54. So easily assimilated

For this year’s Christmas music post, I decided to look more deeply into a Polish carol that is familiar in English-speaking countries with the words “Infant holy, Infant lowly.”  That text, penned by Edith Margaret Gellibrand Reed, dates only as far back as 1920.  A mystery I’ve been unable to solve is why Reed’s setting appeared first in an American publication (Primary Education, December 1920), and not in her own UK periodical (Music and Youth) until twelve months later.  Both appear below.  The first publication is marred by a number of infelicities (I assume misprints) which are rectified in the later publication.  I have marked those changes are in red, as well as some changes to the lyrics.  But notice the last three notes of Reed’s version of this melody—I’ll come back to them later.

SOURCE:  composite image, (l). scan of p. 641 of Primary Education (December 1920); (r) cropped scan of p. 945 of Music and Youth (December 1921).  [For larger image, click here.]

Reed’s text aimed at a G-rated children’s carol, and it has the usual suspects of the nativity pageant:  divinely well-behaved Baby in manger, lowing cattle, amazed shepherds, radiant angels, and stunning news.  The Polish text (or at least the only Polish text I have found associated with the melody) is “”W żłobie leży” [“He lies in a manger”].  I have not had the means to do a comprehensive search, but the earliest source I have located was a hymnal printed in 1838.  It includes three distinct but related melodies for the text:

SOURCE:  scans from the Biblioteka Narodawa of Śpiewnik kościelny czyli Pieśni nabożne z melodyjami... ed. Michał Mioduszewski (1838), pp. 30, 31, and 32; the final stanza concludes on p. 33.  The footnote on p. 30 indicates that the first tune is the most commonly used.

I know no Polish, but with the help of a number of friends I learned that the original text is very different from the innocent (even innocuous) English.  The first few verses are cast in the first-person plural:  we will sing for the baby, we will follow the shepherds, we will make him happy.  But then it turns to the second person singular, asking pointed questions:  Why are you in a manger?  Why does the world not accept you?  Then, finally, we have a response from the baby:  He foretells a blood bath such as will make the weeping in Ramah seem trivial by comparison; yet it is the bath in my blood that brings salvation. 

This is to say that “W żłobie leży” is much more substantial and challenging than “Infant holy, Infant lowly.”  But it has been assimilated into a different culture—a comfortable, early twentieth-century middle class culture which didn’t want any reminders of weeping in Ramah [Jeremiah 31; Matthew 2].  I had a little trouble associating the melody with anything except a lullaby, at least until I started looking at some Polish organ settings of the tune which ended in grand ff statements.  (If you’re interested, see the two settings in IMSLP #791869.)  And these reminded me of another organ setting of this tune, in a collection of noëls by Alexandre Guilmant.  He begins quite portentously:

SOURCE:  Guilmant op. 60, book 2, no.1 (bb. 1-9), from IMSLP #03921, a reprint of original 1886 Schott edition.

(Here’s a good performance.)  Eventually Guilmant gets around to stating the theme:

 SOURCE:  Guilmant op. 60, book 2, no.1 (bb. 20-37), from IMSLP #03921, as above.

The heading describes this piece as “based on an old Polish carol”; at the presentation of the theme, there is an asterisk referring the user to this footnote:

 SOURCE:  Footnote on the page of the above example, from IMSLP #03921

Guilmant reveals his source for this “ancien noël Polonais” (thus evidently not in a common repertory in France at the time) but what Fr. Victor Thirion’s source was we do not know.  Guilmant gives us a French title for this tune:  “Accourez bergers fidèles, l'heure bénie a sonnée” (roughly “Hurry, faithful shepherds, the blessed hour has sounded”—in any case, nothing like either the Polish or the later English texts).  Most important, however, is the re-barring of the music:  unlike the Polish source above (and, indeed, the early publications of “Infant holy, Infant lowly”), Guilmant starts the melody on an up-beat.  My guess is that Fr. Thirion’s communication to Guilmant was an aural transcription—that he heard it as an upbeat, and notated it that way.

This metrical dislocation appears in a considerable number of hymnals and carol books that use Reed’s “Infant holy, Infant lowly” text—but it is striking that in the earliest printings of her version the carol starts invariably on the downbeat.  Indeed, the earliest version I have located of the English “Infant holy, Infant lowly” text with the tune shifted a beat over à la Guilmant is not until 1950 (well after Reed’s death), where it appears in the Armed Forces Hymnal:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Armed Forces Hymnal, p. 211, from Archive.org

The harmonization is here attributed to David Hugh Jones (a professor at Westminster Choir College); the copyright at the bottom of the page indicates “Words from Kingsway Carol Book.”  (I have not yet gotten my hands on that source, but a copy is on its way and I will add an addendum below if there’s anything useful to report.) 

So how did this change happen?  My guess is that Fr. Thirion’s communication to Guilmant was an aural transcription, although it just as well might have been an intentional change by either Thirion or Guilmant (or somebody earlier in the transmission chain).  In any case, I am quite certain that the change happened in France, not in Poland:  that it was an act of assimilation to make the tune more readily comprehensible to French ears, just as David Hugh Jones (or whoever it was) acted in the same way to make it more readily comprehensible to American ones.  The opening melodic gesture—the move from the fifth scale-degree up to the tonic—is (I pronounce, as if ex cathedra) more commonly found crossing the barline (i.e., upbeat to downbeat) in the Western European and American hymn and carol repertories.  More than this—although one can certainly find the rhythm 

in Anglo-American hymns—almost all the examples that occur to me are iambic rather than trochaic, thus preceded by a quarter-note upbeat:

I’m thinking of examples like AZMON (a tune particularly associated with “O for a thousand tongues to sing”) and SOLID ROCK (William Bradbury’s tune for “My hope is built on nothing less”).  The sole trochaic exception that comes to mind is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s splendid KING’S WESTON, which rescues the 6.5.6.5.D text “At the name of Jesus” from a myriad of tunes that all give the same prosaic and predictable pattern (essentially the rhythm of Sullivan’s tune for “Onward, Christian Soldiers”):

... but I digress.

The point I’m trying to get to is that the metrical shift imposed upon the “W żłobie leży” tune is something akin to what the officers at Ellis Island did to surnames as they processed the immigrants entering the country:  they regularized them into something more familiar, maybe with the intent of making them easier for others to spell and pronounce, or maybe because they transliterated what they perceived as the names were pronounced.  Or they were lazy.  Or they didn’t care.  And it worked, and this tune has become a regular fixture among the Anglo-American carol repertory.  Like the Old Woman in Bernstein’s Candide, it is easily assimilated.  (A long way from Rovno Gubernya, indeed.)

I have referred before in this blog to the generally excellent New Oxford Book of Carols by Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott.  Here is their comment about this item:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of The New Oxford Book of Carols p. 605.

This note leaves quite a lot to be desired:

1. The misplaced bar-lines are in fact extremely common in the US, although granted the tune is now appearing with the (Polish) down-beat beginning with increasing frequency in US hymnals.
2. Reed’s version didn’t appear first in Music and Youth—although, again, I cannot explain how it made it (flaws and all) into Primary Education the previous year.  (For that tidbit, I thank the Hymns and Carols of Christmas website.)
3. Keyte and Parrott say that Reed’s text “was written for the mis-stressed version,” but her version is like the Polish sources (beginning on the beat), and it’s not clear that she would have known anything else.  (While some sources refer to the mazurka rhythm of the original, Reed’s commentary in Music and Youth actually describes the “W żłobie leży” tune as a polonaise specifically, rather than a mazurka.)
4. They also refer to an “obvious misprint” that led to the wrong notes at the ending (as given in Reed’s version).  I don’t know that this could have come from anyone other than Reed, and it seems not at all to be a misprint:  

SOURCE:  detail of p. 945 of Music and Youth (December 1921)

This is the 1921 printing; not only is this ending not “corrected” from the 1920 reading, but it is confirmed not only in the piano accompaniment and the Tonic Sol-Fa notation (which reads fa – mi – do), and the two-bar piano echo.  If this is a misprint, it must be from a source prior to Reed and upong which she based her text.  Such has not been located.  Maybe instead this is Reed’s own “improvement”?

That piano echo (preceded by the deceptive cadence under the last sung note) seems to have been Reed’s creation, and it is probably another element of assimilation, stretching the fourteen bars of the Polish version into a more typical classical sixteen.  It has had a long-lasting legacy, as all but one of the page scans of “Infant holy, Infant lowly” on Hymnary.org had the deceptive cadence and extra two (sung) bars.  Corrupted texts are immortal, or at least have nine lives.

One of the big surprises to me in all of this digging was that the tune was known in at least one English hymnal decades before Reed.  In 1877 it appeared in The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer with Accompanying Tunes with the text “Angels from the realms of glory.”   Here it was assimilated in a very different way:  it has been Victorianized, flattened out into all half-notes.

SOURCE:  cropped page scan of p. 54 of The Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer... from Archive.org

Ian Bradley’s Penguin Book of Carols alerted me to this version.  Bradley remarks that the Polish tune’s “date is uncertain but it may well go back to the Middle Ages.”  I doubt it, at least as far as the tune is concerned.  To my ears it is just too tonal to be medieval.  Very few medieval specimens can don tonal garb and successfully “pass.”  (The c. 1400 tune “In dulci jubilo” is to me the exception that proves that rule.)  Rather, it suggests the Biedermier era of “Stille Nacht” (1820s).  Indeed, one of the melodies has a passage that strongly resembles the German folk carol “O Tannenbaum” (popularized with that text in 1824) [highlighted in red in the following illustration],  followed by something like the concluding phrase of the late-18th-century tune for the pseudo-ancient drinking song, “Gaudeamus igitur” [highlighted in yellow].

SOURCE:  marked up detail of above illustration from  of Śpiewnik kościelny czyli Pieśni nabożne z melodyjami... ed. Michał Mioduszewski (1838), pp. 30,

The IMSLP and other repositories had all sorts of Polish settings of one or another of the “W żłobie leży” melodies.  Without taking the space for them here, I link a few below (in addition to the organ settings linked above) because I found them all very interesting:

• Zygmunt Noskowski’s male-choir arrangement, in Sześć kolend, op. 56/ii (1898) IMSLP #696256
• another male-choir arrangement, no. 90 of Kazimierz Garbusiński's 100 Kolend, IMSLP #705961
• Louis Sawicki’s rather polonaise-looking piano setting, no. 3 of 6 Chants religieux de Noël (n.d.)  IMSLP #166628
• somebody’s fair-copy manuscript of Władysław Żeleński’s unpublished Koledy, where it is no. 3 #756521
• a 1908 school hymnbook with two-part settings (and which includes the more familiar (to me) melody as the alternate, Śpiewniczek zawierający pieśni kościelne... (see scan p. 107f.)

These sources demonstrate that several related melodies continued in use in Poland for a long time.  One has overtaken the rest, and I have no idea how much any of the others persist to this day.  As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m all in favor of textual pluralism, and I’d like to hear the other melodies sung more frequently.

The other thing that surprised—or rather staggered—me, as I browsed through many Polish carol books researching this post, was the sheer number of good tunes out there of which I have been completely ignorant.  All very humbling.  And if I found them strange at times, I was thankful that they hadn’t been assimilated.

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 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.

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.

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.”