48. Reindeer Paws: rough places made plain

It has been far too long since I last posted.  2020 has been that sort of year.  A number of posts have been on my mind, but no time to write.  No time now either, but with the academic term over it is time for something different, even if only for the moment.

I have mentioned in passing (in another holiday post, actually) the philological principle of lectio difficilior potior—the idea that between two variant readings, the odder one is more likely to be original.  All things being equal (and they never really are), a copyist is likelier to smooth off rather than sharpen a rough edge in a text.  A reader is even more likely to do this.  I have watched my children, while in the early stages of learning to read, guess the wrong word from the context.  (Just yesterday it was my six-year-old misreading “And the bread on his chin was as white as the snow.”  Not that that isn’t the odder reading...)  Almost daily I become aware of something I’ve misread—and who can guess the number of things I misread but never become aware of?  (Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” again....)

Surely in such cases, the misreading does little or no damage.  I’m thinking of situations where our brains just fill in the details of what we know should be there.  Here, for example:

SOURCE:  I've seen this optical illusion many times.  I took this image from
https://impossiblebrainmatter.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/paris-in-the-spring-an-introduction-to-cognitive-psychology/

If you’ve seen it before, you know the trick of the redundant the.  That is certainly the odder reading, and exactly the sort of thing that would get “fixed” in transmission.  Indeed, it is useful to think of textual transmission as a big game of Telephone.  And some texts go from being written to being spoken /performed (and thus heard or misheard) to being written again...  those changes of medium only increase the likelihood of corrupting the text.  The phenomenon interests me; indeed it has been a focus of my posts on a number of occasions.   (For another holiday example, there’s this one.)

But this situation isn’t quite Telephone.  We don’t just pass on a message and rid ourselves of it.  The messages stay with us—in the version we received, anyway.  And we further corrupt them.  Or maybe we think of it in the way Bernard Woolley used to conjugate such irregularities on Yes, Minister:

I improve the text.

You modify it.

He/She/It corrupts it.

As I type, I learn that this has been called emotive conjugation and seems to be the invention of Bertrand Russell.  #props

I have attempted to justify such improvements before, although not denying that what I (and others) do is corrupting, no matter what motives we might have.  And there are all sorts of motives, and maybe not enough of a paper trail to sort out what happened when.

I ran across such an example this week.  This seems to be the original text (i.e., music and lyrics) of the American Christmas song “Up on the Housetop”—although that is neither the title nor (quite) its original first line:

SOURCE:  Chapel Gems for Sunday Schools / selected from "Our Song Birds" for 1866..., page scan from https://archive.org/details/chapelgemsforsun1866root/page/108/mode/2up  
It appeared in print before this in an October issue of “Our Song Birds,” but I have not located that source.
My suspicion is that the above was printed from a stereo of the original typesetting.

The song is by Benjamin Russell Hanby (1833-67).  It is not a favorite of mine—neither text nor tune—but I will admit that crowdsourcing (after the manner of Telephone) wrought considerable improvement.  Whether it was wearing off the rough edges or not, I’m not sure; but the melody (and consequently the harmony) as generally heard today is at least more interesting than the original.  Look at the chorus as originally printed:  it gets off on the wrong foot.  Too much tonic stalls the musical progress, right at the moment where it needs to be anywhere else.  (I also object to the third “click!” in b. 14, which lands us on the tonic too soon.  Can’t he wait two bars?)  And the melody throughout tends to repeat notes, where the version generally heard today is more interesting because of the neighbor and passing tones that liven things up.  I wonder if Hanby had thought of the tune before the words, and then—facing more syllables than he had planned—just divided the 8ths into reiterated 16ths without rewriting the melody for the new rhythm.  

But music like this is not music we learn from reading it off the page.  We hear it sung to us and we pick it up via oral transmission.  Or at least that is what happened to me.  I learned it in elementary school music classes, and we certainly were not looking at musical notation, still less the original print.  Like so many popular airs, the existence of “Up on the housetop” does not depend on a literate tradition.  I had only heard three of these verses before—and even then with a slightly different text.  I’m quite sure that I had never encountered the corporal punishment of the ratan switches for Lazy Jim, or the beneficence of Rover’s extra bone.  But I remember that as I child I thought I was singing “Up on the housetop reindeer paws,” which would make perfect sense—if only reindeer had paws instead of hooves.  It’s a good example of my little brain in search of an easier reading—which I now recognize as the game of textual Telephone we play unwittingly throughout our lives.

I have not had time to locate the earliest source (music or lyrics) to present the text more as we know them today.  I wonder how long it took to plane off the rough edges?  I see that the 1868 “expanded” edition of Chapel Gems for Sunday Schools drops this number altogether.  Hanby was dead by that time.   Even so, “gems” is wishful thinking for the contents of these volumes, but they make an interesting read today.  I recommend perusing Hanby’s “Crowding awfully,” M. B. C. Slade’s “Was it right?” and the—astonishing—“Little Zulu Band” by “Paulina” (i.e., Sophia Taylor Griswold, who was apparently also responsible for some of the stanzas of “Up on the Housetop”).

I won’t dwell on it here, but for another good example of crowdsourcing eroding the rough edges to positive effect look at the original (1857) version of “Jingle Bells,” or—as titled originally—The One-Horse Open Sleigh.  The verse melody is more-or-less as it is known today, but James Pierpont’s part-song chorus exists without the familiar tune we sing now:

SOURCE:  scan of first edition (Boston:  Oliver Ditson, 1857) from ISMLP #166827, p. 3 (detail)

(Here’s a link to a recording of the original version.)

What got me thinking about this topic was the Advent hymn “Lo! he comes with clouds descending.”  Hymns—both the lyrics and the tunes associated with them—have suffered all sorts of indignities, subject to the whims of editors of hymnals, whose qualifications vary considerably, and who are ultimately dependent on the quality of source material they have in front of them—which may be nothing more than prior badly-edited hymnals.  Thus it is not unusual to find all sorts of variants in hymnals—some prompted by doctrinal concerns, some musical, some practical.   (“We don’t have room for a fifth stanza on this page.”)

Songs of Praise Discussed—a commentary volume on the 1925 hymnal Songs of Praise—remarks:  “Few hymns are more universal in Anglo-Saxon use than this.”  Well, times change.  It goes on:  “... Yet no hymn has been more altered and none so intolerable in its original form.” [p. 42]  You had me at ‘intolerable’.  The lyric is remarkable, even in the version most (I think) printed today—a sublime and terrifying eschatological text by Charles Wesley.  Here is Wesley’s second stanza:

Every eye shall now behold him
    Robed in dreadful majesty;
Those who set at nought and sold him,
    Pierced and nailed him to the tree,
        Deeply wailing,
    Shall the true Messiah see.

Modern parishioners who go to church expecting Advent to be a prelude to Christmas are at this point doubtless wondering what happened to “Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild.”   Wesley was actually reworking ( = improving/modifying/corrupting) a lyric by the Moravian/Methodist evangelist John Cennick, whose original was even more strident.   Wesley was so impressed with Cennick’s verses that he retained the same peculiar metrical structure and rhyme scheme, but Cennick’s pacing is different—so that in his second stanza the punch is delayed until the very last syllable:

Now his merits by the harpers,
    Thro’ the eternal deeps resounds!
Now resplendent shine his nail-prints,
    Every eye shall see his wounds!
        They who pierced him,
    Shall at his appearing wail.

Cennick’s first stanza had memorably concluded “Welcome, welcome, bleeding Lamb!”  This was, remember, the “intolerable” original mentioned in Songs of Praise Discussed:   “We can see from this why 19th-century intelligence revolted against 18th-century religion, and why we have not yet recovered from the resulting agnosticism” [p. 42].

Throughout, Wesley’s text treats the same ideas that Cennick had traversed, although with perhaps more awe than fear.  As the game of hymnological Telephone proceeded, hymnals opted for one or the other or even a patchwork version combining bits of Cennick and Wesley—or, more latterly, toning it down however possible.  (Even in Songs of Praise, Wesley's “With what rapture / Gaze we on those glorious scars” has become “Praise we him for all his scars.”  As J. R. Watson remarks, “Modern rewritings err on the side of control, and take the stuffing out of the hymn” [p. 199].)

This text—whatever it is—has been associated with a number of hymn-tunes, but one of the earliest tunes persists with it even now.  Even so, the rough edges have been worn down with use—as is clear when examining the variants in these early prints.  Although it has two different tune-names here (OLIVERS’ and HELMSLEY—the latter name has stuck), it is clearly the same tune.

SOURCE:  (l.) composite of scans of pp. 104 and 105 of the tune portion (Sacred Melodys) of Charles Wesley’s Select Hymns with Tunes Annext (3rd ed., 1770; the tune appeared already in the second edition of 1765), from https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/s/Wesley-1770-SelectHymnswithTunesAnnext-3rdEd.pdf;   (r.) Scan of p. 16 of Martin Madan’s A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes Never Published Before (1769), from https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/s/Madan-CollectionofHymns-1769-6thEd.pdf. 

This tune shows up in American usage pretty early (here is an example from 1849), all the while with the edges still being worn down.  Indeed it is interesting to compare the array of appearances of this tune in the holdings of Hymnary.org.  From these I observe a moment of standardization--as if in the game of Telephone someone shouted aloud what they wanted everyone to hear, thus affecting all subsequent transmission.  That was The English Hymnal (1906), where Ralph Vaughan Williams penned a harmonization that increasingly has become a default for the tune.  

I was astonished, though, to see that he didn’t leave it alone after that.  When the expanded version of Songs of Praise appeared in 1931, RVW produced a fourth-verse descant overtop the existing harmonization.   It’s a much busier descant than the norm, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it sung:

SOURCE:  Songs of Praise:  Enlarged Edition (1931), detail of pp. 68–69

This extra bit seems to have languished in obscurity within the covers of that book.  Maybe once the rough places had been worn smooth, no one has had the appetite for making it crooked again.

39. standardize/compromise

As we welcome the new year, fireworks are inevitably on my mind.  At the very least, my dogs make me aware of fireworks:  even distant explosions are enough to keep my dogs anxiously pacing the house.  (I can only imagine what it must be like for veterans with PTSD, hearing these explosions at too-close range well into the early hours.)  Moreover, beautiful as such displays may be, it’s hard for me not to feel that if you’ve seen one good one, you’ve pretty much seen them all.  I don’t bother to stay up for them, and then I’m cross when I am woken by worried canines.  On such occasions, I'm inclined to agree with Hamlet’s view of a similar noisy custom: 

More honoured in the breach than the observance (Act 1 Sc. 4).

SOURCE:  “A view of the magnificent structure erected for the fireworks to be exhibited for the solemnization of the General Peace” (uncredited, but apparently in the British Library), cropped from scan of the cover of Bärenreiter facsimile Georg Friedrich Händel:  The Musick for the Royal Fireworks / Feuerwerkmusik / British Library Manuscript R. M. 20.g.7 (2004).  (Christopher Hogwood's introduction to this volume is available here.)

Only because of this pyrotechnical connection, I thought it was time for me to comment on a few of my frustrations related to editions of Handel’s Musick for the Royal Fireworks (celebrating the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle).  I grew up on a musical diet in which the largest “food group” consisted of Bach, Handel, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Mendelssohn.  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the Fireworks music, I think mostly from a 1972 recording by Neville Marriner and his Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields.  (It sounds very familiar to me now, and it’s exactly the sort of recording my father would have bought.)  But I remember, too, a recording of the suite orchestrated by Hamilton Harty, as well as hearing some of the early attempts at historically-informed reconstruction of the original all-winds and percussion scoring—24 oboes, 12 bassoons, a contrabassoon (and, by rights, a serpent—although I’m not sure if that has yet been included on any of the recordings), nine each of trumpets and horns, plus timpani and side drum.  Those outrageous figures were already scaled back from the official plans.  A press blurb several months before the actual event listed “40 trumpets, 20 French horns, 16 hautboys, 16 bassoons, eight pair of kettle-drums, 12 side-drums, a proper number of flutes and fifes; with 100 cannon to go off singly at intervals, with the musick.”

SOURCE:  detail of A Description of the Machine for the Fireworks... (London, 1749), p. 8, just for the heck of it; cropped scan from appendix in Bärenreiter facsimile, p. 92.

Then, as now, one must be skeptical of figures from those in power.  Just two years ago, the (then) White House press secretary Sean Spicer stepped in front of journalists to insist that “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, PERIOD, both in person and around the globe.”  (My transcription hardly does him justice.  If you want to watch it again, here he is.)  Handel rehearsed the work inVauxhall Gardens, south of the Thames, on 21 April 1749 to what must have been a large audience, but—as David Hunter has shown—the official figure quoted (“an audience of above 12,000 persons (tickets 2s. 6d.)”) is just not possible.  Taking “physical, economic, social, and mathematical” factors into account, Hunter reckons the realistic audience size charitably around 3500, allowing that it might have been a good bit smaller still [pp. 75–84].  Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.

I grant, however, that the music Handel wrote was extraordinary, at least in that it departed dramatically from any sort of ensemble he had used hitherto.  Handel was much more adventurous in his use of brass sonorities than was his contemporary J. S. Bach (although admittedly Bach called upon greater technical feats from his players).  The only Bach work I can think of that employs trumpets and horns simultaneously is BWV 205, the secular cantata Zerreißet, zersprenget, zertrümmert die Gruft.  (If there are others, perhaps someone will let me know.)  Handel uses those instruments in combination more often, particularly—as in the Water Music and his sumptuous oratorio Solomon—for antiphonal or double-chorus effects, where the contrasting timbres have much more impact than when he pits two identical ensembles together. (In this regard these works have the advantage of his three Concerti a due cori).  The three distinct ensembles of the Fireworks music are very evident on the first page of Handel’s autograph:  trumpets/timpani (four staves), horns (three staves), woodwinds (five staves):

SOURCE:  scanned from Bärenreiter facsimile, p. 59; also available at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=R.M.20.g.7 (see f. 16r).

When in about 1988 I learned of Dover’s reprints of public domain editions, their paperback comprising the Water and the Fireworks music (both reprinted from Friedrich Chysander’s Händelgesellschaft volume of 1886) was on my very first order form.  As I had grown accustomed to that, which prints the score with the staves allocated more or less as in Handel’s autograph, I found myself disorientated when opening both the 1962 volume of the HHA and its 2007 HHA revision.  In these newer editions, the score has been radically redistributed according (almost) to modern ordering conventions:  woodwinds at the top of the page, then brass (horns first, trumpets next), then percussion, then strings.  (What strings?  I’ll come back to that.)  The “almost” is that in both of these HHA volumes, the bassoons are at the bottom of the page among the strings.  There is a reason for this:  in practice, the HHA only gives a bassoon its own staff when Handel has written an independent part, not just doubling the bass line common to the strings.

SOURCE:  (l.) Händelgesellschaft edition, vol. 47 (1886),  p. 100 [available at IMSLP #24009]; (r.) revised HHA Ser. IV Bd. 13 (2004), p. 87.

I grant that a standard score order is a useful thing, especially for a standardized ensemble.  I don’t object to seeing Mozart scores reorganized in this way, with the upper strings moved from the very top (where he habitually put them) to the bottom (just above the cello/contrabass line).  That said, I think we do miss something when we look at a page so differently laid out from what he wrote, and I appreciate those texts—a good example is Simon P. Keefe’s Mozart in Vienna:  the Final Decade—in which the musical examples restore his score order.  Whatever reordering the HHA might impose on Handel in general, I think the Fireworks music deserves to be treated as an exception:  even by Handel's terms, the ensemble is exceptional.  (Even the NMA abandons its use of modernized score order when dealing with works for a non-standard ensemble; see for example the wind serenades, which retain Mozart’s placement of the horns above the bassoons.)  There are times when the modernized allotment of staves obscures what Handel is doing with his triple ensemble.  Compare the pages below.  The HHA gives me the impression of a dialogue between only two ensembles—brass (in the middle of the score) and oboes/strings (at the top and bottom); placing the horns above the trumpets means that when any of the horns play with the trumpet ensemble they appears to lead the brass altogether, and the use of two consorts (three trumpets + horn, then three horns) becomes almost invisible, while it is very clear in the autograph.

SOURCE:  (l.) autograph, f. 22v (facsimile p. 72); (r.) revised HHA Ser. IV Bd. 13 (2004), p. 107.

(I note with some distaste that already in 1788 Samuel Arnold had put the horns above the trumpets in his edition.)

A further complaint:  both the original HHA volume and the revised version present a score including five staves of strings, realizing instructions for doubling that Handel added to his autograph score.  Doing so while also retaining the inflated wind numbers conflates two distinct versions—outdoor and indoor—into a form Handel never heard:  massed winds + strings.  The conflation makes a striking effect, but it is not something that ever happened in his time.  If you’d like to experience this version but can’t muster 80+ period-instrument players, here’s a 2012 BBC Proms performance by Le Concert Spirituel under Hervé Niquet that does it for you, even adding a drum interlude (at 01:43ff, corresponding with Handel’s later-cancelled instruction “alla Bruit de guerre”) in lieu of discharging cannon:

Strings were not part of the outdoor performance—apparently vetoed by George II himself.  I have my doubts that the overture was composed with strings in mind, given the problematically high “viola” line (generally doubling Oboe III), and the confusing pair of bass lines, in which the contrabass seems to be on the wrong line.  In his revised HHA, Christopher Hogwood has modified the viola line;  I find his version just as dubious, often doubling the bass up an octave even when it seems to me to intrude in the texture.  Whatever one does seems unsatisfactory.  The string doublings were likely added with an eye to a performance at the Foundling Hospital several weeks after the fireworks display; for that concert, the doubled-and-redoubled winds must surely have been scaled back to normal size.

Intriguingly, Hogwood interprets the marginalia in the autograph manuscript as indicating that the work heard at the Foundling Hospital performance differed in another significant respect:  the suite was truncated with just a few movements, and for the finale Handel borrowed the last movement of a trumpet/horn “due cori” concerto, HWV 335a—a work thematically linked to the Fireworks overture and preserved in a different fascicle of the same bound volume now.  (For Hogwood's argument, see his Cambridge Music Handbook [pp. 115 and 127] and the revised HHA volume [p. xxviii-xxix].)  Musically, I like this suggestion a lot:  to me, the two menuets that conclude Fireworks are an unconvincing conclusion to such a work, at least when not followed by fireworks.  Those menuets plod.  The finale of HWV 335a, however, is buoyant.  (Hear it here.)  A problem with this solution to the marginalia is the scoring:  although the scoring is similar, it is not identical:  two (not three) trumpets + two pairs of horns (the first pair consistently with oboes, the second pair consistently with strings).  In that the rest of that Foundling Hospital performance included music from Solomon (two trumpets + two horns), I began to wonder if they jettisoned Trumpet III (or, Principale, as he labels it, denoting its low register) altogether—but what did they do about the extra horn part?  A further problem:  the only movement in the autograph of Fireworks to have a staff allotted to the violas is the final menuet—which this theory would exclude from the strings version of the piece; granted, the staff is lightly crossed-out as it stands.  Is that significant?

SOURCE:  cropped scan of autograph, f. 28v (facsimile, p. 84)

This leads me to my third frustration:  my sense is that the “indoor” version of the Fireworks music (and “Fireworks” no longer seems the right name) really deserves to be published as its own distinct work—and with its own catalogue number.  The revised HHA volume does right by the Water Music (and I’ll come back to it sometime), but I fear an opportunity was missed to do justice to the Fireworks music.  The new volume’s blue covers enclose both a triumphant flourish (the much-needed update of Water Music, since many important sources had come to light) and a damp squib.  Surely there will not be a second revised volume to give us distinct “outdoor” and “indoor” versions of Fireworks; we will have to wait for someone else to do it—someone willing to defy standardization and its inevitable compromise.  Someone, that is, willing to honor the custom in the breach rather than the observance.