22. Sourcing nostalgia

In his brilliant volume The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook, which comprises all of the music mentioned in the “Little House” novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), Dale Cockrell allows that

“As object, no such songbook ever existed.  As a representation of the common musical experience of a given era and region, however, this heretofore hypothetical songbook might well have informed the musical understandings of more Americans than many a real bindings-and-paper edition.” [p. xiv]

SOURCE:  A-R Editions

So Cockrell (with the editors of the distinguished Music of the United States of America series) gives us a bindings-and-paper volume manifesting this imagined collection—and a hefty tome it is. This is an anthology of disparate materials.  It is a fascinating read, even for one relatively unfamiliar with the Ingalls Wilder novels.  (I need to borrow them from my kids.  I’ll do that.  Eventually.)

Cockrell’s sequencing of the items is sensible and does exactly what he says he wants it too:  it exhibits the broad range of repertory that formed such an integral part of family life in the Dakota Territory.  The first section, encompassing music that Wilder would have known from the oral tradition, has sections for Children’s Songs, Fiddle Tunes, and Folk Songs (although of course all of Cockrell’s sources for this are published, some from much later in the twentieth century)  The second section comes from music that would have been disseminated in print in Wilder’s time. It is an interesting list, which he amply justifies in his preface.

Concert/Theater Songs   [Cockrell parses this as music originally intended for public entertainment]
Hymns/Sunday School Songs
Parlor Songs    [for domestic entertainment]
Scottish/Irish Songs
Singing School Music

For this conglomeration of disparate repetoire, Cockrell has had to devise criteria for selecting his primary source for each item.  He describes three ideal critieria:

1)  “If there is physical evidence that Wilder was actually referencing a specific titled publication or a title from a published collection, then that, ipso facto, would be chosen for editing.” [p. xlii] 

This is true of seven items in his repertory, all from the 1871 songbook Pure Gold for the Sunday School.  Sometimes Wilder herself even cites the page number in this collection.

SOURCE:  screenshot of title page from archive.org scan of Pure Gold for the Sunday School (1871)

2)  “If there is compelling circumstantial evidence that Wilder was actually referencing a specific titled publication or a title from a published collection, then that would be chosen for editing.”  [Ibid.]

For example, Cockrell argues persuasively that The Conqueror (1880) was the singing school book purchased by Almanzo Wilder at the singing school in De Smet in the fall of 1884, when he became engaged to Laura Ingalls (as recounted in These Happy Golden Years).  Thus The Conqueror becomes his primary source, trumping a different collection that remains to this day in the Wilder estate.  (For the full compelling argument you must read Cockrell, p. xliii.)  Incidentally, The Conqueror contains the most exciting advertisement I’ve ever seen in such publications.

Cockrell's third criterion proved to be too idealistic:

3) “For titles without such evidence, the musical source most consistent chronologically and geographically with Wilder’s narrative of the Ingalls family would be chosen for editing.  Ideally, this would mean an imprint or collection from the 1870s or early 1880s out of Chicago or the upper Midwest.”  [p. xlii]

As Cockrell explains,

“It quickly became clear that the madness in these few words far outstripped the method.  Few of the titles referenced in the Little House books were published in Chicago or the upper Midwest during the books’ chronological period, and some earlier published numbers were no longer in print at all during the 1869-1885 period.  A rigorous application of the selection criteria left many exceptions to justify, ultimately an affront to the faith in order in logic that underlies the scholar’s craft.  It was time to rethink the rationale behind the criterion.”  [p. xlv]

I am less troubled by these chronological problems than he is.  When I remember the printed music of my childhood, I think of the contents of piano benches in my grandparents’ homes, and there nothing was more recent than three decades before my birth, and quite a few things were then forty or fifty years old—tattered, torn, taped, and clearly family favorites.  I can only imagine that in Wilder’s youth—when printed music was even harder to come by—such publications would be retained for decades after purchase too.  In any case, his more practical revision to criterion #3 fixes the problem, even if to my mind it goes to an extreme:

3 [rev.])   “For all other titles, the first publication or collection in the United States would be chosen for editing.”  [p. xlvi]

Admirable a project as this is, however, I am disappointed because the product is not what it might have been.  Although it is part of MUSA (Music of the United States of America), a series of scholarly editions that has featured a range of creative editorial approaches, I wonder if the forethought of the offprint series Laura's Music—the considerably cheaper and more practical issues aimed at an educational market—had any consequences on the production of this parent volume.  The main consequence that concerns me is how neat and tidy it all is.  This volume preserves the look of the MUSA series, in that every item has been newly computer-set.  Standard as this practice is in music publishing, in this instance I think it would have been better to leave some (if not indeed the majority) of these as digital scans of the source material.  Although of course some expense would be associated with acquiring the high-resolution scans needed, a considerable expense was already used in the new setting of the music, and the multiple stages of proofreading it.  In the spirit of “teach a man to fish...,” I believe this would be considerably more useful volume if it were to instruct the user how to read the nineteenth-century sources (in all of their notational variety) than to present polished twenty-first-century standardized versions of the texts.  (In a sense this complaint follows from the end of my previous post, quoting Peter Williams about editors willfully misrepresenting sources in order to present them in a standardized new edition.)

For example, why can the reader not be trusted to learn how to deal with a score layout for four-part harmony that puts the melody on the staff immediately above the bass?  At least Cockrell retains the open score (that is, a staff for each voice); but why must he move the melody to the top?

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. 149 of The Conqueror as available at archive.org

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Cockrell edition, p. 318.

Not only would I say that the clean, new presentation does not offer any real advantage over the source text, it actually loses something—namely the notational conventions of the source.  This loss was of course intentional, but I feel it is a pity.

Cockrell also generally removes the mid-bar phrasing barlines characteristic of nineteenth-century hymnals, arguing that “[r]etention of the now archaic barline-convention would, I believe, cause much more confusion than illumination” [p. 343].  In heaven’s name why?  Does he expect the user of this volume to be too dense to understand such a basic practice?  (Omitting these extra barlines substantially simplifies the computer-setting (a subject of a prior post), of course, but that’s no justification.)

Similarly, preserving more recent notation practice, in some instances Cockrell makes minute modifications to rests and repeat signs “to accommodate all rhythmic contingencies” [p. 349].  See the adjustment here to the last bar of each strain:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. 5 of Ryan’s Mammoth Collection  as available at violinsheetmusic.org

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Cockrell edition, p. 19.  (I was surprised to see no comment in the critical notes to indicate that many sources give the first sixteenth-note of b. 4 a tone higher, but as Ryan served as his sole source for this item, I guess there was no obligation to note this oddity.  Curiously, though, Cockrell's note does not record that he has omitted Ryan's D.C. indication )

In the fiddle tune “Money Musk,” Cockrell imposes repeats in order to make it conform with “conventions observed in the fiddle tune tradition” to yield a repeating AABBAABB... pattern.  By relying on one source only, he can’t discuss whether other fiddle tunebooks have these repeats.

In his efforts to track down all of the music referenced by Wilder, he only once fails to locate anything—“The Red Heifer”—and his account of it is consequently one of the most interesting in the volume:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Cockrell, p. 354.

Nonetheless, in other instances I had my doubts that he had settled on the right version of the tune.  His source selected for “The Girl I Left Behind Me” gives the tune more or less as I know it, but it doesn't match the scansion of the lyrics that Wilder quotes, which made me suspect that she had a different melody in mind.  (“Let the toast pass” is a similar situation.) The fiddle tune “The Devil’s Dream” is a stand-in for one Wilder more than once refers to as “Devil’s Hornpipe,” which according to Cockrell is otherwise undocumented.  He sagely notes “it is not uncommon for autonomous tunes, especially ones with local dissemination, to escape collection.”  I am not surprised that the vernacular fiddle-tunes seem to have the most slippery textual problems in this volume.

I shouldn’t be complaining.  Cockrell set himself a Herculean task:  locating and evaluating the disparate sources of Wilder’s musical autobiography, starting essentially from scratch.  Even if he didn’t fulfill this in the way I might want it, he nonetheless fulfilled the task very well.

12. Recorded history

A question to which I will periodically return in this blog is “What sorts of non-textual musical evidence nevertheless bear upon the text?”  Another way of thinking of it is “Beyond the notated sources, what other sources can/should affect a new edition of a work?”  A fairly obvious non-notated source is an recording involving the composer as interpreter, or perhaps involving a performer who had worked directly with the composer.  An editor might introduce, for example, metronome marks to approximate a given recorded performance—although this might very well be misleading.  I have already remarked in this blog of an instance where the composer’s performance tempo slowed down considerably over the years; and in early recordings, where the play duration was short and unavoidably constricted by the dimensions of the playback medium (wax cylinder or shellac disc), performers are known to have opted for faster tempi just to squeeze their rendition into the time available.  As far as new critical editions are concerned, my feeling that the editor should do the due diligence of studying any recording that might have claims to be authoritative in any respect, even if none of the findings make it out of the critical report.

An interesting example of this is to be found in Jonathan Del Mar’s excellent edition of the Elgar cello

SOURCE:  baerenreiter.com

concerto (Bärenreiter, 2005).  The critical commentary is a wonder to behold, containing seventeen color facsimiles comprising the whole of the solo cello part in Elgar’s hand prepared for the cellist who gave the premiere (Felix Salmond), four pages of the original short score draft, and the first page of Beatrice Harrison’s copy of the printed solo part.  Later in the commentary Del Mar carefully catalogues the pencilled instructions in this source—a significant document because Harrison recorded the work twice under Elgar’s direction (first in 1919-1920, subsequently in 1928).  These two recordings are among the sources Del Mar uses for his edition, and they feature in one of the most fascinating discussions in the commentary itself:  second movement, bb. 40-48 and the parallel passage at 78-86 (“the most severe dilemma for the interpreter in the entire work,” as Del Mar puts it).

In each of these two passages, a single idea is presented by the soloist and then the orchestra, and then the same exchanged is repeated a third higher:

SOURCE:  my resetting (with Finale) of II mm. 40-48 (using Elgar's piano reduction), reset just to fit it in a smaller space.

Of these last four bars Del Mar asks “Did Elgar intend (but not mark, assuming it as understood) the same ‘largamente   a tempo’ as four bars earlier, or did he, on the contrary (and as some soloists make a point of doing), wish these bars to make a contrast, continuing this time a tempo?”  Here Elgar’s own recordings with Harrison employ the unwritten largamente in these second exchanges, although not a single written source includes it.  (At least not a source in Elgar’s hand; Harrison has added to her copy of the printed part “largamente molto” to b. 43.)  Del Mar concludes tellingly

“Fortunately, there is at least no conflict whatever between individual sources between either group [paper or recorded], so that there is absolutely no doubt as too what we should (a) print (b) play—even if these two groups are in direct opposition with each other.”  [all of these quotations from pp. 36-37 of the critical commentary]

Even more interesting to me is that Elgar apparently took pains to erase some instruction at this point:  what was written above the cello stave here that was subsequently obliterated, distorting even the lines of the blank stave above?  This is bb. 44-46:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Bärenreiter facsimile (2007) of autograph full score (RCM ms 402), pp. 44-5.

Of this Del Mar remarks, “there is—tantalizingly—distinct evidence of deleted markings, but these are very efficiently scratched out so that almost nothing remains.  Only from the extremities of a few individual letters can we tentatively conjecture that Vers. I might have read (44 ‘largamente’ altered to) 45 ‘largamente a tempo’.”  Interestingly, the obliterations occur in both the autograph full score (above) and in the short score draft.

In any case, acknowledging this distinction between how the music is performed and how it is notated is significant.  Del Mar decided to deal with the whole issue in the critical commentary rather than in the separately published score, but at least a footnote in the score directs the user to the commentary.  A more intrusive editor might impose instructions (bracketed or not) or more extensive footnotes to indicate that the solo in bb. 44-45 should resemble bb. 40-41, etc., citing these recordings as support for that.  (I say intrusive—but is that the right word for this?  Heavy-handed?  Patronizing would be more pejorative; the positive spin might be avuncular.)

Christopher Hogwood has cited an interesting case of this sort of detail:  Aaron Copland’s 1974 Columbia recording of Appalachian Spring in its original scoring (13 players) included a bonus disc with excerpts of Copland rehearsing the Columbia Chamber Orchestra.  At this passage

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Boosey & Hawkes study score (HPS876), p. 5. 

Copland instructs the string players “Would you mark a crescendo on the [first] A—the fermata? [demonstrates]  I’m used to that; I don’t know where it came from.”  (Hear this moment of the recorded rehearsal here.)  Hogwood comments

“That, to me, constitutes something as good as written evidence.  Copland wanted it, asked for it in rehearsal and fixed it in his recording.  That crescendo can then go back into the score, but indicated differently from the crescendos he actually wrote, being one that he dreamed he had written but never had, but asked for, and if you want to explain it in the critical notes, you can.” [pp. 5f]

Hogwood's “as good as written evidence” suggests that if he were editing Appalachian Spring the crescendo would be in the score, modified in some way (brackets, dotted lines, whatever) to indicate an editorial addition, but he felt that an indication of its source is optional:  “If you want to explain it in the critical notes, you can.”  Okay, we have the composer literally on the record in this instance, and the ensuing studio recording backs it up.  The critical notes should say at least “hairpin absent from A[utograph], B[oosey published score], P[arts]....”  I think ideally the notes would be the place to document not only the 1974 rehearsal comment, but also if the crescendo is present in Copland’s other recordings of the work (in its larger scoring).  It could therefore be a task for an editor to seek an answer to Copland's “I don’t know where it came from.”  [ADDENDUM 10 June 2020:  The new critical edition of the original ballet score of Appalachian Spring cites the rehearsal recording among sources, but no mention is made of this crescendo, nor does it appear in the score.  An opportunity missed.]

Patrick Warfield documents a much more complicated situation in his edition of six Sousa marches in the Music of the United States of America (MUSA) edition.  He lays out the case for why the early recordings are not to be trusted—greatly reduced recording forces, truncations made to fit works on to a disk or a cylinder, and uncertainty of the identity of the performing ensembles billed on the record label as Sousa’s band (often conducted by assistant Arthur Pryor).  Add to this Sousa’s jealously guarded authentic sound for his own music in live performance:  the published texts of the marches lacked the details of his own performance practice.  Sousa is quoted as saying “we make some changes now and then to make it a little bit different” (p. xxxii).  At best these “authentic” recordings could document only a moment of that dynamic tradition.

Thus Warfield turns to the recollections of Sousa’s players (each keenly aware, after all, of intentional departures from the face-value reading of the printed parts) to try to establish Sousa’s performance practice as best that he can.  These changes generally involved certain groups of instruments sitting out during a repeat (or a first-time-through), getting the melody brass (cornets/trombones) or the percussion out of the way to let a mellower ensemble sound prevail; or it might be moving players to a higher or lower register—clarinets an octave higher or lower than notated.  Warfield’s edition cautiously refrains from printing these alterations directly into the score (“as no printed source includes these changes” [p. xxxviii]), although they are indicated in bracketed instructions.  For example, this bit of The Washington Post:

SOURCE:  cropped scan from Sousa: Six Marches (A-R Editions, 2010), p. 10; there are further instructions at the bottom of the page as well.

Warfield has done an admirable job presenting the evidence of Sousa’s practice without imposing it.  Conductors may experiment as they like.

A more vexing sort of recorded evidence is conveyed by surviving mechanical instruments like player piano rolls or the eighteenth-century barrel-organs that preserve versions of Handel’s organ concertos.  (For the former, Neal Peres da Costa has done admirable work disentangling performance practice evidence.)  The Handel concertos are shown to be laden with what might otherwise be considered improbable ornamentations.  Of course these cannot be exact transcriptions of Handel’s—or anyone’s—performances, as they have had to be “pinned” by hand (the metal pins hammered one at a time into the wooden cylinder).  Due to the minute distances of linear travel as the cylinder turns, it is hard to believe that these can transmit very much in terms of precise rhythmic relationships, still less is there a pattern to suggest notes inégales:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of David Fuller's transcription of an eighteenth-century barrel organ [p. viii]

For pitches (for example, starting a trill with the principal note) the barrels are much more reliable.  They certainly serve to indicate something of the variety of added ornamentations known (even plausible) at the time, and what sorts of ornaments would happen on repeats while other things might be altered.  When such instruments came to be studied in the 1980s (for example this) there was great hope that they were a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding Handel’s performance style:  thus David Fuller insists that

“Here, in principle at least, there are no decisions to be made, no opportunities for interpretation.  One may like or dislike what he sees here [in Fuller’s meticulous transcriptions]; one may not dispute it....  The listener may imagine his ear pressed to a speaking tube extending without obstruction nearly 200 years into history.”  [p. v]

This was too good to be true, but that doesn’t make such evidence irrelevant by any means, and a few pages later Fuller backs down a bit to something much more useful:

“That Handel himself played this or that particular ornament on a particular note in a particular measure could not possibly be claimed; this his style of playing was wholly without effect on general English practice of mid-century and thence upon these cylinders is, on the other hand, unlikely.”  [p. x]

Beyond Handel, such barrel organs can offer us a lot about early eighteenth-century ornamentation in general.  Paul Badura-Skoda even opens his Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard with a chapter on the Handel barrel organs. But these tell us more about eighteenth-century musical culture—barrel organs in particular—than they do anything about keyboard playing or ornamentation, and they must be treated with caution.

The barrel organs are recordings of performances rather than notational instructions about music—and I think we must keep that distinction in mind.  In 1958, Charles Seeger articulated concepts of prescriptive and descriptive notation—“a blue-print of how a specific piece of music shall be made to sound” over against “a report of how a specific performance of it actually did sound” (MQ 1958, p. 184).  When we think of music in terms of composers and works, we are (almost invariably) conceptualizing written music as prescriptive:  How did the composer want this to sound?  When, instead, we think of music in terms of performers and performances, we conceptualize notation as a description of that performance:  How did the performer render this?

The notation may well look pretty much the same in either case, as (despite what Seeger argued for in 1958) descriptive notation is still very much bound to the notational elements devised around prescriptive writing, particularly if the descriptive notation is expected to be an adjunct to some sort of recording of the real thing.  Thus the curious, 1100+ page anthology The Beatles: Complete Scores is descriptive of the Beatles recordings, laboriously (although to me not always convincingly) transcribed by Tetsuya Fujita, Yuji Hagino, Hajime Kubo, and Goro Sato.  I presume it is a labor of love, and it’s difficult to know what it is for:  a coffee table curiosity (commercial)?  A handbook for cover bands (prescriptive)?  An ancilliary resource—but a dangerous one—for scholars of the “British Invasion” (descriptive)?  We can see more rigorous approaches in the MUSA volumes devoted to (for example) transcribed recordings of “Fats” Waller (ed. Paul Machlin) or Sam Morgan’s Jazz Band (trans. John J. Joyce)—fascinating volumes to peruse, even when I did not have the recordings immediately to hand.  These volumes do much to emphasize the complexity of this music, and of course the notation acts to “freeze” the improvised music to allow us to scrutinize and dissect it (... to apply, in other words, the autopsy-table analysis that has been the stock-and-trade of music scholarship).

There is much more to be said here, but this post is already overlong.  I should return at some point to some prescriptive transcriptions—that is, of transcriptions from recordings intended to facilitate new live performance of music that was originally improvised—like Maurice Duruflé’s reconstructions of Charles Tournemire’s Cinq Improvisations, or (rather differently) the Jazz Arts Trio’s “note-for-note transcriptions of historic moments in piano jazz.”  In the latter instance, when I sat through a concert in which these transcriptions were realized (and with scores available for purchase), I was left pondering what manner of performance this could be.  Somehow the music seemed to have been violated in an attempt to bring it back to life.