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.

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.

8. The right tools for the job

Although it isn’t unusual to find players disregarding a composer’s instructions about what instrument to use—frequently the specified instrument simply is not available—it is profoundly irritating to find editions that beat the player to it.  An example of this is the supposedly scholarly edition of Bizet’s Carmen edited by Fritz Oeser (Alkor [Bärenreiter], 1964), where the parts Bizet wrote for cornets-à-pistons are labelled trumpet instead:

SOURCE:  scan of Oeser ed., p. 1 (detail, with emphasis added)

I say “supposedly scholarly”:  the use of trumpets is the least of this edition’s faults—and some of these will certainly feature in future posts.  In any case,  Winton Dean made this point fifty years ago, demonstrating that the Oeser edition “goes disastrously off the rails” from sound editorial practice (p. 284).  Dean also remarks on the trumpet/cornet issue, pointing out that this mis-allocation had already happened in the Peters edition edited by Kurt Soldan (on the IMSLP here) although at least Soldan had the courtesy to add “Pistons” parenthentically underneath.

The instruments are regarded as interchangeable, probably because the cornet  (properly with accent on the first syllable, which makes it easily distinguished from the cornett) is virtually an endangered species, particularly in the USA.  A hundred years ago it was the other way around, and the trumpet seems to have taken over in the 1920s (with perhaps the coup de grâce being Louis Armstrong’s conversion to trumpet).  Thus we find Cecil Forsyth, writing in his Orchestration (1914/rev. 1935):

We must not forget that the contempt which is usually bestowed on the Cornet by those who have never heard it properly played is mainly a contempt because it cannot equal or beat the Trumpet in Trumpet passages.  These simple and straightforward phrases were always consciously designed by the old masters to produce their somewhat oppressive effect by the mere weight of the instrument’s tone.  In course of time we have come to associate that type of tone with that type of passage. (p. 107)

Erring on the side of oversimplification, the conical cornet is a melody instrument; the cylindrical trumpet is a rhythmic instrument, with a tone better able to cut through an ensemble.  To best illustrate the timbral difference between conical and cylindrical brass I suggest this performance of the piece we usually call “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring” (from BWV 147) by the German Brass.  The arranger has cleverly divided the ensemble into a two distinct consorts.  For most of this arrangement, the 4-part chorale is played by cylindrical instruments (one trumpet and three trombones), while the rest is played by conical instruments (two flugelhorns, two horns, tuba—although at a two points a piccolo trumpet joins in, and in the final measures everyone is playing together).

Here is a handy diagram, from Anthony Baines’s Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments (1992), which compares the profile of several brass instruments, although it warrants a few comments below.

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Baines, p. 43 (entry:  Brass instruments). 
Baines does not clarify this, but this diagram must assume that no valves are depressed, nor is the trombone slide extended; 
V then would indicate the passage through the valve section of the instrument, but not diverted through the crooks the valves would engage.  
Otherwise the proportions don't make sense, as (for example) nos. 4 and 5 at their full length would be much closer to #1.

A mountain out of a molehill?  Profiles 4 and 5 do not appear vastly different from each other.  Indeed, but the modern B-flat trumpet is significantly shorter—and thus proportionally more conical—than its predecessors in the Renaissance and Baroque, and indeed even down to the early twentieth century.  The old valved F trumpet of the late Romantic orchestra (an instrument which will figure in a later post) really would sound noticeably different from today’s ubiquitous B-flat, as the F trumpet has a narrower bore and is about half-again as long.  (Its profile would most resemble #1 in Baines’s diagram, although a little shorter.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard one live, although it can be heard on some of the recordings of the (new) New Queen’s Hall Orchestra; otherwise it is essentially extinct.)  If Bizet had been asking for trumpets in Carmen, he would have been expecting something of that sort—not the instrument we see and hear today.

Note that profile 6 above is only the shorter portion of the standard “double” horn today (F/B-flat); the F side would extend off well to the right, and would thus be proportionally more cylindrical.  For orchestral horns, the principle that the longer the instrument is the more cylindrical its profile has always been true:  even before valves, with the crooks players would use to change the key of the instrument, the low crooks produce a very different sound from the high crooks.  Listen, for example, to these recordings of the opening chorus of Bach's cantata Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen (BWV 65) with either C alto or C basso horns:

• C alto:  Gabrieli Consort (dir. Paul McCreesh)
• C basso:  Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (dir. Ton Koopman)

It isn’t just the pitch, but the whole timbre of the instrument that is changed.  At the extreme:  the shortest horns of which I am aware are the E-flat alto horns in Mozart’s K. 132 (the higher pair of two pairs of horns), which make a very round, bugle-ish sound.

In the ensembles that put pairs of cornets and trumpets together—as so often in French nineteenth-century literature, or in military band music—one may frequently find composers observing a distinction between the writing appropriate for one or the other.  Thus in his wind band piece Sea Songs, Ralph Vaughan Williams neatly distinguishes between cornet solos and trumpet solos, and (as below) demonstrates how to keep trumpet punctuation from overwhelming cornet lyricism, while still sometime needing either instrument to function as the other:

SOURCE:  scan of Sea Songs full score (Boosey & Co, "corrected edition 1991"), pp. 20-21 (composite details)

Likewise, Emamanuel Chabrier knew when to let the trumpets do the heavy lifting in a thick texture, relegating the horns and cornets to filling in the harmonies:

SOURCE:  scan of pp. 112-13 of 1997 Dover reprint of 1884 first edition of España (composite details; accolade added)

Working on this post got me wondering of any instances where a composer calls for a player to switch between the two instruments.  It seems like an obvious expedient, but it is curiously rare.  The published full score of Bernstein’s Candide reveals that for the Parisian waltz the first trumpet player takes up the cornet (an allusion, perhaps, to the showy cornet part that Berlioz added to the Valse of his Symphonie Fantastique?)  In the last movement (Marcia funebre) of Bartók’s Four Orchestral Pieces, op. 12, the four trumpet players switch back and forth between trumpets and cornets, although it would be hard to demonstrate that he is absolutely consistent with the sort of idiom he gives to one or the other instrument.  

But in other instances where one might expect such a practice, it just doesn’t happen.  In Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe, for example, the fanfares which begin the chorus “Loudly let the trumpet bray” are played by cornets, Sullivan’s default in the Savoy Theatre orchestra.  (Like Bizet’s Opéra Comique, this may have been a balance issue more than anything else; when Sullivan wrote his grand opera Ivanhoe, he called for trumpets—and even a Wagnerian bass trumpet.)  Seldom do I hear cornets in performances of the Savoy operas.  The rare cornet solo does strike my ear as odd on the trumpet, though.  Compare the solo in the overture of The Pirates of Penzance (by Sullivan's assistant, Alfred Cellier) in these two performances, one with trumpet (at least to my ear, although the player is trying to compensate with a fair bit of vibrato) and the other with cornet.  I note that the Kalmus score (apparently scored from parts) gives no indications that the cornet was what Sullivan had in his ensemble:

SOURCE:  scan of undated Kalmus full score of The Pirates of Penzance, p. 3 (detail)

I started this post remarking on performers disregarding the instructions of a composer, and have given a few examples of editors doing it.  I have been wondering if we could imagine an editor imposing cornet where a composer wrote trumpet?  Has this ever been done—outside of brass band transcriptions?  I can think of a place where I’d like to do it:  the “Tango-Pasodoblé” movement of Walton’s Façade.

SOURCE:  scan of William Walton Edition vol. 7, Façade Entertainments, p. 42 (detail)

This seems to my ear to be begging for a cornet (with its quotation of “I do like to be beside the seaside”), but Walton’s tiny ensemble calls for trumpet.  Changing that is the sort of liberty a conductor is free to do, but not an editor.

7. On second thought

In the Christian liturgical calendar, today is All Saints’ Day, which prompts me to consider small textual point about a hymntune that will be much in use today in Anglican services.  Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his tune SINE NOMINE for the text “For all the saints who from their labors rest” as a processional hymn in The English Hymnal (1906), for which he served as music editor.  This book revolutionized the music of Anglo-American hymnody, incorporating a wealth of traditions (chorales, Genevan Psalms, plainchant, folk music) into a new mainstream.  In addition to many hymn arrangements of folk tunes, Vaughan Williams contributed a several original tunes to the book.  SINE NOMINE is probably RVW's best known hymntune, but there are a handful of other contenders for that distinction.  

Some fifty years after the fact, RVW described his work on the hymnal partly as one of purging the Victorian hymntune repertory:

Whilst trying to include all the good tunes, I did my best to eliminate the bad ones.  This was difficult, because I was not entirely my own master.  My committee insisted that certain very popular tunes should be retained.  The climax came when my masters declared that I must myself write a fulsome letter to a prominent ecclesiastic asking for leave to print his horrible little tune.  My committee and I finally settled our quarrel with a compromise by which the worst offenders were confined to an appendix at the end of the book, which we nicknamed the “Chamber of Horrors.”  (p. 3)

In his preface to the volume itself he is somewhat more restrained:  “...a short appendix is added of alternative tunes to certain hymns for the use of those who do not agree with the choice of the musical editor.”  (p. xii).  Joseph Barnby's tune for "For all the saints" was clearly one not to RVW's taste, as it is confined to the Appendix.  Charles Villiers Stanford's stirring tune ENGELBURG (1904) was under copyright in the new edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern, and thus not available for The English Hymnal.  So Vaughan Williams wrote his own.

Below on the left is the beginning of the hymn as it appeared in the first edition.  The hymnal appeared in a second edition in 1933, and the image on the right is how it appears there.  Ignore the difference in formatting:  the textual variant is bb. 4-6.

Source:  cropped digital scans (600 dpi) of (L) The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 826; and (R) The English Hymnal (OUP) 1933 ed., p. 832.

The harmony of b. 4 is identical (tonic) in both versions, but in the later edition the walking bassline of the pedal is changed in order to accommodate a new harmony (V/V) in b. 5.  This, in turn, allows a suspended E on the downbeat of b. 6, resolving back to the 1906 text in the middle of that measure.

I have wondered about this passage for years.  This hymn is always in the service when I am on the organ bench on All Saints’ Day—or on the Sunday nearest to it.  It appears in many American hymnals, some with the 1906 text (as I first came to know it), and some with the revised text.  Why and when was the change made?

It is hard to date when it was changed, but earliest example I have found with the revised reading is another hymnal which RVW edited, namely Songs of Praise (OUP) which appeared first in 1925:

Source:   cropped digital scan Songs of Praise (OUP) 1925, p. 162.

If anyone can locate this reading in any printing of the first edition of The English Hymnal, I would be eager to know about it.  (A number of separate pamphlets of hymns from The English Hymnal were published over the years, including one in 1921 that included “For all the Saints.”  The only copy I have located is in the British Library, and for this post I haven't been able to check the reading there.  Perhaps the alteration was made at that time?)  Hymns are often the victims of cavalier and arbitrary musical alterations, as often the music editors of a hymnal are not really editors at all; at least in this instance, where Vaughan Williams was the musical editor and this is his own hymn tune, we can rule out the arbitrary and cavalier as a factors.

As to why the change was made, I can only suggest a possible reason.  Over the first notes of the hymn are instructions:

Source: detail of The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 826.

Verses 4-6 are given a four-part harmony setting:

Source: detail of The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 828.

There we note that the “original” harmony is used for bb. 5-6, and that all that is lacking of the original in b. 4 is  the walking bass of the organ pedal line.  My suggestion is that, as this harmonization would appear in three verses already, RVW made an alteration for the other five just for the sake of variety.  I can’t prove it, and I’ve never been convinced that is an improvement.  But while I’m on the subject of this alternate four-part setting, I think the counterpoint for the Alleluyas is gorgeous, the tenor line in particular:

Source:  ditto

Here is a performance from York Minster; it uses the 1906 reading through verse 7.  At verse 8, the revised reading is used.  I’ll remember that idea the next time it is on the service list when I am on the bench.