48. Reindeer Paws: rough places made plain

It has been far too long since I last posted.  2020 has been that sort of year.  A number of posts have been on my mind, but no time to write.  No time now either, but with the academic term over it is time for something different, even if only for the moment.

I have mentioned in passing (in another holiday post, actually) the philological principle of lectio difficilior potior—the idea that between two variant readings, the odder one is more likely to be original.  All things being equal (and they never really are), a copyist is likelier to smooth off rather than sharpen a rough edge in a text.  A reader is even more likely to do this.  I have watched my children, while in the early stages of learning to read, guess the wrong word from the context.  (Just yesterday it was my six-year-old misreading “And the bread on his chin was as white as the snow.”  Not that that isn’t the odder reading...)  Almost daily I become aware of something I’ve misread—and who can guess the number of things I misread but never become aware of?  (Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” again....)

Surely in such cases, the misreading does little or no damage.  I’m thinking of situations where our brains just fill in the details of what we know should be there.  Here, for example:

SOURCE:  I've seen this optical illusion many times.  I took this image from
https://impossiblebrainmatter.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/paris-in-the-spring-an-introduction-to-cognitive-psychology/

If you’ve seen it before, you know the trick of the redundant the.  That is certainly the odder reading, and exactly the sort of thing that would get “fixed” in transmission.  Indeed, it is useful to think of textual transmission as a big game of Telephone.  And some texts go from being written to being spoken /performed (and thus heard or misheard) to being written again...  those changes of medium only increase the likelihood of corrupting the text.  The phenomenon interests me; indeed it has been a focus of my posts on a number of occasions.   (For another holiday example, there’s this one.)

But this situation isn’t quite Telephone.  We don’t just pass on a message and rid ourselves of it.  The messages stay with us—in the version we received, anyway.  And we further corrupt them.  Or maybe we think of it in the way Bernard Woolley used to conjugate such irregularities on Yes, Minister:

I improve the text.

You modify it.

He/She/It corrupts it.

As I type, I learn that this has been called emotive conjugation and seems to be the invention of Bertrand Russell.  #props

I have attempted to justify such improvements before, although not denying that what I (and others) do is corrupting, no matter what motives we might have.  And there are all sorts of motives, and maybe not enough of a paper trail to sort out what happened when.

I ran across such an example this week.  This seems to be the original text (i.e., music and lyrics) of the American Christmas song “Up on the Housetop”—although that is neither the title nor (quite) its original first line:

SOURCE:  Chapel Gems for Sunday Schools / selected from "Our Song Birds" for 1866..., page scan from https://archive.org/details/chapelgemsforsun1866root/page/108/mode/2up  
It appeared in print before this in an October issue of “Our Song Birds,” but I have not located that source.
My suspicion is that the above was printed from a stereo of the original typesetting.

The song is by Benjamin Russell Hanby (1833-67).  It is not a favorite of mine—neither text nor tune—but I will admit that crowdsourcing (after the manner of Telephone) wrought considerable improvement.  Whether it was wearing off the rough edges or not, I’m not sure; but the melody (and consequently the harmony) as generally heard today is at least more interesting than the original.  Look at the chorus as originally printed:  it gets off on the wrong foot.  Too much tonic stalls the musical progress, right at the moment where it needs to be anywhere else.  (I also object to the third “click!” in b. 14, which lands us on the tonic too soon.  Can’t he wait two bars?)  And the melody throughout tends to repeat notes, where the version generally heard today is more interesting because of the neighbor and passing tones that liven things up.  I wonder if Hanby had thought of the tune before the words, and then—facing more syllables than he had planned—just divided the 8ths into reiterated 16ths without rewriting the melody for the new rhythm.  

But music like this is not music we learn from reading it off the page.  We hear it sung to us and we pick it up via oral transmission.  Or at least that is what happened to me.  I learned it in elementary school music classes, and we certainly were not looking at musical notation, still less the original print.  Like so many popular airs, the existence of “Up on the housetop” does not depend on a literate tradition.  I had only heard three of these verses before—and even then with a slightly different text.  I’m quite sure that I had never encountered the corporal punishment of the ratan switches for Lazy Jim, or the beneficence of Rover’s extra bone.  But I remember that as I child I thought I was singing “Up on the housetop reindeer paws,” which would make perfect sense—if only reindeer had paws instead of hooves.  It’s a good example of my little brain in search of an easier reading—which I now recognize as the game of textual Telephone we play unwittingly throughout our lives.

I have not had time to locate the earliest source (music or lyrics) to present the text more as we know them today.  I wonder how long it took to plane off the rough edges?  I see that the 1868 “expanded” edition of Chapel Gems for Sunday Schools drops this number altogether.  Hanby was dead by that time.   Even so, “gems” is wishful thinking for the contents of these volumes, but they make an interesting read today.  I recommend perusing Hanby’s “Crowding awfully,” M. B. C. Slade’s “Was it right?” and the—astonishing—“Little Zulu Band” by “Paulina” (i.e., Sophia Taylor Griswold, who was apparently also responsible for some of the stanzas of “Up on the Housetop”).

I won’t dwell on it here, but for another good example of crowdsourcing eroding the rough edges to positive effect look at the original (1857) version of “Jingle Bells,” or—as titled originally—The One-Horse Open Sleigh.  The verse melody is more-or-less as it is known today, but James Pierpont’s part-song chorus exists without the familiar tune we sing now:

SOURCE:  scan of first edition (Boston:  Oliver Ditson, 1857) from ISMLP #166827, p. 3 (detail)

(Here’s a link to a recording of the original version.)

What got me thinking about this topic was the Advent hymn “Lo! he comes with clouds descending.”  Hymns—both the lyrics and the tunes associated with them—have suffered all sorts of indignities, subject to the whims of editors of hymnals, whose qualifications vary considerably, and who are ultimately dependent on the quality of source material they have in front of them—which may be nothing more than prior badly-edited hymnals.  Thus it is not unusual to find all sorts of variants in hymnals—some prompted by doctrinal concerns, some musical, some practical.   (“We don’t have room for a fifth stanza on this page.”)

Songs of Praise Discussed—a commentary volume on the 1925 hymnal Songs of Praise—remarks:  “Few hymns are more universal in Anglo-Saxon use than this.”  Well, times change.  It goes on:  “... Yet no hymn has been more altered and none so intolerable in its original form.” [p. 42]  You had me at ‘intolerable’.  The lyric is remarkable, even in the version most (I think) printed today—a sublime and terrifying eschatological text by Charles Wesley.  Here is Wesley’s second stanza:

Every eye shall now behold him
    Robed in dreadful majesty;
Those who set at nought and sold him,
    Pierced and nailed him to the tree,
        Deeply wailing,
    Shall the true Messiah see.

Modern parishioners who go to church expecting Advent to be a prelude to Christmas are at this point doubtless wondering what happened to “Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild.”   Wesley was actually reworking ( = improving/modifying/corrupting) a lyric by the Moravian/Methodist evangelist John Cennick, whose original was even more strident.   Wesley was so impressed with Cennick’s verses that he retained the same peculiar metrical structure and rhyme scheme, but Cennick’s pacing is different—so that in his second stanza the punch is delayed until the very last syllable:

Now his merits by the harpers,
    Thro’ the eternal deeps resounds!
Now resplendent shine his nail-prints,
    Every eye shall see his wounds!
        They who pierced him,
    Shall at his appearing wail.

Cennick’s first stanza had memorably concluded “Welcome, welcome, bleeding Lamb!”  This was, remember, the “intolerable” original mentioned in Songs of Praise Discussed:   “We can see from this why 19th-century intelligence revolted against 18th-century religion, and why we have not yet recovered from the resulting agnosticism” [p. 42].

Throughout, Wesley’s text treats the same ideas that Cennick had traversed, although with perhaps more awe than fear.  As the game of hymnological Telephone proceeded, hymnals opted for one or the other or even a patchwork version combining bits of Cennick and Wesley—or, more latterly, toning it down however possible.  (Even in Songs of Praise, Wesley's “With what rapture / Gaze we on those glorious scars” has become “Praise we him for all his scars.”  As J. R. Watson remarks, “Modern rewritings err on the side of control, and take the stuffing out of the hymn” [p. 199].)

This text—whatever it is—has been associated with a number of hymn-tunes, but one of the earliest tunes persists with it even now.  Even so, the rough edges have been worn down with use—as is clear when examining the variants in these early prints.  Although it has two different tune-names here (OLIVERS’ and HELMSLEY—the latter name has stuck), it is clearly the same tune.

SOURCE:  (l.) composite of scans of pp. 104 and 105 of the tune portion (Sacred Melodys) of Charles Wesley’s Select Hymns with Tunes Annext (3rd ed., 1770; the tune appeared already in the second edition of 1765), from https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/s/Wesley-1770-SelectHymnswithTunesAnnext-3rdEd.pdf;   (r.) Scan of p. 16 of Martin Madan’s A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes Never Published Before (1769), from https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/s/Madan-CollectionofHymns-1769-6thEd.pdf. 

This tune shows up in American usage pretty early (here is an example from 1849), all the while with the edges still being worn down.  Indeed it is interesting to compare the array of appearances of this tune in the holdings of Hymnary.org.  From these I observe a moment of standardization--as if in the game of Telephone someone shouted aloud what they wanted everyone to hear, thus affecting all subsequent transmission.  That was The English Hymnal (1906), where Ralph Vaughan Williams penned a harmonization that increasingly has become a default for the tune.  

I was astonished, though, to see that he didn’t leave it alone after that.  When the expanded version of Songs of Praise appeared in 1931, RVW produced a fourth-verse descant overtop the existing harmonization.   It’s a much busier descant than the norm, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it sung:

SOURCE:  Songs of Praise:  Enlarged Edition (1931), detail of pp. 68–69

This extra bit seems to have languished in obscurity within the covers of that book.  Maybe once the rough places had been worn smooth, no one has had the appetite for making it crooked again.

45. Adeste infideles

I was at a performance of Handel’s Messiah a few weeks ago where—not for the first time, it must be said—I noticed some surprises in the orchestral accompaniment.  I have grown used to hearing trumpets and drums (derived ultimately from Mozart’s 1789 orchestration) creep into the “Wonderful Counselor” exclamations in the chorus “For unto us a child is born.”   After all, you’re paying the trumpet and timpani players, so why not get your money’s worth?  I don’t like this philosophy, but I get the justification.

It was clear, however, that not just the trumpet players but also at least the sole second violin player as well were using performing materials reprinted from the 1902 Ebenezer Prout edition:  numbers that should have had unison violins (the aria “How beautiful are the feet,” for example) had instead a fuller string accompaniment.

SOURCE:  cropped screen shot of Prout edition Vln. II part p. 27 (from scan at IMSLP #47447)

The conductor is a friend, so I asked him about this.  “They brought their own partbooks.  It wasn’t worth fixing.”  Particularly when you're operating on just one or two rehearsals, this is certainly efficient:  they’ve already marked it (bowings, etc.) and are used to it.  Why fight it for the one or two people in the audience who will grind their teeth?  (When it is a community performance anyway, who in their right mind would expect a purist approach?)

Such textual mash-ups hardly do any damage, at least as far as the vast majority of the audience is concerned.  What was performed was basically “Prout lite”:  we didn’t have the full Prout orchestration—flutes, clarinets, horns, etc.—but we had bits of his re-workings running in parallel against (and within the confines of) Handel's economical original scoring.  So what?

I guess the “so what?” is the principle of conflating editions by letting performers in an ensemble supply their own, independently of each other.  I was treated to an execrable example of this a few weeks later, and it gives rise to my thoughts today.  It was a pops concert by a community orchestra which also featured a local chorus.  The show concluded with a holiday sing-along section.  One of the sing-along carols was “O come, all ye faithful” (Adeste fideles—a tune which has a fascinating textual history of its own).  When we started a second verse—to the text “Sing, choirs of angels”—several sopranos in the choir took it upon themselves to sing the descant.  By this I mean a very popular descant devised by David Willcocks very early in his tenure as Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge.

SOURCE:  detail of Carols for Choirs (OUP, 1961) p. 89.

It is popular for good reason, as it makes very effective counterpoint out of a sequential figure familiar from another carol, the Renaissance tune associated with the 1901 text “Ding! dong! merrily on high.”  The earliest source I have located with Willcocks’s setting is a live recording of (portions of) the 1958 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.  (More on that source later).  Many choral sopranos know this descant off by heart, and I have been only mildly surprised to see it appear even in hymnals—an implicit invitation for the congregation to join in as well.  This descant and its attendant harmonization, and with it Willcocks’s organ harmonization of the final verse, have become standards the world over.  Indeed, the final verse’s half-diminished-seventh chord at the word Word shows up regularly in Twitter and Facebook posts at this time of year—apparently as a sort of Christmas “money shot.”  By way of example:

SOURCE: screenshot from Twitter:  do your own search “Willcocks word chord” on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever and you'll get plenty of further examples.

Curious as it may seem, there have been instances in history of a descant supplanting the original as the main melody.  This seems to have happened in the case of “Puer natus in Bethlehem” and—for all we know—maybe “O come, O come Emmanuel” as well.  (For discussion of the textual situations of each, see The New Oxford Book of Carols, pp.172 and 45.)  I don’t think Adeste fideles is threatened at all by the descant, but Willcocks’s descant is clearly here to stay:  maybe because it seems to be such fun to sing.  And so the sopranos sang the descant at the concert—even though it was harmonically incompatible with the version the orchestra was playing.  It sounded awful.  And it could be easily fixed with the rehearsal instruction “Sopranos:  no descant.” If they would cooperate.

On the same program, the choir sang along to Leroy Anderson’s charming miniature Sleigh Ride.  Mitchell Parrish’s very clever lyrics were written for it when it was adapted to be a popular song—an extremely popular song, as it happens.  The original key and modulations don’t really work for singers, and it showed at this performance.  I love the piece, but here it was marred by trying to have both the song and the original orchestral work together:  Messiah wasn’t harmed really by the simultaneous versions, but Sleigh Ride was destroyed—just as was “Sing, choirs of angels.”  I’m not a purist, but without the textual meddling these performances would have been just fine.   Bah!  Humbug!

SOURCE:  scan of 1961 edition cover;
I'm not sure of the date of my copy, but
on the back the printed price is $1.80.

One final note about the Willcocks descant:  I believe it first appeared in print in 1961 in the fantastically successful anthology Carols for Choirs, coedited by Willcocks and Reginald Jacques.  This book has had a host of successors (so that it in reprints it was retitled Carols for Choirs 1), and has spread the “Lessons & Carols” style and liturgy all around the world, providing texts for others to perform.  Even in its earliest printing, however, the descant is not quite the same as the version captured on the 1958 recording.  In the recording, the trebles sing the text “Gloria in excelsis deo” at the start of the verse, rather than (with the rest of the choir and congregation) “Sing, choirs of angels.”  Unfamiliar as it is to me with this text, I have to say that I like Willcocks’s original version better:  the imperative Sing of the congregation is answered by the angelic voices above.  Oh, well; second thoughts are not always improvements.  Maybe some enterprising choral director will restore Willcocks’s original version on occasion?  (A word to the wise: just make sure everyone is singing the same version.)

38. Don't fix it

All of my prior December posts have been connected to holiday music in one way or another, so I  continue that tradition here.  The breadth of repertoire heard in Christmas concerts and services gives a surprising representation across Western music history—even in performance contexts that make no attempt to be representative.  This was driven home to me in the 1990s when Andrew Parrott released a number of discs pioneering the application of historically-informed performance practice to a wide swath of holiday music.  (These were ancillaries, in a way, to his New Oxford Book of Carols—the splendid NOBC to which I will refer below.)  If you haven’t heard these, several have been reissued in a box set that is currently going cheaply.

SOURCE:  some of Parrott’s albums, ripped from their Amazon.com pages

A significant portion of Parrott’s work has been the much-needed defamiliarizing of the familiar:  So you think you know X?  Well, listen to this!  I will focus here on a rare example of “early music” surviving more or less intact in a variety of modern hymnals—although of course it is the “more or less” that interests me most of all.

Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) is among the musicians I admire most, particularly for the fecundity of his imagination.  He was industrious in self-publishing, too.  (Reading through his treatise Syntagma Musicum I suspect he would have been a blogger if he were still with us today, maybe producing something like Sarah Bereza’s considerations of all manner of things related to church music.)  Indeed, because of his voluminous publications, it seems likely that the vast majority of his compositions survives.  The bulk of his work is devoted to settings of Lutheran chorales, but the array of settings is dizzying:  two parts, three parts, four parts, five parts, six parts, seven parts, eight parts, ... sixteen parts, ... 24 parts....  No matter what forces you have at your disposal, from the humblest to the cast-of-thousands polychoral spectacular, Praetorius has a setting for you—not just scaled down or scaled up, but completely re-thought for what those forces can do best.  A three-part setting might be SSA, or SAT, or ATT or ATB....  The mind boggles.  By the way, I think this is the best of his title pages, choirs earthly and heavenly joining in praise, just an extension in coelo of what he was trying to do in terra:

SOURCE:  title page of Musarum Sionarum (1607), here from the Cantus part-book (IMSLP #85603); larger size here.

Despite the breadth of his activity, Praetorius is most commonly encountered these days because of a single harmonization:  the German folk carol Es ist ein Ros’, which he harmonized in part VI of his collection Musae Sionae (1609).  His setting is simple but sublime; I have often used it in theory courses to illustrate the potency of a single chromatic note in an otherwise diatonic harmony (as we would say now, he tonicizes ii in the last phrase)—a moment that almost always sends chills down my spine when I hear it.  (Granted, Praetorius uses one other chromatic note, but it is a much more run-of-the-mill tonicization of V.)  No other harmonization of this melody has been a serious contender .  Its dominance is (literally) underscored by Jan Sandström’s 1990 double-choir setting, in which Praetorius’s harmonization is surrounded by a halo of harmony—sometimes clashing, but to great effect.

In English-language hymnals, the tune is usually set to one of two nineteenth-century translations:  Theodore Baker’s from the German (“Lo! how a Rose, e’er blooming”); or John Mason Neale’s from an apt but unrelated Greek Christmas hymn of St. Germanus (“A great and mighty wonder”; actually Neale’s translation has one too many lines per stanza, but it works anyway, as explained in NOBC).  It was Baker’s text I heard first, as a child in the rural Presbyterian church in which I grew up.  Praetorius’s setting was in our hymnal, but I do not remember the congregation once being asked to sing it.  The choir did it as an anthem every year, as the syncopations would have posed some significant challenges to the rest of us.

SOURCE:  scan of cantus part-book of Musae Sionae VI (1609) from IMSLP #29879

In fact, the complicated metrical structure is one of the textual issues that prompts this post.  Praetorius didn’t use barlines [his first edition is at right], although he does indicate the meter with a barred-C.  What he meant by that is not altogether clear; it need not necessarily mean groupings of two, nor indeed even that the half-note (as we think of it now) “gets the beat.”  Granted, Praetorius knew how to indicate triple groupings when he wanted them (most often with the time signature C3).  Subsequent hymnbook editors have devised various strategies to make the meter more accessible to their intended users.  First, they almost always halve the note values, with the half-notes becoming quarter-notes.  Then they adopt one of the following courses:

1. avoiding barlines altogether except for between phrases, essentially acknowledging “this is music from an unfamiliar time and place”
2. regularizing the meter as if a Bach chorale, all in common time, thus suggesting “this is just like many other hymns”
3. re-casting it as if in 3/2 (admittedly only to the first two phrases, to construct an antiphon)
4. presenting it in a mixed meter switching between 2/2 and 3/2; this seems to be most common, although the mixing of the meters varies a bit from book to book.  The most unusual—with a bit of 3/4 thrown in—apparently originates with The English Hymnal of 1906, but appearing in various other books even into this century.

Because of the halved note-values, options 2, 3, and 4 impose a hyper-metrical structure on the tune:  even if we allow Praetorius’s pairs of half-notes as forming basic metrical unit, these strategies group those units into a larger pattern of stressed and unstressed beats.

The other main alteration to the Praetorius setting made by subsequent editors is much more substantial.  At the end of the fifth line, Praetorius has the alto line cross the cantus (= soprano), introducing the third of the triad above the melody.  Here it is as it appears in the Gesamtausgabe der musikalischen Werke von Michael Praetorius (this volume ed. Fritz Reusch in 1928):

SOURCE:  detail of p. 36 (with my mark-up) of a scan available on the IMSLP (#389072)--as indeed is the whole of the Praetorius edition!

Almost half of the hymnals I examined (21 out of 45) changed this—most often by moving the alto line to the bass, with many of these also adding a parallel ascending figure in the tenor:

SOURCE:  detail of Christian Worship (1993), p. 207 from hymnary.org

Others eliminate it entirely (moving the third to the tenor, as moving the third to the tenor makes the melodic motion superfluous):

SOURCE:  detail of Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New (2000), p. 4 from hymnary.org

I am also quite certain that I have somewhere seen it given to the soprano, altering the melody so that the soprano always has the top note.  I have not found this in any hymnbook, but I have an idea where I have seen it.  I have played enough Christmas services at enough churches to be pretty sure it was in a mass-produced “cantater” (as I perhaps too cruelly refer to that genre) that I accompanied at some point.  The alteration is left etched in my memory, even if I have forgotten its source.

(By the way, in the commentary on the tune in the hymnal handbook Songs of Praise Discussed, Archibold Jacob remarks that “On analysis it will be found that much of the charm of the tune lies, inexplicably, in the curious little intercalary passage; it has rather the effect of an intimate ‘aside’” [p. 46].  Perhaps so; I had to look up “intercalary,” but surely he is referring to this phrase.  (And I respect any commentator who will admit something is inexplicable.))

As I have been reviewing so many iterations of Praetorius’s setting, I have been surprised to see the number of English-language Roman Catholic hymnals that use Baker’s translation of the text as bowdlerized by Praetorius:  the last couplet of the second stanza was originally (or at least was transmitted to Praetorius as)

hat sie ein Kind geboren

bleibend ein’ reine Magd

[gave birth to a child

yet remains a virgin]

The ever-virgin Mary didn’t square with Lutheran theology, so Praetorius just used the last line of the stanza one (when half-spent was the night, in Baker’s now-familiar translation); indeed, in the 1609 edition of Musae Sionae VI [illustrated above], it looks as if he merely omitted the text at the end of the second stanza, and the only words left to the singer are wol zu der halben Nacht, even though that yields a dodgy rhyme (Raht/Nacht).

Praetorius didn’t mind making alterations to suit himself and his context, so perhaps I shouldn’t make a big deal of those I discuss here.  But even though I resist the notion of any musical text being definitive, I am inclined to agree with the cleric and hymnologist G. R. Woodward:  “The four part setting... by Michael Praetorius, 1609, cannot possibly be improved” [p. 79].

Like the man said, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

28. The philological wading pool

A month ago I was privileged to be part of a panel titled “Rethinking Primary Sources for the Music History Classroom” at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society.  It was more of a workshop than a panel, as the four presenters had each brought an assignment we have used with our classes, and the audience then did the assignment.  I picked up a lot of good ideas from the other panelists.  I was there to talk about musical texts—specifically how I try to get my students to be more aware of how a musical text gets to be the way it is—and that many (sometimes well-meaning) hands may interfere.

Below I will describe the assignment I presented, but I will digress here to mention its inspiration.  My father was also a college professor.  His degree was in ancient near eastern archaeology, but working at a small college meant that he ended up teaching across the history curriculum, as well as classics and religion.  By the end of his career, most of his time was consumed teaching Hebrew and the Hebraic scriptures in the seminary that shared the campus with the college.  For one of his courses there he designed an assignment that he called “the fish”—and it was one that his former students continue to talk about (whenever I run into them) more than ten years after his death.

“The fish” referred to Samuel Scudder’s account of his studies under Louis Agassiz at Harvard in the 1850s—how Scudder had “learned to see” only by being forced to take the time to “look at the fish” for days on end.  My father was pursuing a similar end with his assignment, in which the students were to attempt to reconcile the chronologies of the kings of Judah and Israel as transmitted in the different biblical accounts.  On the assignment (reproduced here), he notes—with a characteristic understatement—“It is likely you will have difficulty in doing this.”  The UNDERLINED BOLD ALL CAPS text for emphasis is also characteristic.  (I don’t know for how many years he used this assignment, but the worksheets that go with it were all prepared on a typewriter.  That may well be because that was a method he was much more accustomed to using than trying to do a table in Microsoft Word.)

In fact, my father didn’t care what solution a student came up with for the textual difficulties this assignment compelled them to confront.  There was no one “right answer.”  The point was the confrontation itself.  These were students intending to enter the Christian ministry, and he thought it was crucially important that they be confronted with real textual difficulties in the Bible.  The dates don’t line up.  Some students, he told me, would perform all manner of mathematical gymnastics to establish that every syllable of the Holy Writ available to them was inerrant.  At the other extreme, some students’ reaction was “to hell with it.”  It did not matter to my father where the students placed themselves on that continuum, but he wanted them to become aware of their attitude toward the text itself.

It seems like a descent from the sublime to the trivial to lay out my own “fish” assignment, as mine is aimed at nothing more than raising my students’ consciousness of textual issues at all.  Where my father was throwing his students into the deep end, my assignment was just a chance for mine to get their feet wet in the philological wading pool.  But I hope it sticks—that it makes them view any musical text put before them thereafter with a little skepticism:  Why is it thus?  How did it get that way?

There are many ways one might approach such an assignment.  I commend to your attention Rachel Scott’s interesting article treating edition selection as a way of teaching information literacy, and particularly the worksheet she suggests as a pedagogical method.  My own assignment is a practical assignment of a different sort, but also requires an examination of multiple sources of the same musical work.

I decided for this assignment to use a hymn-tune because

1.  such tunes are short 
2.  they have often appeared in dozens (and sometimes hundreds and more) editions, each of which is a valid source for the assignment
3.  via the website hymnary.org, many of those editions are readily available to my students
4.  the transmission of a hymn-tune from one source to another may be straightforward copying of a full four-part texture, but it may just as likely be that the melody alone is taken over—perhaps even from memory—and a new setting is devised; or an editor may make any number of alterations to suit himself (and for much of the history of hymnal production, it is inevitably himself)
5. if you find a hymn-tune that is generally familiar outside of the church, students may more readily grasp the relevance of otherwise esoteric textual issues to “real” musical life.

And so I settled on the anonymous tune ANTIOCH, pretty much universally associated with Isaac Watts’s Psalm paraphrase “Joy to the world! the Lord is come.”  The tune is admittedly more widely known in the United States than elsewhere, but as such it fitted my students pretty well.  Its origins are obscure, and it is regularly attributed to either Lowell Mason or G. F. Handel (no doubt because portions of it sound like the beginnings of two different numbers in his Messiah:  “Lift up your heads” and “Comfort ye, my people”) or both.  Certainly Mason propagated it, but it seems to be of English origins, with its first appearance in the 1830s.  (Many hymnologists have taken notice of this, but a handy and widely-available summary can be found in The New Oxford Book of Carols, p. 273.)

And so, my assignment:

ARMCHAIR PHILOLOGY

Because they were transmitted primarily by rote memorization by musically illiterate congregations (unlike texts, which could be read from the page by anyone verbally literate), older hymn-tunes often exist in many variants. The purpose of this assignment is to get you to look for any distinct lines of transmission of the printed sources of a particular hymn-tune, called ANTIOCH, and perhaps familiar to you associated with Isaac Watts’s text “Joy to the World!” Go to the page for this tune at Hymnary.org, and select any EIGHT of the page scans at the bottom of the page. Print these off (although BE SURE TO NOTE the source of each, as this is on the webpage but wouldn’t be on the printed copy) and study them, looking for any variants you can find. While I am more interested in melodic textual variants, you should also look at the harmonizations: if you come across two identical harmonizations, they are pretty much guaranteed to be in the same line of transmission. Note also the verbal text: any alterations or omitted verses are significant clues. Don’t just print off the first eight it gives you—look around for some interesting ones. (There are some with some really glaring errors—including a completely misplaced first system.)  Turn in to me:

1.  A list of your eight sources, numbered 1–8 (in chronological order, as best that can be determined), with the bibliographic details for each from Hymnary.org
2.  The eight page scans you printed, numbered to match
3.  A diagram (stemma) to indicate how sources 1–8 are related, if at all
4.  Notes of the idiosyncrasies you spotted that allowed you to construct the diagram (You don’t need to account for every detail, just enough to show me how you sorted it out.)

I thus make clear to my students that they have a very incomplete data set.  From the dozens they might look at, I ask for only eight.  Then, however, they are expected to take those eight and treat them as the sole surviving sources, collating the readings and then trying to connect them in any ways they can.  I call the assignment “armchair philology” because they are spared the trouble of finding recalcitrant sources, and there are no consequences to ignoring all the evidence beyond their eight selections.

For my presentation at AMS a month ago, I picked eight and distributed them to the audience.  I usually allow a week for my students to do this—even if they wait until the night before—but my AMS crowd had about eight minutes to do the best they could.  And even with just a few sources, there is much to be seen.  Consider these three sources, for example:

CS:  Carmina Sacra or Boston Collection of Church Music, ed. Lowell Mason  (2^nd Ed., 1841)

SOURCE:  https://hymnary.org/page/fetch/CSBC1841/80/high

SH:  The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, ed. William Walker (“New” Ed., 1854)

SOURCE: resolution of https://www.ccel.org/ccel/walker/harmony2/files/png75/Antioch.png was so poor that this is from IMSLP #168494

Sum:  Songs of Summerland, ed. Thoro Harris  (1943)

Source:  https://hymnary.org/page/fetch/SoS1943/84/high (cropped)

While it is clear that The Southern Harmony version is taken from Carmina Sacra—it even gives the attribution—there is a substantial change in the musical text:  where Carmina Sacra gives a four-part texture (with the melody on the staff directly above the bass, as is customary in such sources), The Southern Harmony only gives three parts, deleting the second staff of Carmina Sacra.  There are a few other changes:  SH translates everything into shaped notes; omits the sustained accompanying bass note in the third phrase of CS—also deleting the figured bass (that only show up in the first few bars of CS anyway).  Both of these sources transmit a slight variant in Watts’s hymn, beginning the second stanza with "Joy to the world" instead of his original “Joy to the earth.”  They also preserve an archaic variant ending for the end of stanza 3:  rather than gleeful repetitions of the extent of the taint of original sin (“far as the curse is found! far as the curse is found! far as, far as the curse is found!”), this version truncates the verse abruptly to get on with the good news.

The version of Songs of Summerland (1943)—a Seventh Day Adventist publication far removed in time from either of the nineteenth century sources above—is also directly connected to this line of transmission, notwithstanding the very different lyric to which it is set.  Like SH, Sum conveys only a three-part texture derived from the reading given in CS, but this time it is the top staff of CS that is omitted; and of course in Sum it is reworked into a melody-at-the-top format.  (The added “tenor” third in the final chord is surely editorial.)  My students could thus determine that, whether or not CS was the direct source for Sum (as there may be other sources in between, or they may share a common ancestor), Sum could not possibly be derived from SH.  If we had only these three data points—our stemma would be like the one at right.

Adding a fourth source naturally complicates the stemma, even when it too is clearly connected to the same line of transmission, with the same basic harmonization.

Anc:  Song Anchor: A Choice Collection of Favorites for Sabbath School and Praise Services, ed. J. E. White  (1878) 

Source:  https://hymnary.org/hymn/SA21878/page/123  (cropped)

Indeed, except for an apparent error (tenor voice, first note of b. 2), this is the same harmonization presented in CS.  Like SH, the sustained bass of the third phrase has been eliminated; like Sum, the format is modernized to put the melody at the top; a tiny variant occurs in the penultimate bar in the tenor, where the introduction of an eighth note allows all voices to change syllables at the same time, but does not affect the harmony.  None of these, save perhaps the first, is substantial enough to require the stemma to posit any number of hypothetical lost sources (even though we know that many such sources have not been consulted for this exercise).  Thus whether one favors the stemma on the right or the one on the left depends on how likely the elimination of the sustained bass tone was arrived at independently.

But then along comes a source to complicate things:

SS:  Songs for the Sanctuary: or Hymns and Tunes for Christian Worship, ed. Chas. S. Robinson  (1868)

Source:  https://hymnary.org/hymn/SFTM1868/page/81  (cropped)

The date of publication puts this clearly before Anc, but it shares the same tenor figure in the penultimate bar and the lack of the sustained bass in the third phrase.  While it is essentially the same harmonization of CS, it has been transposed down to D—and there is a slight but significant modification which essentially exchanges the alto and tenor voices in the first two bars.  Something has also gone wrong with the text setting at the beginning of what ought to be the last phrase—although that may just be a type-setting error.  Most importantly, this source has a short note—a dotted quarter—at the end of the second phrase (on “King” of “Let earth receive her King”); all the other sources reviewed thus far have a note twice as long at this point.  For all these reasons, SS is clearly not an ancestor of Anc (or, for that matter, Sum), yet it is closer to Anc than any other.  Here the stemma could allow for a hypothetical common ancestor, explaining the similarities while also acknowledging the variants:

The other three sources I gave my AMS audience presented wholly different lines of transmission—that is to say, different harmonizations (some straightforward, some showy), some with the long-held “King” note, some with the short.  For these,  at least with the data available, the stemma branches  would only meet at the hypothetical Ur-text [x].  Over the years of using this assignment in class, I note that my students tend too readily to assume that this x marks the only meeting place for any of the sources.  The fact that it is seldom so—that indeed these sources are connected by complicated webs—is only revealed by a minute study of the details.  As Agassiz instructed, “Look at the fish.”

SOURCE:   "Haemulon melanurum" from Wikimedia Commons

It is my contention that Agassiz’s scientific dictum should be the creed of any text critic:  “Facts are stupid things until brought into connection with some general law.”  A variant reading may be curious, but it is no more than that until it can be explained as part of a larger scheme.  The critic’s task is not merely the mechanical listing of variants, but rather the creative connection of the dots to propose some pattern.  And anyone can learn to do that, with time and patience—precious commodities these days.

Although I’ve used this assignment with many students, I have had the opportunity to use it only once since starting this blog, and so the work of those most recent students in that very small class certainly led to the examples I used here.  They deserve to be acknowledged:  Taylor Hedger, Sarah Vermazen, and David Bates.  I thank them for taking this assignment so seriously.


ADDENDUM  19 February 2019
An article based on this assignment appears in Journal of Music History Pedagogy 9/1 (2019), pp. 99-112.