourteen bars of the Polish version into a more typical classical sixteen.  It has had a long-lasting legacy, as all but one of the page scans of “Infant holy, Infant lowly” on Hymnary.org had the deceptive cadence and extra two (sung) bars.  Corrupted texts are immortal, or at least have nine lives.

One of the big surprises to me in all of this digging was that the tune was known in at least one English hymnal decades before Reed.  In 1877 it appeared in The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer with Accompanying Tunes with the text “Angels from the realms of glory.”   Here it was assimilated in a very different way:  it has been Victorianized, flattened out into all half-notes.

SOURCE:  cropped page scan of p. 54 of The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer... from Archive.org

Ian Bradley’s Penguin Book of Carols alerted me to this version.  Bradley remarks that the Polish tune’s “date is uncertain but it may well go back to the Middle Ages.”  I doubt it, at least as far as the tune is concerned.  To my ears it is just too tonal to be medieval.  Very few medieval specimens can don tonal garb and successfully “pass.”  (The c. 1400 tune “In dulci jubilo” is to me the exception that proves that rule.)  Rather, it suggests the Biedermier era of “Stille Nacht” (1820s).  Indeed, one of the melodies has a passage that strongly resembles the German folk carol “O Tannenbaum” (popularized with that text in 1824) [highlighted in red in the following illustration],  followed by something like the concluding phrase of the late-18th-century tune for the pseudo-ancient drinking song, “Gaudeamus igitur” [highlighted in yellow].

SOURCE:  marked up detail of above illustration from  of Śpiewnik kościelny czyli Pieśni nabożne z melodyjami... ed. Michał Mioduszewski (1838), pp. 30,

The IMSLP and other repositories had all sorts of Polish settings of one or another of the “W żłobie leży” melodies.  Without taking the space for them here, I link a few below (in addition to the organ settings linked above) because I found them all very interesting:

• Zygmunt Noskowski’s male-choir arrangement, in Sześć kolend, op. 56/ii (1898) IMSLP #696256
• another male-choir arrangement, no. 90 of Kazimierz Garbusiński's 100 Kolend, IMSLP #705961
• Louis Sawicki’s rather polonaise-looking piano setting, no. 3 of 6 Chants religieux de Noël (n.d.)  IMSLP #166628
• somebody’s fair-copy manuscript of Władysław Żeleński’s unpublished Koledy, where it is no. 3 #756521
• a 1908 school hymnbook with two-part settings (and which includes the more familiar (to me) melody as the alternate, Śpiewniczek zawierający pieśni kościelne... (see scan p. 107f.)

These sources demonstrate that several related melodies continued in use in Poland for a long time.  One has overtaken the rest, and I have no idea how much any of the others persist to this day.  As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m all in favor of textual pluralism, and I’d like to hear the other melodies sung more frequently.

The other thing that surprised—or rather staggered—me, as I browsed through many Polish carol books researching this post, was the sheer number of good tunes out there of which I have been completely ignorant.  All very humbling.  And if I found them strange at times, I was thankful that they hadn’t been assimilated.

*EXTRA* "Wholly writ?" A prehistory of SETTLING SCORES

Note:  This unlisted post is an "Easter egg" linked from the post “Lost (and found) in translation.”  It is unlisted only because it will not interest most of my readers, even though to me it seems not at all tangential to the substance of the blog; indeed, I regard it as absolutely central, the motivating force behind everything I’ve written here.  If you stumbled on this post out of context, you are very welcome—but please read more.

My first teaching job was at what was then Calvin College.  (Like so many other schools, it has upgraded itself to “University” in the years since.)  It is an institution with a particularly well-focused sense of mission, and over the years its faculty, staff, students, alumni, and trustees have expended a lot of mental energy in considering and articulating what it is that this school is and should be doing.  The Calvinist tradition tends toward (as Hamlet says) words, words, words; truly, of making many books there is no end.  In my second year there, two very significant institutional documents appeared, the culmination of a lot of dialogue between various constituencies that hold Calvin dear.  One was an Expanded Statement of Mission; the other, From Every Nation, was a manifesto that called for a wholly new focus on “racial justice, reconciliation, and cross-cultural engagement” in an institution that had for a long time existed within its own subculture—the remnants of a nineteenth century Dutch emigration to the American Midwest.  For its time (2004) and place, From Every Nation was a pretty radical document.  It certainly shook me up in ways that I needed.  

I stayed at Calvin for only four years.  It did not take me long to realize that I would always remain an outsider in that community (my Dutch-heritage last name notwithstanding).  This was not because of any significant theological differences, but rather the ways in which that theology was expected to manifest itself in the lives of the faculty.  I won’t go into that here, as I am keen not to write anything that would inadvertently put this institution in the wrong light.  I treasure my time at Calvin and the many friends I have who continue the good work there.  At the same time, I am very thankful to have been called elsewhere.

That said, I was thrilled to be invited back to Calvin across several summers for a grant-funded study group of Christian musicologists (from several different Christian traditions).  At first we gathered without a set project in mind, but it soon coalesced around the intersecting topics Crisis, Justice, and Peace, with the idea that a specifically Christian perspective on the complexities of music’s place in these fraught domains would, at the very least, be revealing.  We went away after the first summer to consider our own projects that would connect with this theme.  As virtually all of my work to date had been on British topics, I invested my energies on Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem; nevertheless I soon felt at sea, completely out of my depth to say anything useful.  By the time we met again the next summer, I had shifted to looking at the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a cross-cultural reconciliation project that was the brainchild of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said.  Eventually, however, I came to the conclusion that I was not going to have anything more useful to say about this than had not already been better said by Rachel Beckles Wilson, and I was on the verge of dropping out of the group altogether.  But then came a suggestion from Philip Bohlman, who had come as an external consultant to our group, that we might compile a sort of handbook aimed at music students in Christian liberal arts colleges, articulating connections between faith and what we do in music.

[An aside:  once, soon after the AMS Newsletter came out with the schedule for the upcoming annual meeting, a friend posted on social media “What in the flying f*ck is ‘Christian scholarship’?”  (This friend had seen a listing for the reception sponsored by the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music.)  To this friend, the acknowledged bias of Christian absolutely undid any claim to scholarship.  But scholarship generally has come to recognize (and sometimes celebrate) the subjective positioning of the scholars themselves.  A scholar may exist with many intersectional identities and perspectives, some even at odds.  I would argue that we have a better chance of understanding if we don’t pretend that we're standing on the same ground and facing in the same direction.  (This is not to say that the points I am making are distinctly Christian, but rather that I recognize a consonance between my faith and what I do here.)  Thus we were not trying to find a spot at the table; the spot is there (and we and so many others are already in it), but perhaps we aren’t used to speaking in a way that reveals this particular bias.  My sense is that this is not so much out of fear of being dismissed, but rather—as indicated in the prefatory note to this post—the assumption that no one will care.]

When I was on the faculty at Calvin, I was expected to think deeply (and write more words) about the question “How does your faith affect your scholarship?”  I found, however, that I was much more interested in the inverse:  “How has my disciplinary training affected my faith understanding?”  But that question seemed to make them nervous:  if my faith could be shaped by my schooling, maybe it was not strong enough.  I will own to the weak faith (“help Thou my unbelief”), but I still think my version of the question is much more interesting—precisely because it is my real life.  Restated, I became acutely aware of questions I would ask myself in church because of the ways I had been taught musicology.  And any time I saw a footnote in a Bible indicating something to the effect of “the earliest manuscripts lack this passage,” my musicological bells started ringing.  

So, following Bohlman’s suggestion, I started drafting a chapter for the handbook idea.  At the time, the work which I had found most gratifying was the critical editing that had yielded two volumes in the William Walton Edition.  (One tidbit from that project has come up in this blog thus far.)  So I thought my chapter should focus on textual scholarship, and why music students should even care what the musical text says.  The majority of students who opt for the sorts of Christian colleges where the faith connection is foregrounded are surely Evangelical, and the Evangelical community has a reputation for holding the biblical text—the Word of God—very high indeed.  Surely, I thought, that would be a useful hook to get students thinking about why the (musical) text matters.

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I revel in a multiplicity of texts.  I am interested in how different translations present the biblical text, each with their different particular agendas.  I have known congregations for whom the ESV is the only acceptable text; and then there is the so-called King James Only movement (not withstanding that its adherents are using the 1769 version of the text... but I digress).  For me, just as I am interested to see how the musical text may be manifest in different sources, I find different nuances afforded in comparing translations invigorating.  The comparison is not exact; but as I am accessing scripture already though translated text, more versions will chip away at the miscommunications latent in the transmission of ideas through such an imperfect system as human language.  Mutatis mutandis, the same in music.

And so in 2009 I drafted my chapter, following up on all sorts of rabbit trails:  it was the first time that I had really paid attention to Jonathan Del Mar’s new editions of Beethoven’s symphonies, but they proved a very useful case study, as some of the readings printed therein upset musicological apple carts.  (A good example of this can be found in a number of exchanges in Beethoven Forum, particularly between Del Mar and David B. Levy.  Do look them up, if you’re interested.)  But when our study group next met, there was no real enthusiasm for continuing with the handbook project.  I wasn’t really sure what to do with my chapter, as it didn’t feel like an article for any journal I was aware of and I knew it wasn’t a book.  And so it was shelved.  (My colleagues’ work on Crisis, Justice, and Peace ultimate saw the light of day in disparate places rather than a single, unified volume.  We figured that the ideas of our group would get a wider readership if dispersed.)

SOURCE:  wikipedia.com

All of this kindled my new-found interest in reading critical reports of editions outside of my area of specialization; indeed, I found for myself a new specialization—the musical text itself.  I started reviewing musical editions for Notes, enjoying it immensely, but not really knowing what to do with what I was learning.  Then came the rainy morning that really changed my career—but even then I thought I was just writing a conference talk.  A few months later it hit me, quite unexpectedly, one Sunday in June 2016.  I was filling-in as substitute organist in a church in Clemson, SC.  “Seated one day at the organ” (whether or not I was “weary and ill at ease”) the thought occurred to me:  This isn’t a book.  This is a blog. 

I knew nothing about blogging.  I felt I was dragging myself, rather belatedly, into the very late twentieth century.  And yet this medium has been the best for me to chip away at these thoughts about what it is that the musical text conveys, the apparent fixity of notation, and the myriad of variants that confront those who care to see them.  Most importantly:  so much of the essence of what is conveyed isn’t in the notation, but in what we bring to it.  (Naturally, I’d say the same thing about the Bible.  To put it another way, even Holy Writ isn’t wholly writ.)

As I look back at that draft chapter of 2009, the content that has unfolded in this blog is implicit there, even if the explicit Christian contextualizing has not been a focus here.  Here’s a sample of what I wrote then:

     That Urtext editions continue to be the default for so many teachers (and consequently pupils) is significant, because they are substantially more expensive than the reprints of out-of-copyright editions widely available.  There seems now to be a prevailing notion that serious musicians use Urtext editions, that the starting point for the performer should at least be a text the composer would have intended, and that this is assumed to be what appears on the page of such an edition.  Here we run up against a tension between publishers and the editors:  the cleaner the text on the page, the easier it is to reprint it in more marketable off-print editions, but the harder it becomes to indicate the degree and nature of editorial decisions.  Stripping such an edition of its critical apparatus is akin to taking down the scaffolding after hanging the chandelier:  the beautifully-presented text dangles unsupported for all to admire, but not to examine closely.  Moreover, the label Urtext on the cover suggests there is nothing more to examine; that work has been done, and the rest of us can get down to the real business of appreciating it.

     This is precisely what happened to the Authorized Version of the Bible, more familiarly called the King James Version.  The extensive prefatory essay “The Translators to the Reader” and the more than seven thousand marginal notes of the 1611 editions were eliminated by almost all subsequent publishers—a practical decision that surely saved a considerable amount of paper, but not without other consequences, as David G. Burke has argued:

“The effect of this loss was to give the King James Bible a kind of Qur’anic aura.  The KJV appeared in its published editions with no sign anywhere of actual human involvement in its production.  In contrast to any modern Bible translation, always well furnished with a preface providing context and with notes indicating textual uncertainties and ambiguities wrestled with, the KJV shows no indication anywhere that its translators shared the same sense of risk and uncertainty about their text decisions.  But they did, and they expressed in their Preface what it meant to make a Bible translation.  They carefully documented their text decisions in marginal notes, and what they did with those features set the standard for their successors for contextualizing translation work responsibly and forthrightly.  But today’s published editions of the KJV, which give no indication of any of this aspect, in effect lead readers to conclude that the KJV (unlike recent translations with their notes ‘Hebrew obscure’ or the like) is simply perfect because there are no indications that its translators had any difficulties with obscure texts.  Indeed, for some KJV users, the effect of having no access to the translators’ thinking has meant that they experience the KJV as a kind of original text” [p. xiii].

Or, a little later in my chapter:

     As Susan Hellauer of the ensemble Anonymous 4 has remarked, “you can’t sing a footnote” [p. 50].  A performer does not have the luxury of presenting multiple variants simultaneously:  a performance presents (and represents) a single version of a piece—the version determined by the performer(s) to be best suited to that specific performance context.  In fact, a similar dilemma is faced by an editor, too:  the main text of an edition can only represent one version.  Regardless of footnotes and small type that might indicate alternative readings, these are nonetheless alternative to main text established by the editor.   A performer may choose to incorporate such readings (or introduce wholly new ones) and consequently depart from the main text, but neither performer nor editor is free from the practical constraint of a single text elevated by default to a primary status, if only temporarily.

     My discussion thus far has concerned text as notation (what we might think of as the letter of the law) and not the text as its meaning manifested in sound (analogous to the spirit of the law).  Musical notation as such is a handy reminder that notated texts themselves are lifeless until they are enacted.  A performer is required for a performance to be realized, and, by the terms of my analogy, the faith must be lived out by believers for it to be manifest.  Words on the page, like notes in the score, have a value of a certain type, but they await practical application for that value to be consummated.

    There is no room here for detailed discussion of the nature of a “musical work”—a topic much discussed and deconstructed in musicological literature of the past few decades.   I want here, however, to offer an idea from author Dorothy L. Sayers which I believe can add a useful nuance to our understanding of the concept.  In her book The Mind of the Maker (1941), Sayers argues that a crucial aspect in which we are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26) is the ability to make things—and, for the creative artist, the ability to make without necessarily destroying something else.  Moreover, and more importantly, she outlines a trinity-in-unity in the work of the creative artist which she says is consonant with the Trinity-in-Unity of God.  As an author, she illustrates her idea with author as her chief example.  Having discussed  1) the generating idea that governs an  author working on a book, 2) the energy (or activity) which manifests the idea in a material form through the writing of the book, and 3) the power that the book has as others read it, she writes

“If you were to ask a writer which is ‘the real book’—his Idea of it, his Activity in writing it, or its return to himself in Power, he would be at a loss to tell you, because these three things are essentially inseparable.  Each of them is the complete book separately; yet in the complete book all of them exist together.  He can, by an act of the intellect, ‘distinguish the persons’ but he cannot by any means ‘divide the substance.’  … All he can say is that these three are equally and eternally present in his own act of creation, and at every moment of it, whether or not the act ever becomes manifest in the form of a written and printed book.  These things are not confined to the material manifestation:  they exist in—they are—the creative mind itself” [p. 41].

Sayers’s book captivatingly develops this analogy at great length, but it is essentially

Father : Son : Spirit ::  idea : energy : power 

She translates this into the terms of her example as  

book as thought :  book as written :  book as read 

     If we try to convert this to apply to music, the “text” in the sense I have been discussing it seems at first to be the energy—the score as written—and we can recognize the musical work as existing well beyond that, as a generating idea in the mind of the composer, and as a performance in sound (power) that reaches the ears of the audience and lasts in the memory.

     I believe that Sayers’s analogy is extremely useful, but I think that in music the situation is much more complicated.  I would follow Sayers to argue that we can speak of music (and, I think, even a “work” of music) “whether or not the act ever becomes manifest in the form of a [score] or [performance].”  For the purposes of this essay, however, I am concentrating on music which can and does become realized in both text and sound.  In this very common situation, we recognize that between the composer and the audience the work is mediated through the interpretation of one or more performers (to say nothing of the intervening hands of publishers, textual editors, recording engineers, instrument makers, or anyone else who might be involved).  In simplified form, we might describe the mediation through which the music proceeds as six distinct moments:

1.  a psychological state in the mind of composer 
2. that state converted (to whatever degree) into notation on the page  [bracketing for now any editorial intervention in the presentation of the text ]
3. the meanings the notation implies to the performer, in turn generating
4.  a psychological state in the mind of performer, within conventionally-accepted parameters for what the notation can or cannot represent
5. that state converted (to whatever degree) into sound
6. the meanings of those sounds to the hearer

     Sayers’s trinity-in-unity could easily be applied here to 1-2-3 (describing the composer’s relationship to the performer via the score) or 4-5-6 (describing the performer’s relationship to the individual listener via the sound).  In this description, the musical work assumes material form (energy) twice—first as a notated document, second as vibrations through the air.  It is important to recall Sayers’s insistence that these are latent from the beginning, “equally and eternally present in [the] act of creation.”  Indeed, the creativity is spread across all six moments:  the composer, performer, and receiver are all involved in creative engagement with the work—and thus it is no wonder that not only will performances differ greatly, but that listeners of a single performance will perceive very different things.  But this is hardly news, and many before me have linked composing, performing, and listening as a single creative activity. 

     I may posit another analogy: that believers live out their biblical faith in much the same way that performers realize a musical score.  The recognition of music’s two manifestations—the notated score which serves as a pattern for the performer, and the performance in sound which is the communication with the listener—implies a similar double manifestation in the first analogy:  God was made physically manifest first in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ; but now the faithful are charged to abide in Christ (John 15), to love one another as he has loved us (John 13), to be the body of Christ (I Corinthians 12), to conform to his holiness (I Peter 1).  This idea is encapsulated in an oft-quoted epigram:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours, 

yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world, 

yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. 

Following this line of thinking, the analogous mediating “moments” might be expressed as:

1. the eternal will of God
2. Jesus Christ made incarnate in time and space
3. the gospel as recorded through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit [bracketing the work of text critics and—more significantly—translators]
4. the reader’s understanding (again through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit)
5. the will of God lived out again by believers (in varying circumstances)
6. the meaning of such lives to those who encounter them

    The musical and spiritual moments do not correlate exactly.  As above, moments 2 and 5 are material manifestations, but in this case 3 is material as well—and moreover is the “text” in the most literal sense.  The analogy is not perfect by any means, but also serves helpfully to subvert too literal and limited a use of the term text.  Indeed, it accords with recent theories of text criticism which argue for a concept of the text of a work stretching far beyond the mere text of a document.      In the view of Jerome McGann, for example, 

“texts are produced and reproduced under specific social and institutional conditions, and … every text, including those that may appear to be purely private, is a social text.  This view entails a corollary understanding, that a ‘text’ is not a ‘material thing’ but a material event or set of events, a point in time (or a moment in space) where certain communicative interchanges are being practiced” [p. 21].

Naturally the understanding of the text will vary widely from one interpreter to another; similarly performances of the same score can sound very different in the hands of different performers (or even the same performers at different times).  Not only is this inevitable, but it is good.  Just like the different members of the body of Christ (even in the limited sphere of musical interpreters), the members have individual identities.  Isaiah 43 tells of a preserved Israel called “by name” to be a witness.  Individuality is not lost, even in corporate calling.

     C. S. Lewis writes that the Christian’s “whole destiny is in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not its own” [p. 7].   Lest I seem to be at odds with this, a concrete example may help to clarify my point.  A pianist learns a Mozart sonata; she commits it to memory, developing an interpretation that is faithful to the musical notation such as she has it, and also satisfies her own musical sensibilities.  When she goes onto the platform and sits before the instrument, she is an incarnation—her body will be the means which translates the interpretation of the music into sound; and in a sense she “dies to herself”:  she becomes wholly consumed by the communication of this interpretation, which speaks for her although she did not conceive the notes.  She has become a reflection of a face not her own; but at the same time, the reflection is her own, and the auditors may relish the subtle or striking differences between Alicia de la Rocha, Maria-João Pires, Martha Argerich, Mitsuko Uchida, or Hélène Grimaud.  We are called to be like Christ—“little Christs,” to quote Lewis again [p. 54]—but due to our many different gifts and contexts, those little Christs will look a bit different.  Vive la différence:  Christ is too big for anything that any one little Christ could manifest.  

     In the discussion above I have set aside the role of editors, text critics and translators in the mediation of the text between its source and its ultimate recipients.  Just as surely as performers and readers interpret the texts before them, however, so too do the scholars who establish the text to be presented.  And just as any one “little Christ” cannot exhibit the whole Truth, the whole “work” is well beyond the scope of any of the parties involved.  In an interesting review of the Del Mar editions, scholar and editor Clive Brown makes just this point, coupled with a corresponding concern over an obsession with literalism:

“Despite Beethoven’s concern to see his works published without palpable mistakes, his concept of what was essential in them was very different from that of a modern editor.  It seems clear that Beethoven did not see the musical impact of his works as being so closely tied to the literal meaning of their texts as we have been inclined to do for much of the twentieth century….  Del Mar’s propensity to endorse one version of the text to the exclusion of all others suggests a misplaced sense of duty toward Beethoven the creator, and sometimes flies in the face of our increasing understanding of the relationship between text and performance in Beethoven’s time. In this, as in many other areas, truth may well lie in variety rather than unity” [p. 915].

Establishing a credible text is a crucial interpretive element in the chain of mediation; very often the editor’s dilemma is choosing between different competing truths.  Just as performances differ, editions will naturally differ as well.   Neither the editor nor the subsequent users should not be deceived into a false sense of objectivity.  Walter Emery insisted that an editor’s musical sense is useful 

“only so long as he never allows himself to imagine that his work is primarily a form of applied musicianship.  The question uppermost in his mind must be not ‘Which is better?’ but ‘What happened?’   He should use his aesthetic judgment as little as possible, and work as much as possible like a scientist:  or more accurately, like a detective, since he has to deal not only with facts, but also with human habits and motives” [p. 35].

     I disagree:  to be involved in editing at all is to be motivated by a desire to make available a better text.  The pursuit of that text is to be done with great scientific rigor, and decisions must be made based on the evidence at hand, but the interpretation of musical evidence requires musical sensibility.  I agree with Brown:  confronting diversity brings us closer to the truth.  If my editorial work on texts has done nothing else for me, it has forced me to confront the insufficiency of musical notation to record what is truly vital about music.  A good performance is not one which mechanically translates the symbols on the page into some conventionally-accepted sonic equivalent, but one in which the musicality and personality of the performer meet the musicality and personality of the composer via the text (and then ultimately communicate that to the audience through the sound).  A very similar thing might be said of a good edition.  To put it glibly, perhaps, Beethoven has no hands but ours, but multiple hands will yield not only multiple but indeed different Beethovens....

It is just as well that the handbook project never happened:  I think the ramblings I have quoted above might have scared away precisely those students I was hoping to reach.  And I found a much better outlet for these thoughts, having had a few more years to mull them over.  Settling Scores emanates directly out of the work I did for that aborted project, and I expect that I’ve had a far wider readership in those posts, where I have left the theological aspects only implicit. I hope that those who have ears to hear will hear and be encouraged.  If Christian scholarship means anything, it is that there is nothing out there anywhere of which we should be afraid.

53. Lost (and found) in translation

As the academic term winds down, I find time to get to that stack of books unwrapped at Christmas.  In the preface of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music (ed. Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell), I read these words:

“The musical score itself is an imprecise mechanism, which by its very nature offers even the most dutiful performer a rich variety of possibilities.  There has always been much detail that a composer did not trouble to notate, knowing that certain conventions would be observed; some of these are no longer current or have undergone significant changes of meaning.  For example, musical notation can give little indication of tempo flexibility or the balance of instruments within an ensemble.  Those elements of style which a composer found it unnecessary to notate will always have the character of a foreign language, but one within which today’s musicians can learn to converse freely.  Using the resources and techniques for which a particular repertory was intended may well make more sense of what the composer actually wrote, recreating something of its initial impact on the listener” [p. xvi].

Indeed; and while I object to the notion of music as a “universal language” (on which see the late, great Linda Shaver-Gleason), the comparison here with a language in which one may gain fluency, with a fuller sense of idioms and subtexts, makes a lot of sense to me.  Such fluency will never be that of a native-speaker—we cannot be reborn in seventeenth century Europe (nor would I wish to be)—but with eyes open and ears attuned, an immersion into as much of that music’s culture that we can find may at least lead us in the right direction.  Whatever that is.

I remember years ago hearing a snide reference to a certain university music department as one in which “music is seen and not heard.”  I get it.  Musicologists can get wrapped up in the text and forget the experience.  I recognize in myself the tendency, when in museums, to look first to the commentary before I look at whatever is inside the frame—wanting to know what I'm looking at, maybe even what I’m supposed to see.  I'm probably more comfortable in the scholarly conversation (“discourse” is the word that was hammered into me in graduate school) than in the aesthetic experience.  No real surprise there, as I have much more in common with the critics than the creators.  Part of what has made the “historically-informed performance” movement so vibrant, I think, is the interchange between musicologists and musicians:  each has much to learn from the other.  Instruments can teach us what the text is saying, just as much as the philologist can seek to elucidate a particular reading within the larger context of a textual tradition.

As any reader of the blog knows, my concern here is about the musical text, almost always the notated text.  The text is frozen and lifeless, rather like the specimen in the biology laboratory.  Music-as-written is not the live creature in its natural habitat; that would be the music-as-sounded.  The notated text is at best a translation (a transubstantiation, even?) of the musical experience into written form.  Its medium is changed, and whatever new potential this new state affords, this necessarily comes with many costs as well.  Something is always lost in translation.  Even more than this, the notated text cannot be regarded as an end in itself, seen and not heard; rather, it is a means to another end, and it must be reawakened in a new resurrection of the music in sound.  (I offer no apologies for the religious language in this paragraph; I think there are useful connections to be made, if you’re interested you can read more in this prehistory of Settling Scores.)

And this text-as-lifeless-remnant is as true of recordings as of notated music.  A recording is music-as-sounded in only the most literal sense.  Otherwise, it is as frozen as the most prosaic printed page.  As Hua Hsu comments in a perceptive review of a lavish limited edition that presents (one is led to believe) an audio document of 1969 Woodstock festival from idealistic start to muddy end, “Listening to thirty-eight CDs brings you no closer to experiencing such felicity and innocence—the possibility in the tripper’s brittle laugh.  There’s the past, and there’s the story we tell about it” [p. 73].  Memory is fickle, and whatever text survives is all we have, for better or worse.  But text is also fickle.  It is only what happens to have been preserved, a mixture of intention and carelessness.

SOURCE:  discogs.com

A few years ago, I heard a fascinating paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Textual Scholarship.  Alan Galey (who is in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto) was addressing what he called “digital streaming lacunae”—how audio streamed from platforms such as iMusic or Spotify may lack information that would be heard on the corresponding compact disc.  The example that has stuck with me was from the fourth volume of Columbia Records’ “Bootleg Series” of Bob Dylan recordings.  The cover says “The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert,” although the source recording is actually from the May 17, 1966 Manchester Free Trade Hall concert—and the quotation marks around “Royal Albert Hall” acknowledge that there has been fan confusion about this recording for decades (noted, too, on the back cover).  In any case, this CD release preserves the famous heckling fan shouting “Judas!”  

SOURCE:  discogs.com

Galey noticed, however, that if one accesses this recording via any of the streaming services, this most-famous moment is missing.  Moreover, there is nothing to indicate that something is missing.  It may as well have been intentionally edited out.

What Galey discovered, however, was that omission was oversight, not intention.  On the Columbia CD, the “Judas!” exchange (as well as other things between the songs) were coded as pre-gap.  (Those of us old enough to remember compact discs can recall seeing the timer display sometimes indicate negative numbers right before a track started:  -00:03, -00:02, -00:01, 00:00 [start].  That is the pre-gap.)  Whoever was assigned to rip the CDs to provide the files to the streaming services neglected to check off “Include pre-gap” in the dialogue box, and so those sections simply disappeared, absent from the data.  Consequently the streamed version of this album is more than three minutes shorter than the CD release it purports to represent.  The “non-musical” moments of the album have been lost in the translation from one digital medium to another.  Even more alarming:  the digital text is not quite as fixed as we might have assumed.

As intriguing as that example is, I am much more interested in the disconnect between words and music--that is, where the words used to clarify the musical idea prove utterly insufficient, maybe because they are too slippery.  Felix Mendelssohn, in an oft-quoted letter of November 1842, rails about precisely this problem; I quote here the translation by John Michael Cooper (who also writes illuminatingly on the context and significance of this letter):

“There is so much spoken about music, and yet so little is said. I believe that words are entirely insufficient for that, and if I should find that they were sufficient, then I would write no more music.  People usually complain that music is ambiguous; that what they should think of when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words; but for me it is just the opposite, and not just with entire discourses, but also with individual words; these, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so unclear, so misleading in comparison to good music, which fills one’s soul with a thousand things better than words.—What the music I love expresses to me is thought not too unclear for words, but rather too clear.  I therefore find in all attempts to put these thoughts into words something correct, but also always something insufficient...” [p. 159].  

Mendelssohn goes on to state that the music would “arouse the same feeling in one person as in another.”  I’m not as sanguine about that, but I do agree with him that we are wrong to assume that our words are infallibly communicating what we intend.  

I ran across an example of this recently, working on a review of Breitkopf & Härtel’s impressive new edition of Mahler's third symphony.  Near the beginning of the second movement there is an interesting footnote in which Mahler endeavors to clarify his poco riten. instruction:

SOURCE:  cropped page scan (p. 114), showing bb. 29-35 of the second movement from Gustav Mahler, Symphonie nr. 3, ed. Christian Rudolf Riedel (Breitkopf & Härtel, 2021).

In case that print it is too small for you, it reads (in its English version):  “The 16th-notes always in the same tempo; the rit. should be in the rests.”  This is not a literal translation of the German:  “immer gleich schnell” [always as quickly] for the 16th-notes isn’t quite “the same tempo,” but I think we understand what he means.  As the beat slows, the length of the 16th-notes does not get appreciably longer.  He explains that the slowing happens “in the rests” [“in die Pausen”].  But look at the second violin line in b. 32, where we find the asterisk indicating the foot note:  there are no rests.  

SOURCE:  enlarged detail of image of above

A previous editor, Erwin Ratz, tried to fix this in his 1974 edition.  He decided to replace Mahler’s word “Pausen” [rests] with “Punkte” [dots (i.e., on the eighth notes)]:

SOURCE:  detail of p. 106 of a) first edition (Weinberger, 1898) available as IMSLP 109864; and b) revised edition ed. Erwin Ratz (Universal, 1974), see perusal score.

Ratz’s solution does indeed clarify, but it remains unclear whether this is indeed what Mahler intended.  The effect of Ratz’s reading is (I think) that one should hold out the dotted-eighth notes longer and longer, while keeping the 16th-notes the same.

SOURCE:  detail of the corresponding critical remark in Riedel's edition (p. 70). 

An alternate reading—and the one which Riedel favors—is that Mahler's use of the word “Pausen” is a clue to his intentions of the performance of the dotted notes.  Riedel declares in his critical remarks that Pausen “doubtless” indicates that the dots were really intended to be performed as if 16th-rests.  

Maybe.  Certainly there are many other moments in the same movement where Mahler opts to notate with a rest in place of a dot; but throughout he employs a variety of combinations of dots or rests (with and without slurs) for this basic division of a beat into a longer and a shorter note.  What at first glance appears merely inconsistent may also be regarded as exactly what is intended—that each of the various instances is notated as Mahler wanted it, and that what applies to one instrument need not apply to another..  There would not then have to be a stylistic shortening of the dotted-eighth to make room for a 16th-rest (which would be lengthened in the ritenuto); instead both the dotted-eighths and the negligible gaps between the two articulated notes could be gradually lengthened.  That is, both sound and silence are stretched, just not the 16th-notes (which remain the same duration).  I struggle for what word Mahler should have chosen if this is what he had intended:  Lücke [“gaps”], perhaps?  The lack of an obvious word might explain why the word that he uses seems particularly unsatisfying in this case, so that both editors have had to devise a way to make the musical text and the verbal text agree.  Ratz changes the word; Riedel leaves the word but argues for its literal meaning—and thank goodness he doesn’t alter the musical notation to agree with his reading!

This Mahler “lost in translation” issue is perhaps instructive because the it appears to be wrought from the difficulty in finding the right verbal instruction to make sense of the musical notation.   We might also encounter the “divided by a common language” issue, where an instruction means different things to different people, even close collaborators.  I ran across this several years ago in my work on Gilbert and Sullivan.  For Gilbert—the librettist—the word recitative indicated that he was breaking from a verse prosody into a different kind of declamation, generally switching to Italianate endecasillibi.  (If you want more on this—and there is a lot more—see my article, "Recitative in the Savoy Operas.")  Here’s an example from Princess Ida (1884), the eighth of their fourteen collaborations. Gilbert’s label “recitative” in the middle of this longer musical number denotes a shift in topic as well as prosody, as Florian changes the subject:

SOURCE:  cropped page-scan of The First Night Gilbert and Sullivan, p. 221; showing an extract from Act I[I] of Princess Ida.

When we compare the libretto—the verbal text—to the vocal score of Sullivan’s musical setting, we find quite a different use of the term recitative:

SOURCE:  marked up page-scan (slightly cropped) of p. 55 of the first edition (second state) vocal score of Princess Ida, available at IMSLP #331094.

Florian’s outburst (“A woman's college!”) has no “recitative” instruction.  That doesn’t come until fifteen bars later, when Hilarion responds, and Sullivan repeats the marking again three bars later.  In both instances, he cancels it with the musical instruction “a tempo” (i.e., return to the tempo as it was).  What this shows is that for Sullivan, “Recit.” was in this instance a musical instruction:  it meant for the conductor to stop beating in tempo, and to accommodate a free recitation of the text—not necessarily following notated rhythmic patterns strictly.  

One would not know from listening to the music or looking at the score that Gilbert’s recitative (with a corresponding change in the prosody) had happened much earlier.  Sullivan essentially ignored that, setting the new verse structure within the prevailing musical texture.  Yes, the musical style changes a bit, but in a few bars (just after “...worth knowing”), Sullivan has reintroduced the countermelody that has been going on in the accompaniment for all of the previous section.  Sullivan saves the interruption for the first moment of disagreement between the three characters on stage, and it is dramatically more powerful for that reason.  If we imagine all six lines set to this sort of secco recitative, the scene would have stopped dead in its tracks, and it would have been very hard to get the momentum back.

But it doesn’t take two people to use a word to mean different things.  For Handel, it seems that Adagio could be both a mood and a gesture.  The gesture occurs frequently at the end of a movement as a transition to the next:  after a full cadence, then a new instruction (“Adagio”), and then a few chords (often above a descending tetrachord) framing a Phyrgian half-cadence, over which someone presumably extemporizes some sort of embellishment.  This is a common enough Baroque convention, of course—not at all limited to Handel.  I associate it with the Corellian tradition, but Handel turns it almost into a mannerism.  Probably the most talked-about example is Bach’s third “Brandenburg” concerto (BWV 1048), where some have tended to refer to the transitional half-cadence as “the second movement.”  (If you don’t believe me, Google it.  Only as a heuristic do I think we can regard it as a movement unto itself; that or as a CD track.)  The transition at the end of the slow movement first “Brandenburg” (BWV 1046) is more remarkable still:  the tonic chord is denied us, and as the bass gives the notes of the tetrachord in isolation, each is followed by an exchange between oboes (presenting a diatonic chord we might have expected), and the strings (presenting an increasingly intense chromatic alternative).  A haunting moment.  At the slow tempo (Adagio, of course) and with the silences around each of the chords, we stand gazing into the abyss.   

SOURCE:  my own score reduction of BWV 1046/ii bb. 36-39.

(Continuing this digression, for my money a much more intriguing Phrygian half cadence is the one that concludes the aria “Behold and see” in Messiah.  Handel employs the cadence dramatically, leaving this crucial moment pointedly unresolved—willing the music on.)

There are transitional Phrygian cadences in Handel that lack a new tempo designation, but I've never seen him use any designation for such a transition other than Adagio.  And thus, on occasion, one finds him appending this Adagio transitional gesture at the end of a movement that is already marked Adagio.  Here, for example, is the conclusion of the first movement of the concerto Op. 4 no. 3, HWV 291:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Handel's autograph ms of HWV 291, now contained within BL Kings MS 317.  This detail is the top half of f. 12v, which gives bb. 26-30 of the first movement.

In case this is a little hard to read (and Handel’s writing often is), here is the same passage as it appears in the (revised) volume of the HHA:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Orgelkonzerte I, HHA Ser. IV vol. 2 (which superseded an insufficient 1955 volume of the same works); this detail is the bottom of p. 54, which shows bb. 26-30 of the first movement of HWV 291. 

Note the adagio instruction for the cadential transition in b. 30.  (Or is it really in b 29, as it seems to be in the autograph?)  But this movement is already marked Adagio from the start.  Significantly, Handel is not using the word to indicate a return to the tempo in b. 28 after the improvisatory cello passage.  There is no marking at all at b. 28 (i.e., a dog not barking in the nighttime); thus, he must have considered even an a tempo marking superfluous.  But the second adagio in b. 29/30 is a new instruction, not at all superfluous, nor (it would seem) merely redundant.  Handel moves from the “Adagio mood” of the movement to the “Adagio gesture” of the transition after the cadence.  (There is a similar situation in the first movement of Op. 7 no. 4 (HWV309), although in that case Handel was reusing a slightly longer movement, truncating it and adding the half cadence and the seemingly redundant Adagio instruction at that time.)

The editors of the HHA volume, Terence Best and William D. Gudger, evidently thought that the second adagio seemed out of place; their solution was the editorial footnote “= più adagio”—although, as in Riedel’s interpretation of the Mahler Pausen this instruction is an interpretive prescription which seems to be speculative at best.  More Adagio?  Says who?  Granted, my reading is also speculative; but I’d argue that 1) a blogpost is a fitter venue for speculation than a critical edition, and 2) mine is not an ad hoc solution to a unique textual problem, but seems more consistent with Handel’s usage generally.  (Does Handel ever use the instruction “più adagio”?  I wonder.  I don’t know nearly enough Handel to pronounce on that, but something about it doesn’t sound quite right.)

If Lawson and Stowell are onto something with their linguistic metaphor for musical instructions of the past, I’d argue that there is no shortcut—no Google translate—for our attempts to understand it and acquire any measure of fluency.  The past is gone, and we have no real way of immersing ourselves in it.  We are not the original listeners; indeed, we are not an intended audience at all.  We are eavesdroppers on a sometimes static-filled line in a game of textual telephone; to some extent, like the participants in that game, our interactions with the musical texts can affect their transmission to those who come after.  (In this blog I’ve regularly returned to the problems editorial misreadings have caused by narrowing the interpretive possibilities.)  Returning to the earliest sources does not guarantee that we actually know what we’re reading, still less how.

If a blogpost is a proper venue for textual speculation, it may not be the best venue for pleas for humility, but that is how I will conclude.  The more we approach these texts with an awareness of the chasm between the lost musical experience and the accessible musical text as notated (or recorded)—and with a willingness for the notations to mean something other than our common assumption of it, the better our chances (it seems to me) to approaching anything meaningful.   Otherwise, we are merely recreating the music in our own image, just as some may do with the Constitution of the United States... or with whatever you care to name, up to and including God Almighty.