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.

52. Appalachian trail

     “‘The trail,’” dictated Wimsey [to journalist Salcombe Hardy], “‘breaks off at the crucial point. How did the razor get into the hands of Paul Alexis?  If once I could be satisfied of that, the answer might at once set at rest all my doubt.  If Paul Alexis can be proved to have bought the razor, I shall consider the suicide theory to have been proved up to the hilt.  But until that missing link in the chain of evidence is reconstructed, I shall hold that Paul Alexis was foully and brutally murdered, and I shall spare no efforts to bring the murderer to the judgment he has so richly deserved.’  How’s that, Sally?”

     “Not too bad.  I can work that up into something.  I shall add, of course, that you, knowing the enormous circulation of the Morning Star, are relying on the wide publicity it will give to this statement to etcetera, etcetera.  I might even get them to offer a reward.”

     “Why not?  Anyway, pitch it to ’em hot and strong, Sally.”

     “I will—for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer.  Between you and me, would you be satisfied it was suicide if the reward was claimed?”

     “I don’t know,” said Wimsey.  “Probably not. In fact, I am never satisfied.”

Dorothy L. Sayers:  Have His Carcase (1932), chap. XI

In about 1908, Mrs. Olive Dame Campbell by chance heard a student at the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky sing the old English ballad “Barbara Allen,” and she thereafter began canvassing the Appalachian region for remnants of other folksongs from the British Isles. Upon meeting Campbell and seeing her work, English folklorist Cecil Sharp at once recognized that Campbell had “tapped a mine which if properly and scientifically explored would yield results—musical, historical, literary, etc.—of the first importance.” (I quote this from a very useful 1999 article by Michael Yates, “Cecil Sharp in America: Collecting in the Appalachians.”) In the following years Sharp went on three extensive collecting trips with his amanuensis Maud Karpeles. In their 46 weeks in the field, they collected 1612 specimens, publishing their findings as English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917), with an expanded second edition in 1932. The map below appeared in that second edition.

SOURCE:  scan of Frontispiece of vol. 1 of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (2nd Ed.), collected by Cecil J. Sharp, “including thirty-nine Tunes contributed by Olive Dame Campbell” (1932)

The “counties in which the songs were collected” (and only these) are shown by their borders; otherwise, only state borders are indicated. The 1000’ contour line is given in much more detail, zig-zagging to reveal several distinct ridges.  The story told by that more detailed contour line surely regards the remoteness of the locations in which Sharp collected his specimens:  a distance that may not appear very far on the map might be separated by a considerable difference in elevation with few passable routes.  Indeed, absent from the maps in both editions is any indication of road access, even between the few cities marked.  In his introduction Sharp emphasizes that his journeys took him into very remote locations; consequently, the texts gathered in those places are relics of a tradition that has persisted and developed apart from the increasingly urbanized world down the hill.

At the same moment that Sharp and Karpeles were finishing their journeys up and down the Appalachian hills, a Kentucky boy who would have been particularly interested in their endeavors was “over there” in France.  Indeed, from his wartime experience John Jacob Niles (1892-1980) eventually published a book of soldier songs which, even with its texts somewhat sanitized, still merits its title, The Songs my Mother Never Taught Me (1928).  Returning after the war, Niles was fascinated by the findings of Sharp, Campbell, and Karpeles—and by the burgeoning interest in folk music generally.  He set about to find some treasures of his own.

     

     “Satisfied?” asked Hardy, as Wimsey returned from the police-station.  He had telephoned his story to Town and was absorbing a little refreshment after his labours.

    “I ought to be,” replied his lordship.  “The only thing that worries me, Sally, is that if I’d wanted to invent a story to fit this case, that is exactly the story I should have invented.”

Have His Carcase, chap. XIV

From the start, this blog has been as much about what’s on the page as about how it got there.  I’m passionately interested in the textual antecedents of whatever is in front of me.  Where did this come from?  Whose hands were on it?  What changes (small or large) were wrought?  What do such changes convey to us about how comfortably this music exists as a notated text at all?  But what about when the textual trail grows prematurely cold?

SOURCE:  scan (p. 49) from a field notebook of John Jacob Niles,
preserved among his papers at the University of Kentucky;
this image is taken from from Ron Pen,
I Wonder as I Wander:  the Life of John Jacob Niles (2010).

Here’s an example of something that clearly is not comfortably finding its way into notation.  (Apologies for the comparatively low-resolution of the scan—but I don’t think that will prevent anyone from following the rest of this post.)  It shows a page of one of Niles’s notebooks, and purports to be his earliest attempts to notate the song “I wonder as I wander,” in Murphy, North Carolina, on July 16, 1933 (starting about one-third of the way down the page).  The two following pages have further attempts.  Ron Pen, who was the Director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, has probably given more sustained attention to these pages than anyone else in the world, and has pieced together a narrative of what these tidbits reveal about Niles’s compositional process.  Yes, I said it:  compositional.  While the inspiration of this song came out of the mouth of another (Niles noted down: “singing of a girl who calls herself Annie Morgan about 16 or maybe younger, very pretty—very unwashed”), whatever he heard Morgan sing was radically transformed before Niles published the song.  As Pen recounts, Niles’s compositional sketches from late September and early October 1933 gradually accumulate two further stanzas, and several different versions of the tune.  Those pages also have notes like “Carl E[ngel] will not take it this way (the ending is wrong).”  Engel was Niles’s publisher at G. Schirmer, and he himself wasn’t above a little textual meddling if it would make a better product in the end.  The textual trail doesn’t just grow cold at July 1933, it is non-existent; a better metaphor would be a spring emerging from the soil, flowing forth with no obvious source.  Yet I have no problem regarding “I wonder as I wander” as an Appalachian folk-song, as it flows out of a(n extrapolated) tradition, even though it is actually the calculated artistic product of John Jacob Niles in dialogue with his publisher.  In the memorable words of Thomas Dunhill, “let us disabuse ourselves of the idea that a folk-song is a song written by nobody and arranged by Cecil Sharp” (p. 246).

There is a pretty good chance you have heard Niles’s song:

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,

How Jesus the savior did come for to die

For poor on’ry sinners like you and like I;

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.

It often shows up on Christmas concerts in all sorts of arrangements, particularly for choirs.  And it’s a good tune, often described as “haunting.”  The tune is unusual:  all four phrases begin with the same sequence of notes, but each phrases ends differently; the last phrase has both the highest and lowest pitches of the melody, with what is perhaps an unexpected final note—unresolved, lingering, making the silence which must eventually follow it seem poignant indeed.  About twenty years ago when I heard the new tune by Swiss composer Carl Rütti, I was puzzled:  as far as I’m concerned, the original tune was the best part.  Why throw it out?  

The first three lines of the lyric seem to stem directly from the encounter in Murphy, NC, but possibly not the repeat of the first line as the last line of the stanza came from Annie Morgan.  (Niles failed to continue that pattern in his other stanzas, which I think that is a weakness.)  The subject/object confusion of “like you and like I” at least provides a rhyme, but in my mind’s ear I can still hear my father’s audible wince anytime he heard that sung.  (He always had a red pen in his pocket, and I can remember him adding proofreader’s marks to Christmas letters sent by friends and relations.  You can take the professor out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of some professors.)  The strongest line is the very first:  not just the near rhymes of wonder and wander, but under too.  Nothing else in the lyric rises so high.  And I note that nothing in the first stanza really defines this as a Christmas song; but Niles and Engel surely knew it would be more marketable as such.  And so it was published as an “Appalachian Carol” in Niles’s anthology Songs of the Hill Folk (1934), and then in numerous arrangements thereafter.

Niles eventually realized that his song was a goldmine, but he then had to find ways of claiming authorship of something he had hitherto presented as collected material.  I see that the blurb about this song in The Reader’s Digest Merry Christmas Songbook strives for some mystical union of composed and folk, even below the explicit attribution “Words and Music by John Jacob Niles”:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 206 of The Reader's Digest Merry Christmas Songbook (1981).

... whatever that means.  In that Reader’s Digest collection, the song is grouped in a section of “Christmas Folk Songs and Spirituals.”  In The New Oxford Book of Carols—a splendid resource to which I have turned before in these posts—the tune is allocated to the “Traditional Carols” section, not the “Composed Carols.”  Yet I think we could make a pretty good case that some items in the “Composed Carols” are far less composed than this one.  (“In dulci jubilo,” anyone?)  Wasn’t it Will Rogers who said something like All music is folk music.  I never heard no horse sing?  (Probably not.  Whoever it was, we get the point.)

The problem with this question of attribution is that, rather like the boy who cried “wolf,” the deception involved in “I wonder as I wander” makes it hard to trust anything that Niles has claimed anywhere else.  He said that he paid Annie Morgan six quarters to sing the song a few times as he tried to write it down, and Pen believes that one can see those efforts on the pages of the field notebook.  In any case, the $1.50 Morgan received was nothing compared to the profits that Niles brought in by appropriating her unattributed idea.  Pen quotes Ellen Steckert’s perceptive remark:  “to have discovered the natural gem was then far better than to admit to having produced it artificially” (p. 156).

(Eeyore knows all there is to know
about not being satisfied.)
SOURCE: Illustration by E. H. Shepard;
scan taken from The Project Gutenberg
e-book of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Niles produced a string of such discoveries (if that is what they are... which I doubt) and I notice a trend:  not only is he the only person to have notated anything resembling these tunes, but his informants are very often conveniently untraceable.  Annie Morgan was the daughter of an itinerant preacher, and they were headed out of town (with Niles’s quarters paying for the fuel).  Other singers who sang for him are identified with vague phrases like “a very willing old lady known as Granny Holcolm,” “a woman who was cooking for a preacher’s wife in Asheville, N.C.,” “an elderly woman named Mrs. Nuckols, who lived somewhere north of Yorkes, Ky.”and the like.  Niles may have been very much concerned with being compensated for his troubles, but the buck stopped with him:  his untraceable sources were useful as characters in his J. Peterman-like descriptions of how he (allegedly) collected each song, but nothing beyond that.  (Such rambling prose accounts reach their zenith in The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles (1960), the title which seems to give away the game).

SOURCE:  scan of contents page

And is it true? (to channel John Betjeman); for if it is...  then some of Niles’s findings blow one's mind.  The specimens he claimed to find of English carols surviving in the Appalachians are far more startling than anything that Cecil Sharp turned up, precisely because they seem at odds with what we know about religious traditions on the frontier.  Certainly we don't expect the Marian focus of “Sing we the Virgin Mary” (which, as the NOBC observes, “would appear to be a near-miraculous survival of the fifteenth-century English carol text ‘I sing of maiden that is makeless’ (British Library, Sloane MS 2593, where it appears without music)”).  Ah, but Niles didn’t have find Sloane MS 2593 to learn of this text, as he had the [old] Oxford Book of Carols at hand already, which included Martin Shaw’s tune for it.  When Niles published his version (“I took down this song in Mayfield Ky., in 1933, sung by members of the Mathers family, who were said to be tenants on a near-by farm”), he comments that “in comparing the verses below with the original, we observe a similarity that goes beyond mere chance.”  I won’t argue with that:  Niles left nothing to chance.  (I’m reminded of the exchange in the W. C. Fields film My Little Chickadee (1940):  “Is this a game of chance?” / “Not the way I play it.”)  This pamphlet, The Anglo-American Carol Study Book, reads as one-upmanship against the by-then-deceased Cecil Sharp.  Anything you can find I can find a more curious example.

More curious still is the putative survival of the “Corpus Christi carol” (also found in the Oxford Book of Carols and a number of other sources Niles knew), and with a visceral eucharistic text that to my mind is more haunting than anything in “I wonder as I wander”:

SOURCE:  scan of pp. 126–27 of The Oxford Book of Carols (1928).

I won’t go into the extremely complicated story about Niles’s “discovery” of this one, as David Reed Parker has already done a masterful job at that.  (See his “John Jacob Niles and Revisionist Folklore:  The Corpus Christi Carol/‘Down in Yon Forest’” in Southern Folklore 49/2 (1992), pp. 147-56.)  It is worth tracking down Parker’s article, even if he is a little more willing to accept Niles’s word than I am.  Ron Pen, too, is generally willing to give Niles’s documentation the benefit of the doubt:  “To conceive of creating such fraudulent sketches [of ‘I wonder as I wander’] would require prodigious foresight and an unbridled imagination for forgery” (p. 152).  Exactly.  As Lord Peter almost said, these are exactly the sketches I should have invented.

But is there some aesthetic legitimacy in such deception?  Don’t we hear it differently if we think it is not just Niles’s creation, but something that has been passed through oral tradition up in the Appalachian hills?  I am reminded of Fargo, the great film by Joel and Ethan Coen (which has spun of a television series exploring the world in which the film takes place).  It opens with this notice:

SOURCE:  screenshot from the film, borrowed here from https://creepycatalog.com/true-story-movie-fargo/

And yet, if you watch the final credits all the way to the end, you get the standard disclaimer:  “No similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is intended or should be inferred.”  The story is entirely made up, but we are instructed to watch it as true—and (I would contend) that makes an important difference in our reception of it.  We are enabled to enjoy it in a different way than if we approach it as fiction.

Maybe there is something similar going on with Niles’s “Appalachian carols.”  But one thing is clear:  John Jacob Niles forged a trail.  In one sense or another.

49. The sound of (editorial) silence

There is a temptation for an editor to select a variant reading that alters the sound of a work enough to be audible to musically-sensitive listeners.  (It provides for a certain frisson: “They’re playing my edition!”)  Some years ago I discussed Thurston Dart’s edition of the “Brandenburg” Concertos as an extreme case of in-your-face textual difference.  This is an temptation I had to learn to resist when editing—being different for the sake of being different.

I stumbled across an example the other day.  I had been reading Christoph Wolff’s new book, Bach’s Musical Universe.  I was struck by this passage, which concerns a group of chorales associated with the lost St. Mark Passion:

“Moreover, their manner of four-part chorale harmonization shows a consistently greater degree of contrapuntal intricacy and rhythmic animation than Bach had typically brought to bear in the past, particularly in the inner voices—a trend that would continue in the Christmas Oratorio.” [p. 226]

It never occurred to me that Bach’s harmonizations “improved” as he aged.  Yet it brought to mind an e-mail exchange I had with a music theorist friend about a year ago about particular favorite Bach chorale harmonizations.  I had said then that my favorite—if I had to name one—would be the closing chorale of the first part of the Christmas Oratorio, a setting of “Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her.”   That setting punctuates each phrase of the melody with a fanfare of trumpets and drums—which I once liked very much, but which now I regard as an intrusion on the real stuff, the harmonization.  (In any case, the fanfares are striking, as they seem at odds with the text:  essentially “Make for yourself a clean, soft bed in my heart, O sweet little Jesus, so that I never forget you.”  (As a further aside, my guess is that it was this thirteenth strophe of Martin Luther’s hymn which somehow gave rise to the false idea that Luther had authored “Away in a Manger.”  He didn’t, but the sentiment is there.)  Some conductors—Ton Koopman on the video linked above, and John Eliot Gardiner are examples—downplay the trumpets and drums, as if not to wake the baby.  But I think Philip Pickett is right to have them thunder away:  the effect is not of a newborn but rather the King of Heaven beating on the door of my heart.)

I love this harmonization, particularly the last two phrases.  Spurred by Wolff’s commentary, I pulled it out again and played it on the piano a few times.  The next day it was on my mind as I walked to my office, so when I got there I pulled the Dover reprint of the BG edition of the shelf and played it anew.  And right at the end—Is this a misprint?  What is that D doing there?

SOURCE: BWV 248/ix, bb. 10–15; cropped scan of BG bd. 5 (ed. W. Rust, 1856), p. 48; from ISMLP #02418.

The D may at first appear odd harmonically:  the tenor crosses below the bass to produce a second-inversion subdominant chord.  But assuming that the continuo bass line has some instruments sounding an octave lower (double bass, organ?), then the true bass line is still below the tenor; thus no such solecism has occurred.  The voicing is unusual, but the harmony at this cadence offers no surprises.

SOURCE:  cropped scan of NBA II/6, p. 54
(ed. W. Blankenberg and A. Dürr, 1960) 

I wasn’t expecting the D because it is not what I grew up hearing.  (The D is on the Koopman video above, though.)  What I heard for years is the reading in the NBA, where the tenor steps down to a wonderfully dissonant E.  I love that chord.  Now instead of IV we have ii, and my argument about the second-inversion is undone.  If we disregard the 16-foot doubling in the continuo line, the tenor becomes the bass of a (very proper) root position chord; but if we account for the octave doubling, we have an unexplained second-inversion chord.  That notwithstanding, I think it is a gorgeous effect.  And so I found myself wondering how it came to be, given that it was not in the old edition.  What was the story?

I turned next to the NBA critical report, which states that the autograph manuscript shows a correction from the D to the E, although the manuscript parts (tenor and viola) transmit the D.  Hmmmmm...  Let's take a look at that autograph....

SOURCE: enlarged details from D-B-Mus.ms Bach P 32, Bl. 12v (from Bach Digital).  The detail on the left shows alto, tenor, bass, and continuo staves for bb. 11–13 of no. 9; on the right the fourth tenor note of b. 12 is further enlarged.

So... is that a correction?  To my eye the D [we are in tenor clef] remains much clearer than the smudge that is alleged to be an E.  I will admit that the smudge is rounded like a note-head, though it appears a different color and much lighter, and would have to have been made at a different time, maybe unintentionally.  When Bach isn’t able to make a correction appear unambiguous (as, for example, the B which replaces an A as the very first choral bass note in the example above), he does something to clarify it—as he does elsewhere on this same page.  In this instance, Bach’s second thought was to let the third trumpet leap up rather than to repeat the same descending figure, but as the ink was smudged in the process, he clarified by indicated that the intended note was C.  (The lower C was sufficiently obliterated.)  

SOURCE:  same page as above; this detail is bb. 2–4 of the trumpet and drum staves. 

So why, then, did he not write the letter E in bar 12 to clarify the tenor correction?  

Because it wasn’t one.  Sometimes a smudge is just a smudge.  Indeed, for a blissful moment I thought it might just be ink bleeding through the paper.  Here is a side-by-side comparison of the same detail of the Bach with a mirrored image of the other side of the page—mirrored, that is, to facilitate comparison of markings which are bleeding through:

SOURCE: marked, cropped scans from P32.  Left is the same image as above; right is the corresponding portion of the other side of the page (f. 12r).

You can see the shadows of a lot of the markings bleeding through, the clearest of which I have marked with red arrows.  Conspicuously absent, though, is any mark to bleed through to create the “E” smudge:  I have circled that spot in blue.  But keep fol. 12v (with the chorale) was the last page of a fascicle, and it shows signs of other ink transfer (marked in yellow)—having been put down on top of something else. My guess—and it can only be a guess—is that the “E” smudge (which is very close to the area marked in yellow) is a similar offset transfer.  In any case, it's not an E.

If that smudge were an E, Bach’s figured bass should reflect it.  The figures transmitted in the continuo part (not in the score) show know signs of alteration.  (Those figures appear in both the BG and the NBA examples above.)  Nothing accounts for the E in the harmony; and in no other source is an E transmitted.  If this was indeed a second thought, Bach apparently didn't think it was important to have anyone actually perform it.  But I would argue instead that this reading is the wishful invention of Walter Blankenburg and Alfred Dürr, editors of that volume of the NBA.  I’d hate to see it go; I think it sounds fantastic.  But it has no textual authority, and is thus usurping the rightful place of the authoritative D.

All of this is a lot of words spent on a single quarter note; but it is an example, I think, of an editor opting for an audible difference even without the evidence to support it.  For a considerably more egregious example, get a load of this:

SOURCE:  cropped scan (p. 61) of BA 10303-01, C. Saint-Saëns, 3e Symphonie en ut mineur, op. 78, vol. 3 (ed. Michael Stegemann) of Camille Saint-Saëns:  œuvres instumentales complètes (Bärenreiter, 2016).

This new critical edition of Saint-Saëns’s “Organ” Symphony is marred by an astonishing number of typographical errors; it really merits a post of its own just for that reason, and maybe I will get around to that someday.  But what appears above is not an error.  It is what the editor (Michael Stegemann) meant.  In case there is any doubt of that, here is the remark in the critical commentary, together with my scrawled commentary in the margin.  Pardon my French.

SOURCE:  cropped scan (p. 206) of BA 10303-01 plus pencil annotations

On no authority whatsoever, Stegemann interrupted the composer’s very carefully contrived legato arpeggio, inserting a break right before the downbeat of b. 365.  (Say what you like about it, it is an audible change.) Other than the dotted-slur in the cello, there is no indication on the page that a change has been made, and users who do not consult the notes—or who do not already know the piece very well—will be none the wiser.  This edition has been issued as a much less expensive offprint, and Bärenreiter reports to me that typos (all of them?) have been corrected, but that edition appears without any of the critical commentary.  Users who trust the “Bärenreiter Urtext” marketing (“the last word in authentic text”) may well assume this represents responsible editing.  Caveat emptor.

If Stegemann had left this text as he had found it—if, that is, it appeared as in all other sources (including the first (1886) and second (1907) editions, issued by Durand)—he would not be neglecting his editorial duties.  An editor is still doing the job even when the decision is made to let any given reading stand without alteration.  But maybe an editor only feels like an editor in the act of emending something.  What is the sound of an editor not changing the text?

A few weeks ago I was amused to see someone in a Facebook group posting their various complaints about eccentric readings in “the Bärenreiter edition” of Handel's Messiah.  (What the post referenced is the vocal score published by Bärenreiter, which is a reduction of the text of the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe (the HHA), but the textual decisions are not Bärenreiter’s editorial responsibility.)  The person was essentially complaining that this is not the textus receptus, and that Bärenreiter should just “get in line.”  I suppose the Novello edition is the closest thing to a standard edition now, having (in this country) replaced the old Schirmer edition.  But people use all sorts of editions all at once, and a few years ago in this blog I was grumbling about orchestral players bringing their own partbooks from different sets—leading to a chaos of conflation in performance.

A particular example the writer cited was from the climax of “the Hallelujah chorus.”  Here is the reading of Bärenreiter vocal score:

SOURCE:  cropped scans of pp. 247 and 248 of the HHA vocal score of Messiah, ed. John Tobin (Bärenreiter, 1965).

The textual surprise here:  the words sung in bb. 76-77.  We expect “and Lord of Lords,” yet we get “and He shall reign.”  But the HHA is a scholarly edition... or rather it became a scholarly edition after a rocky start and a number of superseded volumes.  The editor of Messiah, John Tobin, thus had no interest in what people have come to accept as Messiah.  He was interested only in what the authoritative texts convey.  My advice:  If the user doesn’t want to put up with a scholarly edition, then buy something else instead.  There are plenty of alternatives.

Perhaps “and He shall reign” is not what Handel intended here, but Tobin did not make the choice capriciously.  Here is this passage as it appears in Handel's composing score:

SOURCE:  scan of British Library RM 20.f.2, p. 205 (scanned from Bärenreiter facsimile edition).

Observe that both texts appear:  “and He shall reign” below the altos, “and Lord of Lords” below the tenors, and “and He” below the basses.  This bass “and He” is the only one in Handel’s hand.  The alto and tenor words have been inserted by his assistant, John Christopher Smith—and the smudge indicates some degree of uncertainty.

Smith was the copyist of the conducting score, a fair copy with some autograph insertions of new and revised movements, and a host of other markings in the composer's hand.  Here is the relevant page:

SOURCE:  scan of GB-Ob MS Tenbury 347 f. 96v, from the Scolar Press facsimile (1974).

Here there is no ambiguity.  Maybe Smith got it wrong, but there is no sign of correction here.  Tobin thus felt justifiably obligated to print “and He shall reign” (as did some of the earliest editions) because that is what the most authoritative sources transmit most consistently.  If you don’t like it, tough.  You don’t have to sing it that way; alter as you see fit, but don’t complain about a scholarly edition being scholarly.  

This issue of sticking with the authoritative text—come what may—has now hit home for me in a new way.  In the last year, I have been asked to assist with the completion of an edition that is already 75% done.  It is a critical edition of Princess Ida, a Gilbert & Sullivan opera that premiered in 1884, the immediate predecessor to The Mikado.  It is a scholarly edition, although with vocal score and orchestral parts prepared to facilitate its use in performance.  I have a student assistant; her first task has been just proofreading the text of the full score as it has been set against Sullivan's autograph.  She has done great work with this, and it is so good to have another pair of eyes on this sort of project.

A few weeks ago I got a text from her:  “I had a question about the lyrics, but we can discuss it another time if you're too busy.”  I was intrigued, mainly because the lyrics are not our task at the moment.  This edition has a policy of “divided authority”:  the autograph full score is the principal authority for the orchestral parts; the second state of the first edition of the vocal score is the principal authority for the vocal parts, the lyrics, and the text underlay; and a certain edition of the libretto is the principal authority for the dialogue.  So we weren't concerned about the lyrics as such at the moment.  What would her question be?

Actually, I should have foreseen it.  This was the page of proofs that prompted it, although it appears here as I think it should in print--with the offensive n-word redacted:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of proof of p. 197 of new critical edition of Princess Ida (forthcoming), no. 12, b. 109–112; I have redacted the text.

Of course she asked Why is this word there?  At the very least, why is it not relegated to the footnote, with the substitute text in the score proper?  As this edition seeks to establish the text as it was settled in the first run, the line quoted in the footnote is extraneous, and certainly doesn’t belong in the main text of the score.  But I feel strongly that we can't print what Gilbert wrote.  All the same, we can’t hide what Gilbert wrote—we need to leave the ugliness on display, or else we let Gilbert off the hook.  Princess Ida is a troubling piece in many ways, particularly as the focus of Act II is lampooning women's education generally.  (The joke, as it happens, is on Gilbert—or at least on his chauvinist characters.  They rattle off a list of impossible things that these “girl [sic] graduates” hope to accomplish; but several of the items on that list have actually come to pass since 1884.)  But ugly and troubling texts still need to be presented, and in ways that don't simply bypass the problems.  

Several years ago, at my previous institution, one of my responsibilities was directing the chamber orchestra.  I had great fun with it, particularly as the instrumentation changed substantially each year as students graduated and matriculated.  There were always new challenges and new opportunities.  One year I had such an idiosyncratic ensemble that I rashly decided to compose/compile/arrange a score to accompany a silent film.  If I had realized what I was getting into, I would never have done it—but it proved to be great fun despite the labor that it entailed.  I settled on a Buster Keaton film that I felt sure would appeal to my undergraduate audience:  College (1927). 

But there is a short scene right in the middle of the film where Keaton is in blackface.

SOURCE: cropped screenshot at 29:14 from the full film, available on youtube.

I considered skipping this scene in performance; I briefly considered not even scoring this film at all.  My solution, ultimately, was to show the film, but for the orchestra to remain tacet throughout the four or five minutes of the blackface scene.  We thus could present Keaton’s film intact, but—by remaining silent—pointedly not endorse it.  Or at least that was what I was hoping we could do.  We could remind the audience that in the midst of the brilliance and finesse, there is an ugly and indelible stain that is more than just an artifact of its time.

So too in this edition of Princess Ida, I want the ugly stain to be clear, even if I don’t feel we can actually print the n-word.  The opera dates from 1884, but the edition is a product of the early twenty-first century; our edition inevitably will reflect our historical moment, too.  At the moment, the black-box redaction (in the style of released government documents) seems the best way to do be faithful both to Gilbert’s text and our present interaction with it.  The page is visibly scarred, but the content of the text is still clear.  And anyone who wants to see what Gilbert wrote can easily consult a multitude of other sources.

To do otherwise in such a case—that is, to print the text as it stands, to remain silent as an editor—is simply not an option.  The editorial silence would be deafening.