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.

45. Adeste infideles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

38. Don't fix it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hat sie ein Kind geboren

bleibend ein’ reine Magd

[gave birth to a child

yet remains a virgin]

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

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

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