59. The latent textual value of a derivative score

A few weeks ago, my colleague Justin Vickers posted a very generous profile of my blog.  Speaking with Justin a few months ago, I gave him an example of material that has been on my idea list for posts even before I posted the very first one in the summer of 2016.  These ideas sometimes linger while I wait to find the right examples to illustrate the issue at hand.  One of those ideas—the second on the list, actually—was about the importance of vocal scores to the textual record.  (A vocal score is an edition of a vocal or choral work in which the orchestral accompaniment has been “reduced” so that is reasonably playable by one person at a piano; as opposed to a full score, in which all the orchestral lines are spelled out—but there are varieties of full score too numerous to discuss in this post).  Knowing that Justin is a Britten scholar, the example I shared was Peter Grimes.  But now is a good chance to finally write this post (not as post number 2, but as number 59), and thus to back up and look more into the Peter Grimes instance.  And, as so often in this blog, there is a long backstory here.  If you want to cut to the chase, skip the indented paragraphs and I’ll see you on the flip side.

Decades ago, during my graduate studies, the music seminar room doubled as the 

“locked press” of the music library.  In my very first blogpost, I described my favorite space in the Cornell music library before the building was renovated:  it held the M3s (collected editions) and the ML134s (work catalogues).  The locked press inspired a certain awe, as it held the stuff that could be accessed only with special oversight—the holdings that would be only rarely consulted and which would be impossible or expensive to replace.  I remember the bewildering array of facsimiles (in those days before digital scans were so readily available online), and sometimes during a class my eyes would wander up onto the shelves to behold these special volumes.  I remember one catching my eye, noteworthy because it wasn't a facsimile of a medieval or renaissance source, nor even of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century manuscript, although it was as impressively lavish in its presentation.  Two big volumes:  The Making of Peter Grimes:  I. Facsimile of Benjamin Britten’s composition draft and II.  Notes and Commentaries.  I knew very little of Britten’s music at the time; I knew the name of the opera, but I had never seen or heard it.  I knew it was an important work, but I was still surprised to see that something so recent—hardly fifty years old at the time—would merit a place in the holy of holies in the music library.

You should keep in mind that I was a snob of the first order at that time.  I had very strong opinions about what was worth looking at and what was worth listening to.  When in the late 1980s I came across the Dover reprints of full scores, what interested me most was that they were full scores (i.e., what I assumed to be “everything the composer wrote”), not really anything about what editions were being reprinted.  With my interest in Gilbert and Sullivan, it was a little frustrating at the time to be pretty much limited to vocal scores, but I still generally held vocal scores in contempt—at least at one remove from the real thing, at best.

I occasionally requested something from locked press, and those seemed like particularly momentous times.  In fact, almost soon asI arrived on campus campus I called up the facsimile of The Mikado, spending several hours at my carrel poring over it.  I perused several other locked press items over there years, but never Peter Grimes.  That wasn't until many years later, by which time I had come to know the opera pretty well, and was devoting much of my energies to British music generally.  So, in the spring of 2013, when I had some faculty development funds to spend, I splurged on several facsimiles:  Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, the composition score of Messiah, and a few others.  But also, seeing a chance flyer from Boydell & Brewer, I ordered The Making of Peter Grimes.  I spent a lot of time with it over a few weeks, looking at the score with the full score at hand, and reading the commentaries.  But then it went up on the shelf and didn't often come back down.

Fast forward a few years, when I was considering using something from Peter Grimes for one of my classes to analyze.  Finally over my full-score-only snobbishness, I had recognized that it would sometimes be easier for my students to see what I wanted them to see if they could use a reduced score of some sort (like Ravel’s two-piano transcription of La Valse... and, I thought to myself, at least the transcription is by the composer...).  So I went down the hall and borrowed the vocal score of Peter Grimes from one of my applied voice colleagues.

I had never looked at this vocal score before, but flipping through it, I kept thinking I’ve seen this before.  And I knew exactly where I had seen it.  It looked a lot like the “composition draft” that was in the facsimile on my shelf.  No, it’s not note-for-note the same—hardly that.  But what the vocal score transmits is derived not from the full score but from the composition draft.  The draft is written in “short score,” meaning lots of stuff crammed in a few staves, but generally not really conceived as a piano accompaniment.  Maybe because Britten was himself a formidable pianist, the notation of the short score betrays to my eye a sort of “pianistic thinking” which transferred nicely to the clean vocal score text prepared by Erwin Stein.  Looking at it now, it is actually hard to find a really good example to demonstrate this.  The section that had first attracted my attention was the interlude that opens Act III; the example below is from the storm interlude in the middle of Act I (the beginning of which has always struck me as prefiguring some of the “rumble” in West Side Story; Bernstein had conducted the US premiere of Peter Grimes in 1946.  Just sayin’...).  These are some of the most fascinating pages in the composition draft:  they reveal a complicated gestation, as Britten was asked to lengthen it, adding and revising material in the middle of the movement.  I think this is sufficient example, though, of how the compositional draft is taken over into the piano reduction with little more than cosmetic retouching (as well as spelling out everything that is otherwise indicated with ditto slashes).

 

SOURCE: Britten: Peter Grimes, Interlude II (Act 1); composite of (l.) p. 110 of the published vocal score; and (r.) detail of f. 35r from the composition draft, scanned from the Boydell facsimile.  The material of the composition draft begins in the second bar of the vocal score page (indicated by the red bracket).

There are even times when Britten brackets the upper two staves as “I” and the lower two as “II”—which certainly suggests thinking of it as two pianists.  Stein's reduction even sometimes asks for two pianists, but it interesting to note that these do not really match up with the times Britten writes that way.  The great Passacaglia in the middle of Act II, for example, appears in the composition draft on no more than three staves (though Stein expands it to full piano duet).

What this suggests to me is that the heart of Britten’s ideas of the piece are more easily seen in the notation of the vocal score than of the full score.  Moreover, since this was Britten’s regular working habit—short score before full score—maybe the vocal scores of his other works would similarly convey the essence of the work in ways that might be obscured in the full score, especially such complicated and overwhelming scores as War Requiem.  When Imogen Holst prepared the War Requiem vocal score, she relied on the compositional draft, and Philip Reed has made this point before (and doubtless others have, too):

“As with the vast majority of Britten’s output, the War Requiem took shape on the manscript paper as a through-composed short score draft written in pencil throughout, with the orchestral texture reduced onto two, three, or occasionally four staves and the vocal lines occupying their own staves.  At first glance the draft resembles something approaching a vocal score and was certainly used as a guide by Imogen Holst when she prepared the vocal score (under Britten’s supervision) for Boosey & Hawkes.  The instrumentation is indicated by verbal abbreviations—‘str’, ‘trbn’, ‘ww’—at the time of composition, ready for instant retrieval when the moment came for the full score to be made.  This simple technique was effective in allowing Britten to press on to the end of a work before making the full score, safe in the knowledge that the piece was in effect written; in the case of complex works, such as the War Requiem, it also allowed an assistant to follow behind the composer using the draft as a basis for the all-important vocal score from which the soloists and chorus would learn their music” (37).

And to add another nuance:  my guess is that greater fluency with the published reductions in the vocal scores of Britten’s works would yield similar fluency with reading his compositional drafts.  I think that it would give a greater facility to perceiving aspects of his compositional process than the rest of us can readily discern.

On this practical matter of needing a piano reduction of the orchestral material for rehearsals, in other research before I started this blog I had a few examples where the composer would depart from his [sic] usual routine in order to produce a vocal score first--because it would be needed sooner than a full score.  When Charles Villiers Stanford wrote his Songs of the Sea in 1904, he seems to have first thought of it as an orchestral song cycle for one singer, and started work on the full score; only later did he decide to add a men’s chorus, and then set to work on the vocal score.  When, in 1910, he followed it up with another cycle, Songs of the Fleet, he knew from the first that it would feature a mixed chorus along with the baritone soloist, so he started with writing the vocal score (with a piano part) before then turning to the full score.  All four of his autograph manuscripts for these two pieces are preserved at the Royal College of Music, London.  (What do we make of the well-established Stanford having to prepare the piano reduction rather than it being hackwork for someone contracted by the publisher?  I’m not sure.)

Another example:  William Walton was not much of a pianist himself, and so generally composed in full score (but, if the sketches that remain for the Variations on a Theme of Hindemith (1963) are typical, writing in concert pitch before producing a fair copy with the correct transpositions); in the case of the Cello Concerto (1955-56), however, Walton produced a keyboard “reduction” first.  (Can you “reduce” something that doesn’t yet exist?)  In the case of his chamber opera The Bear (1966–67), Walton worked on the piano score in tandem with the vocal score, apparently using the discipline of working out a piano score as the opportunity to test the worth of what he had already written.

But perhaps the greatest musicological value of vocal scores must be the preservation of material subsequently cut and lost in other sources.  Among the treasures on the IMSLP (and there are many!) is a scan of the two early Choudens vocal scores of Bizet’s Carmen.  They prove to be from two different issues:  the Eastman copy includes the recitatives composed by Ernest Guiraud, documenting the early reworking of the opera—and thus an early exemplar of the performance tradition that dominated during the first century of Carmen performances; the Chapel Hill copy is a true first edition, without recitatives (although the scan missed a few pages—most frustrating!).  But what is so important about this edition is that it contains the “Scène et Pantomime” that initially followed the opening chorus but was cut during the first run.  The autograph for this portion was removed from the rest of the opera, although it survives now in a private collection.  Fortunately, it has since been published (as in the 1992 Schott/Eulenberg score), but for a long time the first edition vocal score was the only available source for it.  Of this score, as Winton Dean notes, the 1875 vocal score is the authoritative source in determining the provenance of the early changes to the score:

“No retouch to the autograph, whether it is in the hand of Bizet, Guiraud, Antony Choudens, General de Gaulle, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, can by any human possibility have got into the 1875 vocal score after Bizet’s death or (barring misprints) without his approval.  All such modifications to the autograph must have been made in conformity with Bizet's wishes as expressed in the vocal score.”  (p. 289)

(Note that the Eastman copy indicates at the end of the opening chorus to follow directly with “no. 2,” but there is no “no. 2” in that source.) If you're interested, Richard Langham Smith (pp. 161–89) argues persuasively for the importance of this pantomime scene in understanding the work, even if it does seem to me like a speed bump in a performance.

One other example of the vocal score as an important conduit of evidence:  this spring I was teaching an American Music course, and for the class session when were talking about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American hymnody, I wanted them to look at a source I remembered seeing years ago (via a da Capo press reprint, but now of course more readily available as a scan online).

SOURCE: cropped screenshot of the title page of IMSLP 242918, the first edition (a copy at Eastman)

The reason I remembered looking at this source some thirty years ago was because of that line in the subtitle “together with many beautiful extras from the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and other eminent modern composers never before published in this country.”  One such tune that had struck me as a particularly odd choice and thus memorable decades later.

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of p. 180 of IMSLP 242918

I recognized this melody from Act I of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito, and it struck me as strange that it would show up here.  As was customary in such sources, the melody is presented in the staff directly above the bass.  (Lest this be thought the tenor—one of my pet peeves—please note that the first hymn in this collection explicitly labels the top staff as “TENOR” and the third as “TREBLE OR AIR.”  The fact that tenors may sing this melody is another issue altogether and has to do with the practical use of these tunebooks, not the initial intention they present.)  

But this spring when I looked at it again, what stood out was that first triplet in the melody (second system, first downbeat).  I’ve never heard that before, I thought.  Where did they get that?  Out of curiosity, I looked up Mozart's autograph.

SOURCE:  cropped and marked-up scan of the autograph score, from IMSLP 807497 (p. 42); for reference, this is p. 74 as presented in the Bärenreiter facsimile of the autograph, which re-assembles portions held in different collections.

We are in a different key (A major) and in different clefs (the upper staff is the bassoon in bass clef, the lower staff is Annio, in soprano clef), but the reading shows two downward triadic arpeggios, a tonic and a supertonic chord.  None of that 8-7-8 neighbor-tone motion in the hymnbook.  Were the editors of the hymnbook trying to make it easier to sing?  (But if so, why include this tune at all?)

As the IMSLP had a scan of an early vocal score, I clicked on that.  Lo and behold!

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan of p. 25 of IMSLP 572308, a vocal score published by Simrock c. 1800

There was the Boston reading, clear as day.  So where did this come from?  The piano reduction in this source was credited (even on its title page) to Christan Gottlob Neefe, and it must have been one of the last things he did, since he died in 1798.  Was this figuration Neefe's idea?

I looked in the critical report of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe.  Crickets.  Not only was there no mention of the Simrock vocal score (and indeed very little reference to any of the early vocal scores), but there was nothing flagged about this passage.  So I pulled out the new edition of the Köchel Catalog.  Neefe's vocal score was not listed.  Instead, I found two 1795 editions of the vocal score:  one was published in Leipzig by Breitkopf, with a keyboard reduction by Siegfried Schmiedt; the other in Hamburg by Günther & Böhme, with a keyboard reduction by August Eberhard Müller.  I found a scan of the Schmiedt score right away; the only digital scan I could locate of the Müller reduction was from a subsequent Breitkopf score (c. 1803), but in any case both of them gave the same reading as the autograph:

SOURCE:  composite, marked-up, cropped scans of early vocal scores:  (top) p. 24 of Breitkopf (1795) available at archive.org; and p. 17 of Breitkopf (c. 1803), available at Harvard University Library.

I looked at other published vocal scores and manuscript copies; I couldn’t locate any other source that transmitted Neefe’s reading (assuming he originated it), but I was only looking at scores of the complete opera.  Maybe Neefe’s reading made it into some other excerpted anthology that I haven't seen.  Otherwise I can only conclude from all this at the moment that a copy of Neefe’s edition was the one that the Boston editor(s) referred to in preparing the Handel & Haydn Society Collection.  Not much, but it is gratifying to have at least something other than a wild goose chase.

ADDENDUM 5 July 2026

A fantastic recent example of the value of a derivative sources is Marc Shepherd's discovery of three cut numbers from Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, extant only in a manuscript copy of the full score; the score was under wraps in a D'Oyly Carte vaults for almost a century, and then languishing in the British Library until Shepherd paged it and saw what it contained.  It's a great story.

58. Leaving traces

One of our dogs, Lorraine, is a hound mix of some sort.  She has an incredible nose.  (Actually, the ears and jowls are pretty impressive, too.)  Her favorite thing on a walk is to find a piece of pizza that someone has left on the ground—which occurs more often than you might think.  But her second favorite thing is just follow some new scent that wasn’t there the last time we walked by.  She loves it.

SOURCE:  my photographs of Lorraine out for a walk/sniff on December 28, 2025.  No pizza found, alas.

Even with a short list of unfinished drafts for other posts, today’s post occurred to me because of a number of thing coalescing in my reading in the last few weeks.  Some of the books were Christmas presents, some were in piles of things to read when I had time, and others for ongoing research.  Let me start with a few excerpts that struck me:

Maria Caraci Vela [trans. Elizabeth MacDonald]:  “Copying, therefore, manuscript or printed, and to a large degree also of computerised type, is never a completely mechanical act: the text is assimilated by the reader and copyist—who lives and acts within precise horizons and cultural and historical conditioning—in an individual manner, and its reproduction necessarily passes through a filter that includes the risk of deviations from the model, whether they are voluntary or involuntary, mechanical or due to reflection, intrinsic in any case to the very act of transmission” (p. 18).  “Every witness [source] is a physical individual and a historical reality, which documents a precise moment in the life of a text.  There may of course be a witness that definitely transmits the wishes of the author.  But this does not mean that the philologist should not in any case study other witnesses: because, as has already been said, that witness does not exhaust all point of interest or the field of investigation in musical philology, as it is important to evaluate both whatever may have preceded him (the history of the creative process), and whatever came after (further author’s corrections; the history of tradition and the reception given to the musical text)” (p. 25).

[Name withheld to shield a naïve academic, in a pre-publication review included in the eventually printed volume]:  “He does not quote sources for his findings, for he is himself an unimpeachable source for anything you might care to know about a wide range of yuletide musical gems, spanning centuries and encompassing the globe.”

Yo Tomita:  “In a modern critical edition it is standard practice to discuss any potentially controversial decisions in relation to the musical text in the form of a commentary, usually found at the back of the volume.  Yet, when it comes to issues that are generally considered outside the realm of the main musical text, such as the style of movement headings, score layout, beaming, the distribution of text between the left and right hands in the case of keyboard works, and so on, editors tend to mention very little or nothing at all” (p. 13).

And it came to pass that as I was walking Lorraine the other day, I started wondering if while she is keenly aware of the traces left by others she gives any thought to the traces she leaves behind for the next scent hound.  Sure, dogs may sometimes intentionally mark territory, but even as they proceed along their merry way they are leaving a scent trail behind at all times.  As are we all.

I remember being taught that we cite sources just to give credit it where it is due, but also that those who follow us can replicate our work and see if they agree with our conclusions.  I have noticed that my own students seem to regard citations as a sign of weakness (equivalent to a confession that I didn’t come up with all of this myself), while I try to show them that they are actually a sign of strength and should be a source of pride (Look at all the work I did on this!).  Scholarship is joining an ongoing conversation, and doing that productively requires a good bit of listening to what others are saying before venturing in yourself.

I understand Tomita’s frustration:  sometimes, in the interest of tidy new editions, all manner of clues are expunged from the text.  I have been guilty in acceding to house style guides that tacitly regularize all manner of things that seem (as Tomita puts it) “outside of the main musical text.”  It can be difficult in such instances to know what the composer really wrote on the page—and even in instances where an editor makes a point to retain some notational aspect as musical significant, the user may still be at a loss.  Why this now?  As an example, in Charles Villiers Stanford’s orchestral song cycle Songs of the Fleet, the third movement—“The Middle Watch”—opens with just octaves in the strings, together with the downbeat given in the timpani.  It is in a slow 6/4 meter.  This is Stanford’s notation in both of his autographs—the choral/piano score (which he notated first):

SOURCE: cropped scan of Stanford, Songs of the Fleet, autograph vocal score (Royal College of Music MS 4158a), f. [7r].

and the full orchestral score (although I have cropped the wind parts from this image):

SOURCE: cropped scan of Stanford, Songs of the Fleet, autograph full score (Royal College of Music MS 4158), f. [18v]

In this instance, for the new edition I felt it would be wrong to regularize the tied dotted half-notes as dotted whole-notes already in b. 1.  Yes, in a sense they are equivalent (each filling a whole bar), but I think they connote different things.  Perhaps perversely, the tied dotted half-notes suggest to me a longer sound than a dotted whole-note, as using the tie suggests to me that the break between the end of the held note and the attack of the next should be a shorter.  Stanford soon switches to using dotted whole-notes—easier to write, certainly.  In fact, it is because it would be easier to write—as a shorthand—that I do not think he is suggesting that they require a different interpretation.  Rather, it suggests I’ve shown you what I mean, now you keep doing that.  He doesn’t bother to indicate ‘simile’ because it seems obvious.

That said, I contend that it would have been wrong of me to change all his dotted whole-notes into tied dotted half-notes—that is, to regularize it in a way that so often is a hallmark of editions, by spelling out what the editor thinks the composer meant.  But it is worth leaving editorial traces, and so it was important to include a note explaining what I was up to, a scent for interested hounds to follow:

SOURCE: cropped scan from the critical notes of our edition (A-R Editions, 2019), p. 213. 

“Inconsistent thereafter” covers a lot.  It could be regarded as carelessness on the part of the composer.  If the matter had been really important to me, I should have documented every instance of the tied dotted whole-notes in the two Stanford autographs.  Moreover, I shied away from stating outright my musical reasons for wanting to retain Stanford’s idiosyncratic notation for those first two bars, as maybe there would come others after me who would recognize a different and greater significance in it.  I think it is important, though, in such situations, for the user to know to what degree what they are seeing reflects the composer's notation, and to what degree that has been altered.  (For an example where I think the standardization goes a good deal too far, see my post about the HHA edition Handel’s Musick for the Royal Fireworks.)

I give my Stanford example as one in which we see the composer leaving one sort of trace and the editor another, but my point is that we are all leaving traces all the time.  An example comes to mind from Malcolm Bilson’s Knowing the Score lecture, which includes an anecdote of a pianist coming to him with Beethoven's op. 111 using an edition in which the lower-staff leap (in octaves) of the treacherous opening diminished seventh is re-notated to be use both hands, thus bypassing the danger.  As Bilson remarks, this student “doesn’t even know what Beethoven wrote!”

This issue—not knowing what a composer wrote—is exceedingly common.  That is just the state of things.  (Q.  What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?  A.  I don’t know and I don’t care.)

I see that the edition to which he is referring—Leo Weiner’s 1959 edition for Editio Musica Budapest—is not yet accessible via the IMSLP, and maybe that is just as well.  But Weiner was a highly educated musician, and I’m sure he did not make this alteration without considering it carefully.  (The same cannot be said of a lot of the stuff uploaded to the IMSLP:  entirely new files, in which some manuscript or older edition has been re-set by someone with access to musical notation software.  Sometimes these are done pretty well; sometimes they are abysmal—but maybe that should be the subject of another post someday—again an issue of the worst of amateurism).  Still, one of the traces Weiner’s edition leaves behind inevitably betrays at least a different understanding of the music than Bilson argues is manifest in the original notation.  And, as James Grier memorably puts it, “Let the editor not be accused of printing the piece the composer would have written had he or she known as much as he editor” (p. 136).

I thought about Bilson’s indignation a few months ago when I was filling-in for the organist at a local church.  One of the communion hymns was a new one to me: “He’ll understand, and say ‘well done’.”  It is number 190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II:  An African-American Hymnal (1993), a publication of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, overseen by the renowned gospel music scholar Horace Clarence Boyer (1935-2009).  Boyer knew what he was doing, and if I second guess him now, it is because it may reveal the different sorts of traces left by him as editor and me as user.

SOURCE: marked-up, cropped photograph from #190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II (1993)

The chord that I have indicated is (to my mind) misspelled, or rather contains a misspelt note.  I would argue that bass note should really be a b-double-flat, a chromatic upper neighbor to the a-flat which follows.  We might hear that just as the bass line skipping up while  the rest of the chord is sustained, or specifically as a familiar “French augmented 6th” sonority in this case borrowed from a d-flat major tonality that never itself actually gets stated as such.  The a-natural just doesn't register with me:  I can’t make sense of it, or at least couldn’t make sense of it as I sight-read the example verse after verse.  It actually was even harder in the refrain, where the same chord progression occurs, but this time the cautionary flat sign for the ensuing a-flat is missing.  That really threw me.

SOURCE: marked-up, cropped photograph from #190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II (1993)

In such a context, I would ordinarily expect an a-natural to resolve upwards, and a b-double-flat downwards.  The a-natural seemed to me non-sensical.  But the point is the I would ordinarily expect.  It is the theory training that has messed up my ability to read the music as it is.  I will grant, in the abstract, that an a-natural is much easier to imagine than a b-double-flat.  But this is not in the abstract:  it is in context.  And in context, the way I have been taught has made it harder to read as notated, even though the a-natural is a “simpler” concept.  (I used this in class to illustrate to some beginner theory students that as they acquire theoretical knowledge and think more in terms of theoretical concepts, they may find that they lose facility at things they can already do now.  This example demonstrates one way that has happened to me.)

I don’t know what the back-story of this version of this hymn is—my hound nose isn’t as good as Lorraine’s—but it would seem that in the production of the Lift Every Voice and Sing II Boyer and the others of his editorial team either passively let the a-natural stand from whatever source-text they were working from, or actively changed b-double-flats to a-naturals to appear—I’m guessing—more user-friendly to the church musician.  The attribution for this arrangement is to Boyer himself, and I haven’t found this harmonization anywhere else.  (Hymnary.org cites seventy appearances of the tune in the hymnals and songbooks in their database; the melody in some of those other instances is remarkably varied in a lot of ways, and I was gratified to find in another harmonization two true c-flats rather than b-naturals.)  The chosen spelling of the note makes it easier for some, harder for others.  I suppose I sniff out here some general sense of the intended end-user, and that user wasn't expected to put up with b-double-flats.  And yet, not quite:  I only have to turn the page to no. 191 (also in e-flat major) to find b-double-flats notated.  I’m not sure what to make of it.  The trail has gone cold.

And thus another excerpt which has been on my mind for several months:

John Jowett:  “Text is puzzling, Protean, and capable of shifting beyond reach at the very point where we try to grasp it.  In that awareness lies the fascination of the subject” (p. 6).

I find myself thinking of both the textual trails that lead to musical editions and the trails that those editions leave behind—for better or worse.  What I have learned most as I have written this blog over almost ten years is that the textual situation continually surprises me.  I know what Jowett means.  So very often when I go to check a point in whatever early sources are accessible to me, there is something unexpected—and that something that was already fascinating to me becomes increasingly more absorbing.  Just in time for Christmas 2024, Bärenreiter put out a facsimile of the autograph manuscript of Bedřich Smetana’s Vltava.  As soon as my copy arrived, I turned to a magical moment—my favorite use of the triangle in the whole of the orchestral repertoire (or, more accurately, the bit of it that I know).  It happens at b. 36, the moment presumably representing the confluence of the sources of the river that have been so evocatively depicted in first 35 bars.  But what I found surprised me:

SOURCE:  cropped digital scan of Bedrich Smetana: Vltava [autograph score: Národní muzeum - Muzeum Bedřicha Smetany inv. č. S 271/1250] (Bärenreiter Facsimile, 2024), p. 4

If that is hard to make out in that image, I have uploaded a larger scan of the full page here.  But what is important to note is that the triangle part is not on the staves, but is added at the bottom of the page.  Those little dots are three notes (the downbeats of bb. 36, 38, and 40) and rests in between.  If you check the full page, you will see that it is ruled with 24 staves.  The first three are blank; then nine are used for the first system (bb. 30-34); then there is a blank staff to separate the systems; and the remaining nine are used for the last system (bb. 35-41).  This means that there was space for Smetana to include the triangle on a staff if he had planned to use it here.  (The triangle is given its own staff on the first page of the score, where the full instrumentation is spelled out; although the timpani has its standard placement in the middle of the page, Smetana puts the rest of the percussion at the bottom of the system:  triangle on stave 23; cymbals and bass drum on stave 24.  Is this a trace of an afterthought?  The barlines on p. 1 seem to be drawn without a break to the bottom staff, so perhaps not.)  The next page comprises bb. 42-46; the triangle does not play, and it is not allotted a staff.  Only on the next page do we find the triangle given its own staff (23), and with music to play—but even then it is impossible to know whether it was added as he scored that page or added later.  The triangle never again appears in the lower margin of the page, but it is also never included in a general system bracket unambiguously made in preparing a page of the score (even on p. 1).  

What I sniff out of all of this is that that magical moment in b. 36 is sheer inspiration, and inspiration that apparently caught Smetana off guard, as he hadn’t made room for it.  And—most curiously—he adds a performance instruction for that first triangle note:  

“p elegante”

I have my doubts on whether anyone would know what to do with this instruction.  (I can almost hear a conductor in rehearsal: Percussionist, can you ‘ding’ more elegantly, please, as instructed?)  In b. 48 he adds another baffling triangle instruction:

“p zvonkovitě”

The Czech here, I am informed, means "bell-like" or "reminiscent of bells."  The new Bärenreiter critical edition gives “quasi campanella.”  Again, I would be at a loss.  (Percussionist, can we have a bit more ‘dong’ in that ‘ding’?)  Does the player need to switch to another triangle?  Clearly, Smetana sensed an expressive potential in the triangle that few others ever have.  And if I think he overdoes the triangle a bit in Vltava a bit, that first “ding” still gets me every time.

In recent months I have been following Marc Shepherd’s substack posts about editorial issues in Gilbert & Sullivan, particularly their 1875 one-act Trial By Jury.  Shepherd is concerned with getting practical and authoritative texts affordably into the hands of companies producing these shows.  Such companies often work on a shoestring budget, and so have tended to use whatever free performing materials they could access, despite the hosts of textual problems such materials contain, rather than shell out any money on more reliable texts.  I commend Shepherd for taking it upon himself to improve the available performing texts, and for taking the editorial task so seriously.  I also appreciate the transparency of these substack posts—the traces are left everywhere for anyone interested.  Not only can we follow Shepherd’s traces in the decision making (and vis-à-vis other editions of the work), but Sullivan’s traces in the compositional process.  Sullivan’s various short-hand notations and labor-saving devices (ditto passages, colla parte doublings...) left all manner of irreconcilable differences, including a surprising note for Oboe II, even when Sullivan never once had a second oboe in his comic operas.  Although Shepherd’s task is to solve these problems, he goes one better by calling attention to them.  Knowledge of a textual curiosity in one work may well illuminate a real problem in another, and the more minds aware of it the better.  (An example I have mentioned before in this blog of how such wider knowledge is required to answer even tiny puzzles is Jonathan Del Mar’s insight into Beethoven's use of the clef-method of transposition, leading Beethoven to write (for example) an umambiguous c-natural when he just as unamibuously meant c-sharp).

Sometimes we have enough of the materials to verify that what seems odd in a source is actually a trace of something that was odd.  For example, looking through some printed parts for Charles Lecocq’s charming 1872 opera La Fille de Madame Angot, I was puzzled to see three bars of rest notated individually rather than with an extended rest (as elsewhere in the part), and—even more suspicious—an extraneous pp mark:

SOURCE: cropped marked-up scan from 1873 flute/piccolo part on the IMSLP (#876459), p. 15.

Surely there was a story here!  And indeed, the autograph full score revealed that the piccolo had had a pp melody there that had been since deleted in blue pencil.  

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan from autograph full score on Gallica (ark:/12148/bpt6k8559382), p. 113 (f. 52r).

So (my hound nose tells me) the part was prepared before the deletion, but then altered; but as it had been laid out with three bars there, it was easier to put in whole rests in each bar than to make it a three-bar extended rest.  (If you don’t know this work, by the way, this brief promo video for a marvelous new recording is a great introduction.)

I try to get my students to look for such curiosities in whatever we are studying.  For example, we look at the Bach concerto for two keyboard, BWV 1060, asking the question if this was indeed originally written for different solo instruments, what traces can we find to suggest what they were?  The solo lines are so markedly different each other (at least judging by the right hand parts of the solo keyboards) that they do not seem to have been both of the same instrument.  It seems conventionally accepted that it was originally violin and oboe, which certainly seems very reasonable to me—but I do want them to look at the evidence (such as it is) and see what they would make of it.

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan from BG edition of BWV 1060, Bd. 21.2 (IMSLP # 849611), p. 29 

I quoted one line of James Grier’s The Critical Editing of Music above.  I should give him a little more space, and I wholly endorse his sentiment on the traces left by an edition, a starting point rather than a finish line:

“Critical editions should generate critical users.  The advantage a critical edition offers its users is guidance from a scholar who has devoted a considerable amount of time, energy, and imagination to the problems of the piece and whose opinion is therefore worth considering.  This is not to say that users need not do any thinking for themselves, nor that they must agree with the editor in every particular.  But a critical attitude should stimulate a critical response, of which one possible manifestation is a competing edition.  Many of these ambiguous issues can never be resolved definitively, either because source materials have perished or because ambiguities were present from the original compositional conception of the work.  Therefore no edition is definitive, and, perhaps more important, the truth is simply not ascertainable....  The greatest works of music, as of literature, have attracted and will continue to attract the attentions of editors whose approach varies considerably, and so it is inevitable that several editions of a given piece might exist, each different in many aspects.  If such is the case, in variably the truth will fall somewhere in between the competing editions, and the student of the work is better served by consulting all editions or as many as is practicable.  In this way the users themselves can draw conclusions about the whereabouts to the truth” (p. 181f.).

Indeed, for this textual hound, edited texts become as absorbing as the the source(s) to which they point.

SOURCE:  my picture of Lorraine displaying her wingspan (October 2025)

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 the source as the Kingsway Carol Book, but that source preserves Reed's arrangement almost intact.  

So how did this metrical change happen?  While I think that Fr. Thirion’s communication to Guilmant was an aural transcription, 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 think it very likely 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 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 upon 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.