36. What shall we tell the students?

In some ways, I feel that musicology is both my job and my hobby.  I’m paid to be a musicologist (or maybe I’m really paid to administer a department, but I have to teach something); I “do” musicology on the side, too.  With occasional exceptions, my bedtime reading and the books I take on vacation are musicological; issues of the Music Library Association journal Notes (which always has a few articles, but is mainly filled with reviews of books, scores, and other musical media) accumulate on my desk to take when I travel.  (I’ve found that Notes is perfect for travel conditions, as the fairly short items can easily be interrupted at any moment—a gate change, the refreshment cart coming down the aisle, etc.—and resumed later without really losing the thread.)  Most of what shows up on this blog inevitably comes from the “hobby” side of my musicology interests; indeed, very little has actually concerned the textual materials that have been my own research focus.

But this is one of my rare posts from the “job” side, straight out of the classroom.  It’s not that the others don’t deal with issues that might be useful in a classroom, but I tend not to write about what I do in the classroom.  In the blog I often dive deep into geeky details, but in class I seldom wade into textual waters, maybe for fear of drowning in digressions, or of scaring my students away.  But there are times where a textual matter is so central—a veritable elephant in the room—that it must somehow come up in class.

I have usually taught music history classes without a textbook as such, using anthologies instead—one of scores and one of primary sources.  (For years I did this happily pairing the W. W. Norton survey score anthologies with the Weiss/Taruskin Music in the Western World source readings.)  More recently, my approach to music major courses has changed so much that I find no text worth my students’ money, and so I have sometimes opted to make my own anthology—particularly with the easy access to public domain editions via the IMSLP.  I have kept my eye on the products out there, though, so I know pretty well what I am foregoing.

The only thing that I don’t like about the Norton anthologies is that they have recently opted sometimes to computer-set an item anew rather than reprinting an early edition.  Here is an example:

Source:  scan of Norton Anthology of Western Music (6th ed., 2010), pp. 238–9. 

I know that the notation of an early edition might be unwieldy for students, but it is not so foreign as to lose them completely.  (For example, here are the relevant pages of a 1679 printing of the Geneva Psalter, and a 1635 Scottish Psalmes of David in Prose in Meeter).  On the strength of the maxim about the value in teaching someone to fish, I would rather have the occasional difficult source in the classroom than always predigested texts.  Granted, the Norton anthologies do not generally seek out give original sources to reprint, but why re-set these here when the early printings could be such a handy teaching tool and take no more space?

Enough quibble about Norton.  A far larger disservice to students has been done by the competing Oxford Anthology of Western Music, three volumes conceived as an ancillary resource for the textbook version of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music.  Whatever one might say about Taruskin’s accomplishment (and many people have... including the bloggers of The Taruskin Challenge), he is a significant voice.  Whether adopted or rejected, his retelling of the story of Western music will inevitably influence the classroom (and music journalists, for whom he seems to have become a one-stop shop), despite his particular interests and lacunae.  If Oxford University Press has its way, Taruskin’s version will supplant all others for the next generation.

My criticism in this post has to do not with Taruskin but with the companion score anthology, which was prepared by others.  As far as I can tell, the editors have—understandably—resorted to public domain editions as often as possible to keep the costs down.  I have no problem with this:  I am convinced that you can teach effectively from any source (although some sources are better in one context than another); furthermore, in a music classroom there is no such thing as a “bad” edition, as long as we consider what precisely that edition can teach us.  What frustrates me is when the editors fail to realize the value of the eccentric edition they have chosen to reprint.  I will offer two examples here.

First, Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, op. 13:

Source:  cropped scan of Oxford Anthology of Western Music (2nd ed., "2019" [sic!]), Vol. 2, p. 204.

The Oxford anthology reprints the old Breitkopf complete edition (although bar numbers have been added and the layout is altered to fit more systems on the page).  This is a work for which no autograph manuscript survives, so that the first edition (1799) is the most authoritative source, despite the occasional likely misprint.  One significant aspect in which some subsequent editors have departed from the text of that first edition is the placement of the exposition repeat:  is the pianist to go back to the beginning or to the Allegro di molto e con brio (b. 11)?

SOURCE:  bb. [11–13] cropped from the IMSLP scan of the 1799 first ed.

The first edition places this repeat at b. 11.  To be sure, there may be good musical reasons for wanting a reprise from the start—analogous to the Tempo I section which begins the development (b. 133)—but that is not what the first edition shows.  In his edition, Jonathan Del Mar concludes “There can be no [textual] justification for taking the repeat from bar 1, as has in some circles become fashionable” (p. 26; the bracketed emendation is mine). The Oxford anthologizers have missed a chance to remark on this textual detail, and it is a good "teaching moment" lost... or at least inconvenienced, as now the instructor would have to know of this discrepancy in order to point it out, if someone in the class doesn’t notice a difference between the text on the page and a recording they might hear.

Second, the overture to Rossini’s Barber of Seville:

Source:  cropped scan of Oxford Anthology of Western Music (2nd ed.), Vol. 2, p. 281.

Oxford reprints this from a 1900 G. Schirmer piano/vocal score.  It includes a very common textual variant in the first theme of the Allegro:  the opening motive is immediately repeated note-for-note—with three pick-ups—rather than with only two, as here in a Choudens vocal score of 1897:

SOURCE:  bb. 25-28, cropped scan of 1897 Choudens piano/vocal score "Edition conforme au manuscrit de Rossini", with piano reduction credited to L. Narici; scan from IMSLP 280519.

According to the critical commentary of the new WGR edition, the three-note echo appears in no authentic source of il Barbiere (1816), although Rossini had apparently previously altered the text thus when he used the same overture earlier in the year for Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra.  (He was recycling it there from Aureliano in Palmira (1813), which had the two-note version.)  Rossini’s regularization mystifies me, as it is the lack of conformity that seems to me truly ingenious:  I am struck by the way in which the omission of a single eighth-note makes the whole passage seem less cluttered, less fussy.  The original is “the harder reading,” and it is no surprise that copyists would knock it back into conformity.  Whatever Rossini thought in the meantime, when it shows up again in Barbiere (here) the extra pick-up is gone, and the original text is restored.  But you wouldn’t know that from the Oxford anthology, where no mention of it is made at all.  Do we tell the students?

Perhaps these are nothing more than missed opportunities.  Most troubling in the Oxford anthology is the cavalier identification of some of the sources in the first volume.

Source:  cropped scan of Oxford Anthology of Western Music (2013), Vol. 1 p. 530.

It appears to me that whoever put this list together regarded its purpose as indemnifying the publisher rather than citing the sources.  To say merely that items 56, 68, 70–73, 75, 76, and 78–91 are “public domain” tells us nothing about the identity and, consequently, the quality of the texts before us.  Some of these are newly typeset by OUP (although what the source text was, or how much intervention has occurred, is not shared).  Others are lifted from major nineteenth-century editions—Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst, the Bach-Gesellschaft edition, and the like—and as such they represent a variety of different editorial approaches (including the piano reductions included on the full scores of the old Handel edition).  Why these editions are not identified is a mystery to me, unless no one thought any of this mattered.  It does to me.  And it should matter to students, as I daresay their instructors would never let them get away with citing a source merely as “public domain.”

But it’s not like I have been a paragon of textual transparency in the classroom.  For years I have had indistinct qualms about an example I have taught in which there is a huge textual departure which I never mention to my students.  I have regularly used the last portion of Act III of Le nozze di Figaro in my core-curriculum music course (the sort of course that has generally supplanted “appreciation” courses).  Even though the bit of the act I assign in the course starts just before the dictation duet (“Canzonetta sull'aria”), I have found it useful to screen the whole of Act III for the class.  It takes about 40 minutes, and so with a few minutes of contextualizing, and occasionally interrupting to make some comment about form or technique, it just fits in a 50-minute period.  The students always seem to enjoy it.

SOURCE:  DG website

For this screening I have regularly used the 1993 Jean-Louis Thamin stage production (for the Théâtre du Châtelet), featuring the team assembled by John Eliot Gardiner, and released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon in 2001.  I like to use this production because it looks pretty traditional on stage, but the stage “business” feels very current even after 25 years, and the students seem to relate pretty well to the singers-as-characters.  (It has a spectacular cast, too, with a young Bryn Terfel as Figaro.)

What I have always failed to tell my students, however, is that Gardiner modifies Mozart’s sequence in Act III to accord with a hypothesis of Christopher Raeburn and Robert Moberly—essentially moving the Countess’s aria to before the legal proceedings.  This scheme puts two soliloquy scenes back to back and removes altogether any solo numbers from the second half of the act.  Nonetheless, I like the pacing, and I think it works very well in that production.

Raeburn and Moberly published their idea in Music & Letters in 1965, at a time when Mozart’s autograph score of Acts III & IV was still missing as a casualty of World War II, but even among various copyists’ manuscripts and printed libretti they could produce not even a single document that would support them.  Subsequent scholars (in particular, Alan Tyson) have revisited the hypothesis now that the autograph has resurfaced, and still there is no documentary evidence to back it up.  As sensible as the revised Act III sequence is, it never seems to have been part of da Ponte’s or Mozart’s plan for the piece.  And yet this is the version I show to my students—and with no comment from the lectern to say that this is an eccentric ordering of the material.  (Granted, I don’t show the class Act IV, where Gardiner makes an even more daring departure from the text, bisecting a recitative in order to reposition later numbers in the midst of it, but even then I’m not sure that I would mention it.)  

My vague qualms notwithstanding, I’ve never lost any sleep about my silence in class about any of this.  Although (as should be clear from my blog) text is a matter of enormous import to me, the textual situation isn’t what I’m trying to teach in that particular general-education context.  I want my students to be moved, amused, shocked, transfixed by Figaro and by that performance of it.  In another context—this one, for example—the textual issue is my subject.  I expect that most of my students wouldn’t care about the manhandling of Mozart’s score.  Even if one did, given a 50-minute class period for a 40-minute act, I have no time for it, and it is scarcely worth returning to at the next class meeting, particularly when it isn’t even the assigned portion of the act.  (Then again, I also don’t tell them that the fandango in the Act III finale—very much part of my assigned section of the piece—is absent from most of the early Viennese sources, apparently cut after just a few performances.)

I remember once hearing a senior scholar respond to a graduate student’s idea, “Well, that's something you might tell undergraduates.”  I hated that.  I understood what he (sic) meant—something like “that is a hideously oversimplified explanation, but it is pedagogically useful as it is easily understood and would allow you to move on to other material.”  I don’t ever want to condescend to my students like that.  But I also don’t want to obscure the subject by belaboring them with my textual hobby.  While it is fun to have a hobby and a job that so closely intertwine, I’ve got to keep the two distinct enough that the everyone in the room is aware if I am momentarily digressing (or transgressing, really) into the hobby territory.  Such transgressions can be valuable—as sometimes I have had to see someone being passionate about something in order to understand why it matters.  And I don’t mind being geeky if my students can understand why I care about something.  Actually, I just don’t mind being geeky.

My conclusion is so trite as to not need saying, perhaps, to anyone but me:  What shall we tell the students?  Whatever works.

28. The philological wading pool

A month ago I was privileged to be part of a panel titled “Rethinking Primary Sources for the Music History Classroom” at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society.  It was more of a workshop than a panel, as the four presenters had each brought an assignment we have used with our classes, and the audience then did the assignment.  I picked up a lot of good ideas from the other panelists.  I was there to talk about musical texts—specifically how I try to get my students to be more aware of how a musical text gets to be the way it is—and that many (sometimes well-meaning) hands may interfere.

Below I will describe the assignment I presented, but I will digress here to mention its inspiration.  My father was also a college professor.  His degree was in ancient near eastern archaeology, but working at a small college meant that he ended up teaching across the history curriculum, as well as classics and religion.  By the end of his career, most of his time was consumed teaching Hebrew and the Hebraic scriptures in the seminary that shared the campus with the college.  For one of his courses there he designed an assignment that he called “the fish”—and it was one that his former students continue to talk about (whenever I run into them) more than ten years after his death.

“The fish” referred to Samuel Scudder’s account of his studies under Louis Agassiz at Harvard in the 1850s—how Scudder had “learned to see” only by being forced to take the time to “look at the fish” for days on end.  My father was pursuing a similar end with his assignment, in which the students were to attempt to reconcile the chronologies of the kings of Judah and Israel as transmitted in the different biblical accounts.  On the assignment (reproduced here), he notes—with a characteristic understatement—“It is likely you will have difficulty in doing this.”  The UNDERLINED BOLD ALL CAPS text for emphasis is also characteristic.  (I don’t know for how many years he used this assignment, but the worksheets that go with it were all prepared on a typewriter.  That may well be because that was a method he was much more accustomed to using than trying to do a table in Microsoft Word.)

In fact, my father didn’t care what solution a student came up with for the textual difficulties this assignment compelled them to confront.  There was no one “right answer.”  The point was the confrontation itself.  These were students intending to enter the Christian ministry, and he thought it was crucially important that they be confronted with real textual difficulties in the Bible.  The dates don’t line up.  Some students, he told me, would perform all manner of mathematical gymnastics to establish that every syllable of the Holy Writ available to them was inerrant.  At the other extreme, some students’ reaction was “to hell with it.”  It did not matter to my father where the students placed themselves on that continuum, but he wanted them to become aware of their attitude toward the text itself.

It seems like a descent from the sublime to the trivial to lay out my own “fish” assignment, as mine is aimed at nothing more than raising my students’ consciousness of textual issues at all.  Where my father was throwing his students into the deep end, my assignment was just a chance for mine to get their feet wet in the philological wading pool.  But I hope it sticks—that it makes them view any musical text put before them thereafter with a little skepticism:  Why is it thus?  How did it get that way?

There are many ways one might approach such an assignment.  I commend to your attention Rachel Scott’s interesting article treating edition selection as a way of teaching information literacy, and particularly the worksheet she suggests as a pedagogical method.  My own assignment is a practical assignment of a different sort, but also requires an examination of multiple sources of the same musical work.

I decided for this assignment to use a hymn-tune because

1.  such tunes are short 
2.  they have often appeared in dozens (and sometimes hundreds and more) editions, each of which is a valid source for the assignment
3.  via the website hymnary.org, many of those editions are readily available to my students
4.  the transmission of a hymn-tune from one source to another may be straightforward copying of a full four-part texture, but it may just as likely be that the melody alone is taken over—perhaps even from memory—and a new setting is devised; or an editor may make any number of alterations to suit himself (and for much of the history of hymnal production, it is inevitably himself)
5. if you find a hymn-tune that is generally familiar outside of the church, students may more readily grasp the relevance of otherwise esoteric textual issues to “real” musical life.

And so I settled on the anonymous tune ANTIOCH, pretty much universally associated with Isaac Watts’s Psalm paraphrase “Joy to the world! the Lord is come.”  The tune is admittedly more widely known in the United States than elsewhere, but as such it fitted my students pretty well.  Its origins are obscure, and it is regularly attributed to either Lowell Mason or G. F. Handel (no doubt because portions of it sound like the beginnings of two different numbers in his Messiah:  “Lift up your heads” and “Comfort ye, my people”) or both.  Certainly Mason propagated it, but it seems to be of English origins, with its first appearance in the 1830s.  (Many hymnologists have taken notice of this, but a handy and widely-available summary can be found in The New Oxford Book of Carols, p. 273.)

And so, my assignment:

ARMCHAIR PHILOLOGY

Because they were transmitted primarily by rote memorization by musically illiterate congregations (unlike texts, which could be read from the page by anyone verbally literate), older hymn-tunes often exist in many variants. The purpose of this assignment is to get you to look for any distinct lines of transmission of the printed sources of a particular hymn-tune, called ANTIOCH, and perhaps familiar to you associated with Isaac Watts’s text “Joy to the World!” Go to the page for this tune at Hymnary.org, and select any EIGHT of the page scans at the bottom of the page. Print these off (although BE SURE TO NOTE the source of each, as this is on the webpage but wouldn’t be on the printed copy) and study them, looking for any variants you can find. While I am more interested in melodic textual variants, you should also look at the harmonizations: if you come across two identical harmonizations, they are pretty much guaranteed to be in the same line of transmission. Note also the verbal text: any alterations or omitted verses are significant clues. Don’t just print off the first eight it gives you—look around for some interesting ones. (There are some with some really glaring errors—including a completely misplaced first system.)  Turn in to me:

1.  A list of your eight sources, numbered 1–8 (in chronological order, as best that can be determined), with the bibliographic details for each from Hymnary.org
2.  The eight page scans you printed, numbered to match
3.  A diagram (stemma) to indicate how sources 1–8 are related, if at all
4.  Notes of the idiosyncrasies you spotted that allowed you to construct the diagram (You don’t need to account for every detail, just enough to show me how you sorted it out.)

I thus make clear to my students that they have a very incomplete data set.  From the dozens they might look at, I ask for only eight.  Then, however, they are expected to take those eight and treat them as the sole surviving sources, collating the readings and then trying to connect them in any ways they can.  I call the assignment “armchair philology” because they are spared the trouble of finding recalcitrant sources, and there are no consequences to ignoring all the evidence beyond their eight selections.

For my presentation at AMS a month ago, I picked eight and distributed them to the audience.  I usually allow a week for my students to do this—even if they wait until the night before—but my AMS crowd had about eight minutes to do the best they could.  And even with just a few sources, there is much to be seen.  Consider these three sources, for example:

CS:  Carmina Sacra or Boston Collection of Church Music, ed. Lowell Mason  (2^nd Ed., 1841)

SOURCE:  https://hymnary.org/page/fetch/CSBC1841/80/high

SH:  The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, ed. William Walker (“New” Ed., 1854)

SOURCE: resolution of https://www.ccel.org/ccel/walker/harmony2/files/png75/Antioch.png was so poor that this is from IMSLP #168494

Sum:  Songs of Summerland, ed. Thoro Harris  (1943)

Source:  https://hymnary.org/page/fetch/SoS1943/84/high (cropped)

While it is clear that The Southern Harmony version is taken from Carmina Sacra—it even gives the attribution—there is a substantial change in the musical text:  where Carmina Sacra gives a four-part texture (with the melody on the staff directly above the bass, as is customary in such sources), The Southern Harmony only gives three parts, deleting the second staff of Carmina Sacra.  There are a few other changes:  SH translates everything into shaped notes; omits the sustained accompanying bass note in the third phrase of CS—also deleting the figured bass (that only show up in the first few bars of CS anyway).  Both of these sources transmit a slight variant in Watts’s hymn, beginning the second stanza with "Joy to the world" instead of his original “Joy to the earth.”  They also preserve an archaic variant ending for the end of stanza 3:  rather than gleeful repetitions of the extent of the taint of original sin (“far as the curse is found! far as the curse is found! far as, far as the curse is found!”), this version truncates the verse abruptly to get on with the good news.

The version of Songs of Summerland (1943)—a Seventh Day Adventist publication far removed in time from either of the nineteenth century sources above—is also directly connected to this line of transmission, notwithstanding the very different lyric to which it is set.  Like SH, Sum conveys only a three-part texture derived from the reading given in CS, but this time it is the top staff of CS that is omitted; and of course in Sum it is reworked into a melody-at-the-top format.  (The added “tenor” third in the final chord is surely editorial.)  My students could thus determine that, whether or not CS was the direct source for Sum (as there may be other sources in between, or they may share a common ancestor), Sum could not possibly be derived from SH.  If we had only these three data points—our stemma would be like the one at right.

Adding a fourth source naturally complicates the stemma, even when it too is clearly connected to the same line of transmission, with the same basic harmonization.

Anc:  Song Anchor: A Choice Collection of Favorites for Sabbath School and Praise Services, ed. J. E. White  (1878) 

Source:  https://hymnary.org/hymn/SA21878/page/123  (cropped)

Indeed, except for an apparent error (tenor voice, first note of b. 2), this is the same harmonization presented in CS.  Like SH, the sustained bass of the third phrase has been eliminated; like Sum, the format is modernized to put the melody at the top; a tiny variant occurs in the penultimate bar in the tenor, where the introduction of an eighth note allows all voices to change syllables at the same time, but does not affect the harmony.  None of these, save perhaps the first, is substantial enough to require the stemma to posit any number of hypothetical lost sources (even though we know that many such sources have not been consulted for this exercise).  Thus whether one favors the stemma on the right or the one on the left depends on how likely the elimination of the sustained bass tone was arrived at independently.

But then along comes a source to complicate things:

SS:  Songs for the Sanctuary: or Hymns and Tunes for Christian Worship, ed. Chas. S. Robinson  (1868)

Source:  https://hymnary.org/hymn/SFTM1868/page/81  (cropped)

The date of publication puts this clearly before Anc, but it shares the same tenor figure in the penultimate bar and the lack of the sustained bass in the third phrase.  While it is essentially the same harmonization of CS, it has been transposed down to D—and there is a slight but significant modification which essentially exchanges the alto and tenor voices in the first two bars.  Something has also gone wrong with the text setting at the beginning of what ought to be the last phrase—although that may just be a type-setting error.  Most importantly, this source has a short note—a dotted quarter—at the end of the second phrase (on “King” of “Let earth receive her King”); all the other sources reviewed thus far have a note twice as long at this point.  For all these reasons, SS is clearly not an ancestor of Anc (or, for that matter, Sum), yet it is closer to Anc than any other.  Here the stemma could allow for a hypothetical common ancestor, explaining the similarities while also acknowledging the variants:

The other three sources I gave my AMS audience presented wholly different lines of transmission—that is to say, different harmonizations (some straightforward, some showy), some with the long-held “King” note, some with the short.  For these,  at least with the data available, the stemma branches  would only meet at the hypothetical Ur-text [x].  Over the years of using this assignment in class, I note that my students tend too readily to assume that this x marks the only meeting place for any of the sources.  The fact that it is seldom so—that indeed these sources are connected by complicated webs—is only revealed by a minute study of the details.  As Agassiz instructed, “Look at the fish.”

SOURCE:   "Haemulon melanurum" from Wikimedia Commons

It is my contention that Agassiz’s scientific dictum should be the creed of any text critic:  “Facts are stupid things until brought into connection with some general law.”  A variant reading may be curious, but it is no more than that until it can be explained as part of a larger scheme.  The critic’s task is not merely the mechanical listing of variants, but rather the creative connection of the dots to propose some pattern.  And anyone can learn to do that, with time and patience—precious commodities these days.

Although I’ve used this assignment with many students, I have had the opportunity to use it only once since starting this blog, and so the work of those most recent students in that very small class certainly led to the examples I used here.  They deserve to be acknowledged:  Taylor Hedger, Sarah Vermazen, and David Bates.  I thank them for taking this assignment so seriously.


ADDENDUM  19 February 2019
An article based on this assignment appears in Journal of Music History Pedagogy 9/1 (2019), pp. 99-112.