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.

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.