52. Appalachian trail

     “‘The trail,’” dictated Wimsey [to journalist Salcombe Hardy], “‘breaks off at the crucial point. How did the razor get into the hands of Paul Alexis?  If once I could be satisfied of that, the answer might at once set at rest all my doubt.  If Paul Alexis can be proved to have bought the razor, I shall consider the suicide theory to have been proved up to the hilt.  But until that missing link in the chain of evidence is reconstructed, I shall hold that Paul Alexis was foully and brutally murdered, and I shall spare no efforts to bring the murderer to the judgment he has so richly deserved.’  How’s that, Sally?”

     “Not too bad.  I can work that up into something.  I shall add, of course, that you, knowing the enormous circulation of the Morning Star, are relying on the wide publicity it will give to this statement to etcetera, etcetera.  I might even get them to offer a reward.”

     “Why not?  Anyway, pitch it to ’em hot and strong, Sally.”

     “I will—for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer.  Between you and me, would you be satisfied it was suicide if the reward was claimed?”

     “I don’t know,” said Wimsey.  “Probably not. In fact, I am never satisfied.”

Dorothy L. Sayers:  Have His Carcase (1932), chap. XI

In about 1908, Mrs. Olive Dame Campbell by chance heard a student at the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky sing the old English ballad “Barbara Allen,” and she thereafter began canvassing the Appalachian region for remnants of other folksongs from the British Isles. Upon meeting Campbell and seeing her work, English folklorist Cecil Sharp at once recognized that Campbell had “tapped a mine which if properly and scientifically explored would yield results—musical, historical, literary, etc.—of the first importance.” (I quote this from a very useful 1999 article by Michael Yates, “Cecil Sharp in America: Collecting in the Appalachians.”) In the following years Sharp went on three extensive collecting trips with his amanuensis Maud Karpeles. In their 46 weeks in the field, they collected 1612 specimens, publishing their findings as English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917), with an expanded second edition in 1932. The map below appeared in that second edition.

SOURCE:  scan of Frontispiece of vol. 1 of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (2nd Ed.), collected by Cecil J. Sharp, “including thirty-nine Tunes contributed by Olive Dame Campbell” (1932)

The “counties in which the songs were collected” (and only these) are shown by their borders; otherwise, only state borders are indicated. The 1000’ contour line is given in much more detail, zig-zagging to reveal several distinct ridges.  The story told by that more detailed contour line surely regards the remoteness of the locations in which Sharp collected his specimens:  a distance that may not appear very far on the map might be separated by a considerable difference in elevation with few passable routes.  Indeed, absent from the maps in both editions is any indication of road access, even between the few cities marked.  In his introduction Sharp emphasizes that his journeys took him into very remote locations; consequently, the texts gathered in those places are relics of a tradition that has persisted and developed apart from the increasingly urbanized world down the hill.

At the same moment that Sharp and Karpeles were finishing their journeys up and down the Appalachian hills, a Kentucky boy who would have been particularly interested in their endeavors was “over there” in France.  Indeed, from his wartime experience John Jacob Niles (1892-1980) eventually published a book of soldier songs which, even with its texts somewhat sanitized, still merits its title, The Songs my Mother Never Taught Me (1928).  Returning after the war, Niles was fascinated by the findings of Sharp, Campbell, and Karpeles—and by the burgeoning interest in folk music generally.  He set about to find some treasures of his own.

     

     “Satisfied?” asked Hardy, as Wimsey returned from the police-station.  He had telephoned his story to Town and was absorbing a little refreshment after his labours.

    “I ought to be,” replied his lordship.  “The only thing that worries me, Sally, is that if I’d wanted to invent a story to fit this case, that is exactly the story I should have invented.”

Have His Carcase, chap. XIV

From the start, this blog has been as much about what’s on the page as about how it got there.  I’m passionately interested in the textual antecedents of whatever is in front of me.  Where did this come from?  Whose hands were on it?  What changes (small or large) were wrought?  What do such changes convey to us about how comfortably this music exists as a notated text at all?  But what about when the textual trail grows prematurely cold?

SOURCE:  scan (p. 49) from a field notebook of John Jacob Niles,
preserved among his papers at the University of Kentucky;
this image is taken from from Ron Pen,
I Wonder as I Wander:  the Life of John Jacob Niles (2010).

Here’s an example of something that clearly is not comfortably finding its way into notation.  (Apologies for the comparatively low-resolution of the scan—but I don’t think that will prevent anyone from following the rest of this post.)  It shows a page of one of Niles’s notebooks, and purports to be his earliest attempts to notate the song “I wonder as I wander,” in Murphy, North Carolina, on July 16, 1933 (starting about one-third of the way down the page).  The two following pages have further attempts.  Ron Pen, who was the Director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky, has probably given more sustained attention to these pages than anyone else in the world, and has pieced together a narrative of what these tidbits reveal about Niles’s compositional process.  Yes, I said it:  compositional.  While the inspiration of this song came out of the mouth of another (Niles noted down: “singing of a girl who calls herself Annie Morgan about 16 or maybe younger, very pretty—very unwashed”), whatever he heard Morgan sing was radically transformed before Niles published the song.  As Pen recounts, Niles’s compositional sketches from late September and early October 1933 gradually accumulate two further stanzas, and several different versions of the tune.  Those pages also have notes like “Carl E[ngel] will not take it this way (the ending is wrong).”  Engel was Niles’s publisher at G. Schirmer, and he himself wasn’t above a little textual meddling if it would make a better product in the end.  The textual trail doesn’t just grow cold at July 1933, it is non-existent; a better metaphor would be a spring emerging from the soil, flowing forth with no obvious source.  Yet I have no problem regarding “I wonder as I wander” as an Appalachian folk-song, as it flows out of a(n extrapolated) tradition, even though it is actually the calculated artistic product of John Jacob Niles in dialogue with his publisher.  In the memorable words of Thomas Dunhill, “let us disabuse ourselves of the idea that a folk-song is a song written by nobody and arranged by Cecil Sharp” (p. 246).

There is a pretty good chance you have heard Niles’s song:

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,

How Jesus the savior did come for to die

For poor on’ry sinners like you and like I;

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.

It often shows up on Christmas concerts in all sorts of arrangements, particularly for choirs.  And it’s a good tune, often described as “haunting.”  The tune is unusual:  all four phrases begin with the same sequence of notes, but each phrases ends differently; the last phrase has both the highest and lowest pitches of the melody, with what is perhaps an unexpected final note—unresolved, lingering, making the silence which must eventually follow it seem poignant indeed.  About twenty years ago when I heard the new tune by Swiss composer Carl Rütti, I was puzzled:  as far as I’m concerned, the original tune was the best part.  Why throw it out?  

The first three lines of the lyric seem to stem directly from the encounter in Murphy, NC, but possibly not the repeat of the first line as the last line of the stanza came from Annie Morgan.  (Niles failed to continue that pattern in his other stanzas, which I think that is a weakness.)  The subject/object confusion of “like you and like I” at least provides a rhyme, but in my mind’s ear I can still hear my father’s audible wince anytime he heard that sung.  (He always had a red pen in his pocket, and I can remember him adding proofreader’s marks to Christmas letters sent by friends and relations.  You can take the professor out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of some professors.)  The strongest line is the very first:  not just the near rhymes of wonder and wander, but under too.  Nothing else in the lyric rises so high.  And I note that nothing in the first stanza really defines this as a Christmas song; but Niles and Engel surely knew it would be more marketable as such.  And so it was published as an “Appalachian Carol” in Niles’s anthology Songs of the Hill Folk (1934), and then in numerous arrangements thereafter.

Niles eventually realized that his song was a goldmine, but he then had to find ways of claiming authorship of something he had hitherto presented as collected material.  I see that the blurb about this song in The Reader’s Digest Merry Christmas Songbook strives for some mystical union of composed and folk, even below the explicit attribution “Words and Music by John Jacob Niles”:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 206 of The Reader's Digest Merry Christmas Songbook (1981).

... whatever that means.  In that Reader’s Digest collection, the song is grouped in a section of “Christmas Folk Songs and Spirituals.”  In The New Oxford Book of Carols—a splendid resource to which I have turned before in these posts—the tune is allocated to the “Traditional Carols” section, not the “Composed Carols.”  Yet I think we could make a pretty good case that some items in the “Composed Carols” are far less composed than this one.  (“In dulci jubilo,” anyone?)  Wasn’t it Will Rogers who said something like All music is folk music.  I never heard no horse sing?  (Probably not.  Whoever it was, we get the point.)

The problem with this question of attribution is that, rather like the boy who cried “wolf,” the deception involved in “I wonder as I wander” makes it hard to trust anything that Niles has claimed anywhere else.  He said that he paid Annie Morgan six quarters to sing the song a few times as he tried to write it down, and Pen believes that one can see those efforts on the pages of the field notebook.  In any case, the $1.50 Morgan received was nothing compared to the profits that Niles brought in by appropriating her unattributed idea.  Pen quotes Ellen Steckert’s perceptive remark:  “to have discovered the natural gem was then far better than to admit to having produced it artificially” (p. 156).

(Eeyore knows all there is to know
about not being satisfied.)
SOURCE: Illustration by E. H. Shepard;
scan taken from The Project Gutenberg
e-book of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Niles produced a string of such discoveries (if that is what they are... which I doubt) and I notice a trend:  not only is he the only person to have notated anything resembling these tunes, but his informants are very often conveniently untraceable.  Annie Morgan was the daughter of an itinerant preacher, and they were headed out of town (with Niles’s quarters paying for the fuel).  Other singers who sang for him are identified with vague phrases like “a very willing old lady known as Granny Holcolm,” “a woman who was cooking for a preacher’s wife in Asheville, N.C.,” “an elderly woman named Mrs. Nuckols, who lived somewhere north of Yorkes, Ky.”and the like.  Niles may have been very much concerned with being compensated for his troubles, but the buck stopped with him:  his untraceable sources were useful as characters in his J. Peterman-like descriptions of how he (allegedly) collected each song, but nothing beyond that.  (Such rambling prose accounts reach their zenith in The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles (1960), the title which seems to give away the game).

SOURCE:  scan of contents page

And is it true? (to channel John Betjeman); for if it is...  then some of Niles’s findings blow one's mind.  The specimens he claimed to find of English carols surviving in the Appalachians are far more startling than anything that Cecil Sharp turned up, precisely because they seem at odds with what we know about religious traditions on the frontier.  Certainly we don't expect the Marian focus of “Sing we the Virgin Mary” (which, as the NOBC observes, “would appear to be a near-miraculous survival of the fifteenth-century English carol text ‘I sing of maiden that is makeless’ (British Library, Sloane MS 2593, where it appears without music)”).  Ah, but Niles didn’t have to find Sloane MS 2593 to learn of this text, as he had the [old] Oxford Book of Carols at hand already, which included Martin Shaw’s tune for it.  When Niles published his version (“I took down this song in Mayfield Ky., in 1933, sung by members of the Mathers family, who were said to be tenants on a near-by farm”), he comments that “in comparing the verses below with the original, we observe a similarity that goes beyond mere chance.”  I won’t argue with that:  Niles left nothing to chance.  (I’m reminded of the exchange in the W. C. Fields film My Little Chickadee (1940):  “Is this a game of chance?” / “Not the way I play it.”)  This pamphlet, The Anglo-American Carol Study Book, reads as one-upmanship against the by-then-deceased Cecil Sharp.  Anything you can find I can find a more curious example.

More curious still is the putative survival of the “Corpus Christi carol” (also found in the Oxford Book of Carols and a number of other sources Niles knew), and with a visceral eucharistic text that to my mind is more haunting than anything in “I wonder as I wander”:

SOURCE:  scan of pp. 126–27 of The Oxford Book of Carols (1928).

I won’t go into the extremely complicated story about Niles’s “discovery” of this one, as David Reed Parker has already done a masterful job at that.  (See his “John Jacob Niles and Revisionist Folklore:  The Corpus Christi Carol/‘Down in Yon Forest’” in Southern Folklore 49/2 (1992), pp. 147-56.)  It is worth tracking down Parker’s article, even if he is a little more willing to accept Niles’s word than I am.  Ron Pen, too, is generally willing to give Niles’s documentation the benefit of the doubt:  “To conceive of creating such fraudulent sketches [of ‘I wonder as I wander’] would require prodigious foresight and an unbridled imagination for forgery” (p. 152).  Exactly.  As Lord Peter almost said, these are exactly the sketches I should have invented.

But is there some aesthetic legitimacy in such deception?  Don’t we hear it differently if we think it is not just Niles’s creation, but something that has been passed through oral tradition up in the Appalachian hills?  I am reminded of Fargo, the great film by Joel and Ethan Coen (which has spun of a television series exploring the world in which the film takes place).  It opens with this notice:

SOURCE:  screenshot from the film, borrowed here from https://creepycatalog.com/true-story-movie-fargo/

And yet, if you watch the final credits all the way to the end, you get the standard disclaimer:  “No similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is intended or should be inferred.”  The story is entirely made up, but we are instructed to watch it as true—and (I would contend) that makes an important difference in our reception of it.  We are enabled to enjoy it in a different way than if we approach it as fiction.

Maybe there is something similar going on with Niles’s “Appalachian carols.”  But one thing is clear:  John Jacob Niles forged a trail.  In one sense or another.

42. yet there’s method in’t

I toyed with a spoof post for April Fools’ Day; I even considered altering the nameplate to read Suppurating Sores, but ultimately thought better of it.  You can thank me later.

I’m just back from the annual conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, which this year was hosted collaboratively by NYU and The New School.  It was my first time attending this conference and I intend to return.  I knew that this time if I wasn’t giving a paper, I would be just standing along the wall during the breaks, drinking coffee and eating bagels.  So I went back to Bach’s so-called “passaggio chorales,” about which I have already posted on the blog.  This time, though, I looked more at the earliest sources—all manuscript copies—rather than the nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions (the focus of my earlier post).  My conference proposal was to link some textual issues in these manuscript copies with theories that have emerged around the so-called “‘bad’ quartos” of the Shakespeare plays:

• reported texts—pirated “memorial reconstructions” by an actor or some other party; 
• deliberate abridgments to shorten the drama (or calculated to require a smaller cast);
• versions derived either from the author’s “foul papers” or subsequent revisions; 
• socialized theatrical texts versus idealized literary ones;
• “performing the play into shape”; 
• texts flawed in the printing shop; or
• some combination of any of the above

(The line I quote in this post’s title isn’t in the first quarto of Hamlet.  In that source Corambus (the character in later sources known as Polonius) remarks merely “Very shrewd answers.”  A lot of Hamlet’s best-known lines aren’t in Q1, so it is naturally suspected to be “bad,” as it doesn’t present what we would like Shakespeare to have written.)

Although the textual situations of Shakespeare and Bach are very different in many respects, I posited that the scholarly theories developed around the one may yet shed some insight on the textual situation of the other; or at least I hoped that my abstract submission might intrigue the program committee enough to get me a spot—and it did.  It was a stimulating meeting, with ideas and findings from presentations that will be re-echoed here in the months and years to come.  Somewhat pressed for time for this post in the middle of the academic term, I will extract just one curiosity from my own presentation.

The passaggio chorale represents a style of hymn-accompanying in which the organist played short interludes between sung phrases of the hymn.  These interludes need not necessarily be showy—still less very long—but they would somehow need to negotiate a path to the next sung note.  Georg Friedrich Kauffman’s Harmonische Seelenlust (published serially in Leipzig 1733-1740) includes 63 passaggio settings, along with more figural chorale settings.  Here is an example, Kauffmann’s passaggio setting of “Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ.”

SOURCE:  Kauffmann, Harmonische Seelenlust (Leipzig, 1733ff.), detail of p. 31; scan from Bach-Digital.

That this setting was intended for accompanying singing is strongly suggested by the “turn-around” interlude after the double bar, which leads back to the first note of the chorale (indicated by a custos at the end of the staff, as is the return of the first bass note).  None of the extant settings attributed to Bach have that “turn-around,” and it is not absolutely clear that they even are intended for congregational singing, but they do manifestly allude to the same tradition in which Kauffmann was working.

Note that Kauffmann’s settings were published in a figured-bass format.  Bach’s six extant settings are transmitted in figured bass only in one source, a copy by Johann Tobias Krebs preserved in an album in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, P 802.  The traditional view has been that Krebs was preserving an incomplete or draft version, while the fully-realized texts preserved by others represent Bach’s finished version.  Part of my argument at the conference—and I am not the first to make it—was that it ain't necessarily so.  Assuming that there even was a lost Bach autograph behind these pieces, there is simply no reason to suppose that it was anything more than the figured-bass lead sheet Krebs gives, rather like Kauffmann’s published settings.

Be that as it may, I was pleased when two other tidbits of my research converged to demonstrate that the contemporaneous uses of the Bach settings played fast and loose with the notion of these pieces as autonomous works.  A curious source that has often been discussed before is the third fascicle of P 274, a c. 1724 copy by Johann Peter Kellner of a Bach Prelude and Fugue (BWV 531, although somewhat abbreviated), after which Kellner copied just portions of two of the passaggio chorales.  Below, I have highlighted in yellow the double bars that indicate the end of BWV 531/ii.  The red markings that follow it link up the copied fragments from BWV 722 (Bach’s “Gelobet seist du”) with the BG edition of the same; the sections marked in blue are taken from BWV 732 (“Lobt Gott, ihr Christen allzugleich”).  As I say, these fragments have long been known, as has a third-party copy which transmits the text of Kellner’s copy remarkably faithfully—fragments and all.

SOURCE:  (left) BG Vol. XL, p. 62, from scan IMSLP #549819; (right) p. “25” of P274 fasc. 3, from Bach-Digital.

The text Kellner deemed worth preserving here was apparently not the chorale harmonization but just the sorts of figures that Bach used for the interruptions (mainly scales and arpeggios).  The one bit of  harmonization from BWV 722 which is preserved is unusually ornate, with a melodic motive appearing in the bass-line as well as within the harmony; Kellner must have liked that idea.  He probably could have played an approximate version of BWV 722 from just his notated fragments—supplying the bulk of the chorale melody and harmonization himself; but the two interludes from BWV 732 following it hardly give enough substance to recreate that setting.  No, a “memorial reconstruction” of anything like the original seems not to have been his goal.  What was it then?

Among the more recent work on the Shakespeare quartos has been a reconsideration of the interaction between literary and oral tradition, and the consequences such would have on the text performed—or at least in the text as printed.  Such ideas are not new to musicologists:  in the 1970s Leo Treitler and others were applying the “formulaic composition” theories of Albert Lord and Milman Parry to plainchant transmission.  If, however, we recognize the passaggio chorale genre as essentially formulaic—each phrase of the harmonized chorale interrupted by elaborate flourishes—then it is not hard to see how such flourishes might become “licks” that could be used to construct new settings (not necessarily notated, but readily performed).  Kellner was preserving the bits he wanted to use.

There is actually more documentary evidence for this mix-and-match approach.  The volume now known as P802 is the work of three different hands:  Johann Tobias Krebs; his son Johann Ludwig Krebs; and Johann Gottfried Walther.  These are Weimar sources (although J. L. Krebs followed JSB to Leipzig to study under him there).  P802 is a thick album:  368 pages containing at least 85 chorale settings, with a range of composers including Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Böhm, Bruhns, Weckmann—the usual suspects for North German organ music c. 1700—plus the newer figures Bach, Kauffmann, and the copyists themselves.  Scattered among all of these pieces are two unattributed passaggio settings, and it is perhaps their anonymity that has left them more-or-less unstudied over the years.  Penned in the hand of Krebs the elder, the second uses the same figured-bass notation that he used for BWV 722, but the first one does not even include a bass-line.   (That said, it may not be accurate to describe it is as incomplete, as one could easily improvise a harmony from what is given—that is, the harmonization is left completely to the player.)  Significant here, however, is that every one of the interludes is taken from one or other of the four Bach passaggio chorales transmitted by Krebs.

SOURCE: scans of P802 from Bach-Digital, marked-up to identify Bach quotations; (top) “Herr, wie du willst, so schicks mit mir” (p. 230); (bottom) “Jesu, der du meine Seele” (p. 253)

That there is a similarity between some of these interludes and Bach’s has been noted already by Schulenberg (in Bach Perspectives 1) and Zehnder (in Bach-Jahrbuch 2013), but I can’t find anyone noting that indeed all of these interludes are ripped from Bach’s settings, some only very slightly adapted to fit the new harmony.

Compared with Shakespeare—for whom basically no autograph material survives—the Bach textual situation is pretty good.  Surviving sources include quite a few autographs, a few original prints, and loads of material copied by people (like Krebs) closely connected to the composer.  But in the absence of an autograph—as in the case of the passaggio chorales—we are forced back to the question Shakespeare scholars have been confronting for centuries:  “What did X write?  And what sorts of clues can the surviving sources give us to answer that question?”  As with Shakespeare, in the case of these Bach pieces—if indeed they are by Bach—we have a fundamental break in the transmission at the very top of the stemma:  no autograph.  (Saying this presumes, of course, that there was an autograph manuscript at all.  In the case of the passaggio chorales, however, there need not have been:  what if we are not talking about texts of a work, but rather records of a practice?  A question to return to in another post….)

The abbreviated texts transmitted by Krebs ultimately take us back to eighteenth-century practice, whether or not it is what Bach wrote.  Thus, I echo Steven Urkowitz on the bad quartos:

[W]e all would learn more about Shakespeare’s plays if we look at the actual raw material, the variant quarto and Folio versions.  Even if … corrupt alternatives [were] introduced by pirates or players, at least those pirates or players stood through repeated performances of Elizabethan plays in Elizabethan playhouses. (p. 204)

Mutatis mutandis, Krebs was there; Kauffmann deemed the abbreviated format adequate for his own publications; and we don’t even know that the fuller version is Bach’s and not actually by Walther or some Herr X.  Krebs gives us merely a starting point, but it seems likely to take us closer to Bach’s own practice—to the extant anyone is seeking it—than the standard text of so many critical editions.  Rather like Shakespeare’s situation,  perhaps we need to keep in mind that (borrowing from the words of Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey) “the earliest versions of [Bach’s] works existed in plural and contested forms.”

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.

An interesting example of this is to be found in Jonathan Del Mar’s excellent edition of the Elgar cello

SOURCE:  baerenreiter.com

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.

9. Q & A, but few answers

Two weeks ago, I gave a solo recital—something very unusual for me, as I’m really a musicologist rather than a musician.  Although I am regularly involved in various performance activities—most usually as an accompanist or church musician—I cannot recall any solo recital I have done since my senior recital in college.  Indeed, that event is the impetus for this one, as this recital fell intentionally on the twentieth anniversary of that senior recital, in the same hall, on the same instrument.  I decided it would be a good chance to revisit some of the same repertoire; and as I did I was reminded of how I got bitten by the musical text criticism bug to begin with.  (My hitherto unstated goal in this blog has been “writing about very technical points in a non-techical way,” and I fear the technical details of this post will mean that it necessarily falls short of that goal.  I don’t blame anyone for not bearing with me to the end of this post; nevertheless, it will be for me a stroll down memory lane.)

The central item on both recitals was the same:  J. S. Bach’s Canonic Variations on ‘Vom Himmel hoch’ BWV 769—or rather BWV769a, and that brings up the textual point for this post.  The Canonic Variations is a late work, composed in 1746-47 as far as can be determined.  It is transmitted in a number of sources, including two authentic sources—the first edition print (usually allocated the siglum Q, as it will be here) and an autograph manuscript generally described as a fair copy (ditto A).  Both are now freely available on the web.  I have taken the images below from the scans available via the Berlin Staatsbibliothek website (print and autograph), but similar reproductions can be found on Bach Digital and the IMSLP, and other places too.

The relationship between Q and A is not as obvious as one might expect.  It would be reasonable to assume that the fair-copy score came first, and the printed edition later—and, indeed, that the fair-copy score might even have been prepared for the engraver of the print.  In fact these two authentic sources present very different versions of the piece, so that in Wolfgang Schmieder’s Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis we find the version of Q designated as number 769 while the version of A is 769a.  The issue of how Schmieder designated different versions of a work (and the consequences of such designations) deserves another post; some day I’ll come back to it.

Both versions contain five movements, but the sequence and presentation of those movements varies significantly.  (For convenience I will use the abbreviations devised by Walter Emery in his study of the work.)  In A the movements are:

• I.  C8    2-voice canon at the octave in the manuals, chorale cantus firmus in pedal
• II.  C5  2-voice canon at the fifth in the manauls, cantus firmus in pedal
• III.  CF  the cantus firmus in 2-voice inversion canons at the sixth, third, second and ninth, followed by the entire chorale in a stretto coda; the movement starts with three voices, adds an additional voice at the midpoint, and the coda adds two more voices.
• IV.  C7  2-voice canon at the seventh (pedal and left hand), cantus firmus + free cantabile line in the right hand
• V.  CA  2-voice augmentation canon at the octave in the manuals (+ free left hand line), chorale cantus firmus in pedal

A is notated throughout on three staves (conventional for organ music now, but not a default for Bach and his contemporaries).  In Q the movements appear in a different sequence, and are laid out differently:

• I.  C8  on two-stave puzzle notation (giving only the first few notes of the trailing canonic voice)
• II.  C5  ditto
• III.  C7 ditto.  These first three variations fit together on one “opening”—that is two printed pages, the verso of the cover page on the left, the recto of the next sheet on the right.
• IV. CA  in open score (4 staves), requiring two pages—the next “opening” of the print.
• V.  CF on three staves, requiring two pages, the final “opening.”

The BG edition gives only the version of Q (BWV 769), leaving discussion of BWV 769a to the critical commentary.  Largely due to the work of Friedrich Smend, in the first half of the twentieth century the scholarly consensus shifted, and A came to be regarded as the later source—and thus the Fassung letzter Hand [definitive version].  That it has never become the preferred version among performers is probably due to the apparent anticlimax:  the showy stretto which concludes BWV 769 comes at the end of only the third movement of BWV 769a.  (Not that either version is performed all that much!)  Gregory Butler, who has done extensive studies of Bach’s original prints, demonstrates that the first three variations of Q were engraved first (and very likely the only parts of Bach’s original conception of the piece), and that when CF was composed it could not be inserted between them without a considerable waste of labor.  As Bach’s conception of the work changed, he made a virtue of necessity (eventually adding CA), thus producing two very different versions of the same basic material.  By default Q is the more “public” version—that’s what published means, after all.  And it is no surprise that the version of Q was the more widely disseminated version.  We don’t know how many copies of Q were printed, but at least twenty survive now, and the Stemma devised by Hans Klotz for his edition in the NBA indicates many manuscript copies derived from the print.  See the tree on the left side—although, as my pencil scrawl indicates, “O” on the left is a very unfortunate typo—it surely must be Q; the “O” listed on the lower right is an entirely different source, transmitting BWV 769a.  (There are other problems with this Stemma not worth going into here.)

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Kritischer Bericht for NBA Ser. IV Bd. 2, ed. Hans Klotz (1957), p. 88.

It may seem odd to copy out printed works by hand, but in the centuries before photocopiers it was extremely common.  In this work it was particularly necessary, as the puzzle notation of the first three variations of Q would make them virtually unplayable without realizing them in notation.  Some of the manuscripts descending from Q (Klotz’s J4, E1, and B2, for example) transmit only movements that needed to be realized.  Thus rather than being bootleg manuscript copies of an out-of-print or otherwise inaccessible piece, these might have been used along side a copy of Q to play the complete work.

There are a plentitude of textual differences between Q and A, in and his comprehensive studies of this work Butler also convincingly argues that the very concept of a “definitive” version is meaningless in this piece.  Butler’s chronology is essentially this:

1. Initial conception:  C8, C5, and C7 composed and subsequently engraved.  Indeed, these seem at first to have been engraved without even indicating (beyond the signum S) the incipits of the canonic entries:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshots of Q as available at http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN614768373, pp. 4 and 5.

Especially in variations 2 and 3 the incipits have been crowded in with the utmost awkwardness.  Butler suggests that these might have intended to look more like the puzzle notation of Bach's other published canons, lacking any incipits at all, but that these were added as the concept of the work shifted.

2.  A new phase:  possibly inspired by his work on BWV 1087 (the fourteen extra canons based on the first eight notes of the bassline of the Goldberg Variations), Bach employed the chorale tune itself canonically, thus producing the series of 4 canons + stretto that make up CF.  At this point Bach started writing out a clean copy of the work—A—placing this new variation before the cantabile C7.  It is possible, indeed, that he considered the work complete after writing out C7, as he drew some final flourishes after the double bar at that point:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of A as available at http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN812577051, p. 106.  The three flourishes which I have encircled in red) appear only at the end of the fourth variation (C7).

If one were pursuing “definitive” readings, this would suggests that variants readings contained in A would supercede those in Q for C8, C5, C7, and CF, as A is the later source for these movements.  Certainly Bach was making revisions even as he was preparing A, a source which Butler notes combines the characteristics of a composing score, a clean copy, and a revised copy.  For example, in C7 bb. 6-7, Butler posits a revised reading that initially appeared in A, subsequently modified, but faintly visible now:

SOURCES:  composite cropped screenshots of Q and A (as above) with my transcription from Butler B-Jb 2000, p. 18.

3.  The final phase:  despite the apparent final flourishes that conclude C7 in A, Bach revisited the work to produce CA, the most complex of the canons.  While this could be put nowhere but the end in A, in Q it could be placed either at the end or in between C7 and CF.  Butler has demonstrated that CA was certainly the last to be engraved, and analysis of the variant readings supports the argument that Q is the later source for this movement.  Walter Emery had raised this possibility some fifty years ago (without the benefit of Butler’s meticulous study of the printing of Q):

As a performer, I had to commit myself to one version or the other.  (As Susan Hellauer once memorably expressed it, “You can't sing a footnote.”)  I opted in this recital for the version of A basically using the text as printed in the NBA, but with a few alterations imported from the critical report (and a fistfull of wrong notes scattered here and there, too).  Scholars don’t have to commit, though, and as Werner Breig puts it in his new edition of the work for Breitkopf,

What is an appropriate type of close?  Whether it is a contrapuntal concentration such as the six-part stretto or a canon in augmentation that points beyond itself, so to speak, through the unfinished canonic imitation in one part—Bach would certainly not have wanted to commit himself to any particular solution. (p. 20)

Moreover, as Bach’s habit of not commiting himself was so pervasive throughout his career—and Bach editions in the last three centuries have had to deal with some perplexing variants—with this post I am launching a

For the first post of each month from now through November 2017 (approximating the liturgical year that generated Bach’s own Jahrgänge of cantatas in his first years in Leipzig) I will deal with some textual issue relating to the works of J. S. Bach.  While the quantity of text-critical work that has been done on Bach cannot rival that done on Shakespeare (still less the Bible), it is a massive body of literature and editions.  Needless to say there is no shortage of things to talk about—and I hope that these posts won’t be as tedious as this one might have been.