13. The best and worst of amateurism

...which is the third installment of the Settling Scores

Having discussed descriptive and prescriptive notation in my last post, I find an opportunity to explore an example (and which is it supposed to be?) relating to Bach.  Here is a surprising recent publication:

SOURCE:  Anthony Tommasini, "Glenn Gould's Every Detail.  But Why?" nyt.com (June 1, 2016)

This curious edition presents two texts of the “Goldberg” Variations on facing pages throughout.  The left-hand [verso] pages are labelled “Original Version,” while the right-hand [recto] pages are labelled “Gould’s 1981 Version.”  I reproduce an extract of the beginning of Var. 29 below, although with the twin texts arranged here vertically rather than horizontally just to be more legible in the blog medium:

SOURCE:  cropped scans of pp. 146-147 of Hopkins, ed., Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations.

From what I can tell, Hopkins’s transcription of Gould’s 1981 performance is impressive, even if it leaves me with some questions.  (In the example above, what distinction does Hopkins intend between Bach’s triplet notation and his transcription of Gould’s performances as sextuplets? I found no explanation of this idiosyncracy, and the only thing I can imagine from it is that Gould’s performance downplays the half-beat.)   This project was clearly a labor of love for Hopkins, and the right-hand pages thus reveal the very best of amateurism—doing something for the love of it, going far beyond what might be asked or imagined.

It is the left-hand pages that leave me disturbed.  Even just the use of the word version for both the “original” (and I’m coming back to that word in a minute, too) and the performance troubles me.  I would have favored different words—maybe “text” for what Gould read, and “interpretation” for what he played.  Granted, the interpretation is filtered through Hopkins’s interpretation into score.  Whatever.  There would be great value in comparing what Gould had studied with what he played.  Of the text Gould used, Hopkins asserts that it was the 1938 G. Schirmer edition prepared by Ralph Kirkpatrick:

“We know that Gould used the Kirkpatrick edition, and only this edition, because three copies of this edition are presently housed in the Glenn Gould Archive (the official repository for Gould’s archives) in the National Library of Canada (NLC).  On the basis of Gould’s editorial markings in these scores (or lack of markings), each copy was seemingly used by him at various points in his career for various purposes.” [p. 10]

Hopkins suggests that one of these three copies (“almost entirely free of markings, such as fingerings, articulations, dynamics and tempos”) was likely the one that Gould used as he learned the work prior to the 1955 recording, and informs us that some pages have gone missing; a second copy seems to be a “reference score during the post-production process for the 1981 recording.”  (I wondered if it is a more recent printing; Hopkins doesn’t give any such information, still less any shelf-mark or locating information.)  The third copy, also incomplete but with very neat and comprehensive fingerings added for the aria and the first eight variations, belonged to Gould’s girlfriend during his conservatory years.  Hopkins concludes

“The relevance of the three copies of this edition is that they show Gould had little concern with the quality of editions that he used over the course of his career.  There is no evidence that he ever researched or consulted other editions for the purpose of critical analysis.” [p. 10]

And yet a page later Hopkins quotes Kevin Bazzana discussing films made immediately after the 1981 recording saying “in [NLC] videotape no. 50A, [Gould] can be seen with the 1979 [recte 1978?] Henle edition of the score.”  Well, what was he doing with that?  Is that not evidence—at least circumstantial, if not an actual smoking gun—of Gould “consulting” another edition?  And I noticed an instance (Var. 26, b. 14, 2nd beat, middle voice) where the note Gould plays in 1981 (D) is in the Henle text and NOT in the Kirkpatrick text (which has E; in 1955 he had played E).  As Hopkins uses these tapes to determine Gould’s fingering as best he can (and an impressive job it seems to be), clearly he deems the videos relevant to the 1981 audio recording.

If a facing-page edition is going to have some value, the facing pages need to relate to each other.  I can imagine two ways that this might have been done:  1) on the left-hand pages, provide a transcription of Gould’s 1955 recording, so that the two performances might be compared, or 2) on the left-hand pages, reproduce the Kirkpatrick text that Hopkins claims Gould used.  (Probably there would be copyright issues with that.  Did Hopkins ever pitch this project to Schirmer, who presumably holds that copyright?)

The Kirkpatrick edition is apparently still in print, and it is also very widely available in libraries (and, I imagine, in piano benches here and there)—indeed, more available in libraries than this Gould transcription will ever be—so interested individuals should have no trouble getting their hands on a copy to make the comparison.  (At a glance, WorldCat lists over 450 library copies of various printings of the Kirkpatrick edition, with just over 30 of the Hopkins/Gould score.)  Comparing the two is particularly interesting because Kirkpatrick often resorts to extra staves to realize Bach’s ornamentation or (yet more significant in this context) to modify the part-crossing to facilitate performance on a piano.  Here are two examples—the aria, where Gould’s ornamentation is somewhat slower than Kirkpatrick’s instructions (32nd-notes rather than 64th-notes), and an example of adapting the music for a single keyboard:

SOURCES:  first sixteen bars of the Aria, in scans of Kirkpatrick p. 3 and Hopkins p. 49.

SOURCES: the end of Var. VIII in marked-up cropped scans of Kirkpatrick p. 23 and Hopkins p. 75.

Instead of either of these strategies, on the left side Hopkins provides an entirely new text, which he explains thus in his introduction:

“Each of the variations [and the Aria] is presented in its original form on verso pages, accompanied by Gould's realization on recto pages, thereby allowing for ease of comparative analysis.  The original forms, labelled ‘Original Version,’ were produced from the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe edition (BGA) of 1853, the Hans Bischoff edition of 1883 and the Ralph Kirkpatrick edition of 1938.  The Handexemplar, Bach’s personal copy of the first engraved edition, was likewise used for this purpose, yet the editions produced by the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA) of 1977 and Henle of 1979 could only be consulted, due to copyright restrictions.  Discrepancies amongst these editions are noted in the Critical Notes on pp. 45-47.”  (p. 9)

Bach’s Handexemplar, corrected in many places by the composer, was rediscovered in 1975.  It was naturally the most important source for Christoph Wolff’s NBA text and its discovery also prompted Henle to issue a revised version of Rudolf Steglich’s 1973 edition (with the revisions undertaken in 1978 by Paul Badura-Skoda).  What does Hopkins mean by “could only be consulted”?  All of the sources he lists were presumably “consulted,” and as his critical notes list variants in each of these texts, it is unclear how “copyright restrictions” have impinged on his task at all.  No, what we have here appears to me to be a reinventing of the wheel:  a new edition that presumes to be scholarly, but executed, in my opinion, in an haphazard way.

Before giving some examples of this, I should note that the NBA text of the Goldbergs has not been universally acclaimed.  In particular, in a 1990 article in Performance Practice Review, Erich Schwandt took Wolff’s edition to task for a number of perceived deficiencies, concluding

“Something must be broken in the mechanism when musicological ‘overkill’ produces 27 pages of Critical Apparatus (roughly two-thirds of a page of words per page of music) and then gets the notes wrong.  I believe that the Neue Bach Ausgabe should seriously consider withdrawing Christoph Wolff’s edition of the ‘Goldberg Variations.’” (p. 69) 

I have examined Schwandt’s critique closey, and I see no warrant for such a charge.  Wolff has not gotten “the notes wrong.”  An edition is an interpretation—a performance, if you like—and although I would like to see every alteration to a source text logged in the critical report, I find only four instances where this not is the case, each having to do with an added appoggiaturas that are not clearly marked in the score as editorial additions.  Schwandt may disagree with Wolff’s and the NBA’s editorial principles (over the ornamentation symbols particularly), but in the critical report Wolff articulates those principles and the decisions that proceed from them.

It must be stressed that in a critical edition, the printed score and the critical report are equally necessary for an understanding of the textual situation.  This seems to have escaped Nicholas Hopkins as he prepared his new “original version” for his Glenn Gould project.  His basic editorial principle seems to be that the Handexemplar, bearing corrections in Bach’s hand, establishes a final text for the Goldbergs once and for all.  His “original version” thus aims to be essentially a resetting (following modern notational practices) of the corrected reading of the Handexemplar, and his critical notes detail differences between his new text and the other five published texts he cites above.  In fact, the vast majority of his critical notes list places where an accidental is missing in the Handexemplar but appears in the other editions.  There is a good reason for this:  the first edition (of which the Handexemplar is a copy, of course) is a product of different notational conventions than ours today:  an accidental was regarded as affecting only the note to which it was affixed.  As an example, in Var. XXVIII b. 23, the left-hand part is crowded with repeated sharps for the recurring note:

SOURCE: cropped scan of the Handexemplar, p. 30 (my mark-up)

This would be too many accidentals by our current standards; the following bar has one too many, while also lacking two that would now be needed:

SOURCE:  ditto

The second natural sign seems superfluous by today’s standards, but we would now expect a natural sign for the last note in both hands—no longer D-sharp but D-natural.  As Hopkins seems unaware of the older practice, he documents it as if it is news.  More than half (at a rough count, 37 out of about 70 total) of his notes deal with this, an item not even worth noting.  Several of Hopkins’s notes record details such as “a dotted tie is notated ... in the NBA.  This tie is found in no other sources.”  Exactly:  the tie is dotted because it is an editorial emendation.

A more serious problem is that—as he gives no indication that he has seen the NBA critical report—he is apparently utterly unaware that of the seventeen other copies of the original print which Wolff examined, six have corrections that Wolff is able to attribute to Bach, and no two of these copies have exactly the same corrections:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Kritisher Bericht for NBA Ser. V, Bd. 2 (1981), p. 93.

In Wolff’s table, source A1 is the Handexemplar, but not all of the corrections made it into the Handexemplar.  (This table only lists corrections found in the other six copies, noting when they are or are not duplicated in the Handexemplar; there are quite a number of corrections unique to the Handexemplar which Wolff documents elsewhere.)  Evidently not knowing of this, Hopkins re-introduces errors into this text which Bach had corrected:

SOURCE: Var. XVI, from marked-up cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 102.

As the table above indicates, in five of the seven copies with corrections traceable to Bach, this E has been changed to F-sharp.  The note is given as F-sharp already in the BG edition (1853), as the copy Wolff identifies as A5 was the source for the edition and has the correction.  Kirkpatrick was working from a different copy, lacking the correction, and so gives E.

Another instance concerns a missing accidental:

SOURCE: marked-up cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 130

The circled A is given as A-flat in all of the editions that Hopkins consulted save the original print; it had been changed to A-flat in only two copies of the first edition (Wolff’s A6 and A8)—neither of which was used as a source for editions prior to the NBA, although it did show up in an early manuscript copy (Wolff's C1) which Bischhoff and Steglich had used.  All of these editors recognized the musical sense of A-flat; even in the intensely chromatic vocabulary of Var. XXV, the A natural is jarring.  Try it for yourself.

Hopkins did catch a genuine lapse in all of the editions he used, and apparently hitherto unnoticed.  It again concerns a missing accidental in this same movement, and it seems clear how it was missed for so long:

Composite of Var. XXV, b. 10
SOURCES:  marked-up cropped scans of  (top) Handexemplar p. 25; (lower left) NBA Ser. V Bd. 2 p. 104; (lower right) Hopkins "original version" p. 130.

The natural sign (missing in the NBA and all the other editions) would not have been expected in the original print, given its conventions regarding accidentals; but subsequent editors may have missed it because 1) in the original print there is a system break before beat 2 of this measure, so that the preceding D-sharp is out of sight and out of mind; and 2) it is so manifestly obvious musically that it was implied even when not on the page.  Neither is a satisfactory excuse.  But has anyone ever played a D-sharp here?  I wonder.  Hopkins is the first of these editors to publish the work as a computer-set (rather than engraved) score, and this is the sort of detail that computer-setting captures more readily than the weary eye.

That said, Hopkins also introduces what is, in my opinion, a shocking error:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 60.

The first two notes in the right hand are a third too high.  That might be regarded as a typo, but the error is compounded on the facing-page transcription:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 61.

These are not the notes that Gould plays—he plays B-G, exactly as notated in every other edition.  And although this could be a simple copy-and-paste error if Hopkins used his own “original version” as the base text for his “Gould’s 1981 version,” it is further compounded by a footnote at the bottom of the same page, explaining the asterisk and even naming the notes (incorrectly) “D and B.”

SOURCE:  ditto

This is not a typo, but rather an editorial blunder.  That there could be an error of this magnitude—even redoubled in a footnote—suggests to me the possibility that there was no editorial oversight whatever to this production.  (Hopkins apparently set this edition himself.)  Lack of editorial oversight would be par for the course for a product that appears under a Creative Commons license on the IMSLP; it is astounding in a publication from a house of the reputation of Carl Fischer.  Granted, there is no backlist of “urtexts” at Carl Fischer, but now Hopkins’s “original” version (that is, the left-hand pages) has just been issued as a new urtext of the Goldberg Variations.  I have not examined that publication, but I hope that—at the very least—this error has been fixed.  Even so, given the rest of the concerns voiced above, Hopkins’s “original version” presumes too much.  As followers of the blog will know, I am all in favor of the proliferation of editions offering valid texts of all sorts, but I think the market has no need of this “urtext” edition of the Goldberg Variations.

The right-hand pages show the best of amateur devotion (although I think the introduction sometimes veers over into hagiography); the left-hand pages appear, in my view, to manifest ad hoc amateur naïveté presented as serious scholarship.  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

12. Recorded history

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

SOURCE:  baerenreiter.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Xmas speedbumps

There is a truism in text criticism that when variant readings do not seem to be a scribal error the editor should prefer the harder reading as more likely closer to the original.  The reasoning is that—all else being equal—it seems less likely that a scribe would intentionally produce something more awkward.

Of course, it must be exceedingly rare that anyone can assert “all else being equal.”  Sometimes the harder reading is so awkward that one must wonder what was behind it.  I can remember the experience even as a child of puzzling over the variant I discuss below.  It seemed so unlikely—so unmusical—that I wondered who could possibly have produced it.  In later years I felt gratified to see my childhood bewilderment justified.

The Rev. Thomas Helmore was a Victorian antiquarian and musician who was in the forefront of the musical revival of the Oxford movement.  He was a precursor to Ralph Vaughan Williams in the breadth of historical sources that he wanted to bring into active use in Anglican worship.  (For an interesting account of his on-site inspection of the chant manuscript universally known as St. Gall in 1875, see that in his brother’s memoirs, p. 99ff..)  It is a pity that for this post I dwell on one of his mistakes, as there is much good to be said about the man and his efforts.

Almost by chance, in 1853 Helmore came into possession of an extremely rare 1582 Scandinavian songbook entitled Piae Cantiones.  (That date—whenever it was—ought to be a red-letter day in music history, as the consequences of Helmore's acquaintance with Piae Cantiones would shape Anglo-American hymnody in far-reaching ways.)  The book was given to Helmore by John Mason Neale, another antiquarian cleric, whose part in the Oxford Movement is much more widely known—particularly because of his verse translations of ancient hymns.  Piae Cantiones was exactly Helmore’s cup of tea, and he collaborated with Neale to produce two publications the following year using the tunes he found there: Carols for Christmas-tide and Carols for Easter-tide (both available here).  Although these publications describe Neale’s lyrics as “principally in imitation of the original,” he sometimes departs very far from this—sometimes astonishingly brilliantly, as with his translation of Prudentius’s “Corde natus ex Parentis” (“Of the Father's love begotten”) matched by Helmore with an entirely independent medieval tune, never to be prised apart.

Another example is Neale’s text “Good Christian men, rejoice,” which he devised to go with the 14th-century German macaronic carol “In dulci jubilo.”  Although he didn’t know it, there was already an English translation that stuck pretty closely to the original—even preserving the macaronic mix with Latin tags from the liturgy.  That translation was devised by Robert Lucas de Pearsall for his 1834 part-song arrangement of “In dulci jubilo,” a mainstay of the Oxbridge Carols for Choirs repertoire, and an almost annual feature in the King's College carol service:

(For more, see Pearsall’s note about his composition, as it appeared in Carols for Choirs (OUP, 1961).)

Neale’s text is entirely his own.  He was faced with a challenge, however, because Helmore’s transcription of the melody produced an irregularity after the third line of text.  Here is what Helmore had before him:

SOURCE:  cropped from screenshot of Piae Cantiones (1582) available as IMSLP #89383

The Swedish text in Piae Cantiones introduced an extra syllable, and thus an extra note.  What in the German original had been only “leit” became “ligger.” Helmore then interpreted the notes I have circled in red to be not minims (i.e., half the length of the diamond-shaped semibreves) but rather longs (i.e., longer than the square breves).  His version of the melody thus introduces two speedbumps in the middle of the second line, and Neale had to accommodate these in his text:

SOURCE:  cropped page scan of Helmore’s Carols for Christmas-tide (1854), p. 20

Helmore’s harmonization is pedestrian in the extreme, but his misreading of the melody became the standard reading for the English-texted carol when it was included in the popular Christmas Carols New and Old, ed. Henry Bramley and John Stainer (Novello, 1871):

SOURCE:  cropped page scan from first edition of Bramley & Stainer.

Stainer’s harmonization has appeared in many English and American hymnals, although some wised up to the mistake and eliminated the seventh bar.  (I’m not sure who spotted it first.  As “In dulci jubilo” became more familiar to Anglo-American audiences through its use in concerted music by Bach and others, the speedbumps in “Good Christian men, rejoice” were bound to be noticed eventually.  Helmore’s error had already been eradicated by the Episcopal Hymnal of 1916, although glancing at Hymnary.org, I see that it persists in books published as late as 1995, 1997, and even a Korean hymnal of 2001.)  The neat thing is that simply excising the error does no damage at all to either the lyrics or the tune, as the repeated exclamations in each verse are gratuitous, and the melody has some phrases that begin with a pick-up and some that begin on the beat.  The New Oxford Book of Carols (1994) asserts that Neale’s lyrics were devised before Helmore transcribed the tune (p. 198), attributing the extra exclamation to Helmore, but no evidence is offered to support this.  I wonder if, rather, Neale had his doubts about this hiccup in Helmore’s transcription, and produced something which could be cut without harm.  Maybe Helmore himself had doubts about it; scholar that he was, he would doubtless prefer the hard reading.  And that’s what he gave us.