58. Leaving traces

One of our dogs, Lorraine, is a hound mix of some sort.  She has an incredible nose.  (Actually, the ears and jowls are pretty impressive, too.)  Her favorite thing on a walk is to find a piece of pizza that someone has left on the ground—which occurs more often than you might think.  But her second favorite thing is just follow some new scent that wasn’t there the last time we walked by.  She loves it.

SOURCE:  my photographs of Lorraine out for a walk/sniff on December 28, 2025.  No pizza found, alas.

Even with a short list of unfinished drafts for other posts, today’s post occurred to me because of a number of thing coalescing in my reading in the last few weeks.  Some of the books were Christmas presents, some were in piles of things to read when I had time, and others for ongoing research.  Let me start with a few excerpts that struck me:

Maria Caraci Vela [trans. Elizabeth MacDonald]:  “Copying, therefore, manuscript or printed, and to a large degree also of computerised type, is never a completely mechanical act: the text is assimilated by the reader and copyist—who lives and acts within precise horizons and cultural and historical conditioning—in an individual manner, and its reproduction necessarily passes through a filter that includes the risk of deviations from the model, whether they are voluntary or involuntary, mechanical or due to reflection, intrinsic in any case to the very act of transmission” (p. 18).  “Every witness [source] is a physical individual and a historical reality, which documents a precise moment in the life of a text.  There may of course be a witness that definitely transmits the wishes of the author.  But this does not mean that the philologist should not in any case study other witnesses: because, as has already been said, that witness does not exhaust all point of interest or the field of investigation in musical philology, as it is important to evaluate both whatever may have preceded him (the history of the creative process), and whatever came after (further author’s corrections; the history of tradition and the reception given to the musical text)” (p. 25).

[Name withheld to shield a naïve academic, in a pre-publication review included in the eventually printed volume]:  “He does not quote sources for his findings, for he is himself an unimpeachable source for anything you might care to know about a wide range of yuletide musical gems, spanning centuries and encompassing the globe.”

Yo Tomita:  “In a modern critical edition it is standard practice to discuss any potentially controversial decisions in relation to the musical text in the form of a commentary, usually found at the back of the volume.  Yet, when it comes to issues that are generally considered outside the realm of the main musical text, such as the style of movement headings, score layout, beaming, the distribution of text between the left and right hands in the case of keyboard works, and so on, editors tend to mention very little or nothing at all” (p. 13).

And it came to pass that as I was walking Lorraine the other day, I started wondering if while she is keenly aware of the traces left by others she gives any thought to the traces she leaves behind for the next scent hound.  Sure, dogs may sometimes intentionally mark territory, but even as they proceed along their merry way they are leaving a scent trail behind at all times.  As are we all.

I remember being taught that we cite sources just to give credit it where it is due, but also that those who follow us can replicate our work and see if they agree with our conclusions.  I have noticed that my own students seem to regard citations as a sign of weakness (equivalent to a confession that I didn’t come up with all of this myself), while I try to show them that they are actually a sign of strength and should be a source of pride (Look at all the work I did on this!).  Scholarship is joining an ongoing conversation, and doing that productively requires a good bit of listening to what others are saying before venturing in yourself.

I understand Tomita’s frustration:  sometimes, in the interest of tidy new editions, all manner of clues are expunged from the text.  I have been guilty in acceding to house style guides that tacitly regularize all manner of things that seem (as Tomita puts it) “outside of the main musical text.”  It can be difficult in such instances to know what the composer really wrote on the page—and even in instances where an editor makes a point to retain some notational aspect as musical significant, the user may still be at a loss.  Why this now?  As an example, in Charles Villiers Stanford’s orchestral song cycle Songs of the Fleet, the third movement—“The Middle Watch”—opens with just octaves in the strings, together with the downbeat given in the timpani.  It is in a slow 6/4 meter.  This is Stanford’s notation in both of his autographs—the choral/piano score (which he notated first):

SOURCE: cropped scan of Stanford, Songs of the Fleet, autograph vocal score (Royal College of Music MS 4158a), f. [7r].

and the full orchestral score (although I have cropped the wind parts from this image):

SOURCE: cropped scan of Stanford, Songs of the Fleet, autograph full score (Royal College of Music MS 4158), f. [18v]

In this instance, for the new edition I felt it would be wrong to regularize the tied dotted half-notes as dotted whole-notes already in b. 1.  Yes, in a sense they are equivalent (each filling a whole bar), but I think they connote different things.  Perhaps perversely, the tied dotted half-notes suggest to me a longer sound than a dotted whole-note, as using the tie suggests to me that the break between the end of the held note and the attack of the next should be a shorter.  Stanford soon switches to using dotted whole-notes—easier to write, certainly.  In fact, it is because it would be easier to write—as a shorthand—that I do not think he is suggesting that they require a different interpretation.  Rather, it suggests I’ve shown you what I mean, now you keep doing that.  He doesn’t bother to indicate ‘simile’ because it seems obvious.

That said, I contend that it would have been wrong of me to change all his dotted whole-notes into tied dotted half-notes—that is, to regularize it in a way that so often is a hallmark of editions, by spelling out what the editor thinks the composer meant.  But it is worth leaving editorial traces, and so it was important to include a note explaining what I was up to, a scent for interested hounds to follow:

SOURCE: cropped scan from the critical notes of our edition (A-R Editions, 2019), p. 213. 

“Inconsistent thereafter” covers a lot.  It could be regarded as carelessness on the part of the composer.  If the matter had been really important to me, I should have documented every instance of the tied dotted whole-notes in the two Stanford autographs.  Moreover, I shied away from stating outright my musical reasons for wanting to retain Stanford’s idiosyncratic notation for those first two bars, as maybe there would come others after me who would recognize a different and greater significance in it.  I think it is important, though, in such situations, for the user to know to what degree what they are seeing reflects the composer's notation, and to what degree that has been altered.  (For an example where I think the standardization goes a good deal too far, see my post about the HHA edition Handel’s Musick for the Royal Fireworks.)

I give my Stanford example as one in which we see the composer leaving one sort of trace and the editor another, but my point is that we are all leaving traces all the time.  An example comes to mind from Malcolm Bilson’s Knowing the Score lecture, which includes an anecdote of a pianist coming to him with Beethoven's op. 111 using an edition in which the lower-staff leap (in octaves) of the treacherous opening diminished seventh is re-notated to be use both hands, thus bypassing the danger.  As Bilson remarks, this student “doesn’t even know what Beethoven wrote!”

This issue—not knowing what a composer wrote—is exceedingly common.  That is just the state of things.  (Q.  What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?  A.  I don’t know and I don’t care.)

I see that the edition to which he is referring—Leo Weiner’s 1959 edition for Editio Musica Budapest—is not yet accessible via the IMSLP, and maybe that is just as well.  But Weiner was a highly educated musician, and I’m sure he did not make this alteration without considering it carefully.  (The same cannot be said of a lot of the stuff uploaded to the IMSLP:  entirely new files, in which some manuscript or older edition has been re-set by someone with access to musical notation software.  Sometimes these are done pretty well; sometimes they are abysmal—but maybe that should be the subject of another post someday—again an issue of the worst of amateurism).  Still, one of the traces Weiner’s edition leaves behind inevitably betrays at least a different understanding of the music than Bilson argues is manifest in the original notation.  And, as James Grier memorably puts it, “Let the editor not be accused of printing the piece the composer would have written had he or she known as much as he editor” (p. 136).

I thought about Bilson’s indignation a few months ago when I was filling-in for the organist at a local church.  One of the communion hymns was a new one to me: “He’ll understand, and say ‘well done’.”  It is number 190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II:  An African-American Hymnal (1993), a publication of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, overseen by the renowned gospel music scholar Horace Clarence Boyer (1935-2009).  Boyer knew what he was doing, and if I second guess him now, it is because it may reveal the different sorts of traces left by him as editor and me as user.

SOURCE: marked-up, cropped photograph from #190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II (1993)

The chord that I have indicated is (to my mind) misspelled, or rather contains a misspelt note.  I would argue that bass note should really be a b-double-flat, a chromatic upper neighbor to the a-flat which follows.  We might hear that just as the bass line skipping up while  the rest of the chord is sustained, or specifically as a familiar “French augmented 6th” sonority in this case borrowed from a d-flat major tonality that never itself actually gets stated as such.  The a-natural just doesn't register with me:  I can’t make sense of it, or at least couldn’t make sense of it as I sight-read the example verse after verse.  It actually was even harder in the refrain, where the same chord progression occurs, but this time the cautionary flat sign for the ensuing a-flat is missing.  That really threw me.

SOURCE: marked-up, cropped photograph from #190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II (1993)

In such a context, I would ordinarily expect an a-natural to resolve upwards, and a b-double-flat downwards.  The a-natural seemed to me non-sensical.  But the point is the I would ordinarily expect.  It is the theory training that has messed up my ability to read the music as it is.  I will grant, in the abstract, that an a-natural is much easier to imagine than a b-double-flat.  But this is not in the abstract:  it is in context.  And in context, the way I have been taught has made it harder to read as notated, even though the a-natural is a “simpler” concept.  (I used this in class to illustrate to some beginner theory students that as they acquire theoretical knowledge and think more in terms of theoretical concepts, they may find that they lose facility at things they can already do now.  This example demonstrates one way that has happened to me.)

I don’t know what the back-story of this version of this hymn is—my hound nose isn’t as good as Lorraine’s—but it would seem that in the production of the Lift Every Voice and Sing II Boyer and the others of his editorial team either passively let the a-natural stand from whatever source-text they were working from, or actively changed b-double-flats to a-naturals to appear—I’m guessing—more user-friendly to the church musician.  The attribution for this arrangement is to Boyer himself, and I haven’t found this harmonization anywhere else.  (Hymnary.org cites seventy appearances of the tune in the hymnals and songbooks in their database; the melody in some of those other instances is remarkably varied in a lot of ways, and I was gratified to find in another harmonization two true c-flats rather than b-naturals.)  The chosen spelling of the note makes it easier for some, harder for others.  I suppose I sniff out here some general sense of the intended end-user, and that user wasn't expected to put up with b-double-flats.  And yet, not quite:  I only have to turn the page to no. 191 (also in e-flat major) to find b-double-flats notated.  I’m not sure what to make of it.  The trail has gone cold.

And thus another excerpt which has been on my mind for several months:

John Jowett:  “Text is puzzling, Protean, and capable of shifting beyond reach at the very point where we try to grasp it.  In that awareness lies the fascination of the subject” (p. 6).

I find myself thinking of both the textual trails that lead to musical editions and the trails that those editions leave behind—for better or worse.  What I have learned most as I have written this blog over almost ten years is that the textual situation continually surprises me.  I know what Jowett means.  So very often when I go to check a point in whatever early sources are accessible to me, there is something unexpected—and that something that was already fascinating to me becomes increasingly more absorbing.  Just in time for Christmas 2024, Bärenreiter put out a facsimile of the autograph manuscript of Bedřich Smetana’s Vltava.  As soon as my copy arrived, I turned to a magical moment—my favorite use of the triangle in the whole of the orchestral repertoire (or, more accurately, the bit of it that I know).  It happens at b. 36, the moment presumably representing the confluence of the sources of the river that have been so evocatively depicted in first 35 bars.  But what I found surprised me:

SOURCE:  cropped digital scan of Bedrich Smetana: Vltava [autograph score: Národní muzeum - Muzeum Bedřicha Smetany inv. č. S 271/1250] (Bärenreiter Facsimile, 2024), p. 4

If that is hard to make out in that image, I have uploaded a larger scan of the full page here.  But what is important to note is that the triangle part is not on the staves, but is added at the bottom of the page.  Those little dots are three notes (the downbeats of bb. 36, 38, and 40) and rests in between.  If you check the full page, you will see that it is ruled with 24 staves.  The first three are blank; then nine are used for the first system (bb. 30-34); then there is a blank staff to separate the systems; and the remaining nine are used for the last system (bb. 35-41).  This means that there was space for Smetana to include the triangle on a staff if he had planned to use it here.  (The triangle is given its own staff on the first page of the score, where the full instrumentation is spelled out; although the timpani has its standard placement in the middle of the page, Smetana puts the rest of the percussion at the bottom of the system:  triangle on stave 23; cymbals and bass drum on stave 24.  Is this a trace of an afterthought?  The barlines on p. 1 seem to be drawn without a break to the bottom staff, so perhaps not.)  The next page comprises bb. 42-46; the triangle does not play, and it is not allotted a staff.  Only on the next page do we find the triangle given its own staff (23), and with music to play—but even then it is impossible to know whether it was added as he scored that page or added later.  The triangle never again appears in the lower margin of the page, but it is also never included in a general system bracket unambiguously made in preparing a page of the score (even on p. 1).  

What I sniff out of all of this is that that magical moment in b. 36 is sheer inspiration, and inspiration that apparently caught Smetana off guard, as he hadn’t made room for it.  And—most curiously—he adds a performance instruction for that first triangle note:  

“p elegante”

I have my doubts on whether anyone would know what to do with this instruction.  (I can almost hear a conductor in rehearsal: Percussionist, can you ‘ding’ more elegantly, please, as instructed?)  In b. 48 he adds another baffling triangle instruction:

“p zvonkovitě”

The Czech here, I am informed, means "bell-like" or "reminiscent of bells."  The new Bärenreiter critical edition gives “quasi campanella.”  Again, I would be at a loss.  (Percussionist, can we have a bit more ‘dong’ in that ‘ding’?)  Does the player need to switch to another triangle?  Clearly, Smetana sensed an expressive potential in the triangle that few others ever have.  And if I think he overdoes the triangle a bit in Vltava a bit, that first “ding” still gets me every time.

In recent months I have been following Marc Shepherd’s substack posts about editorial issues in Gilbert & Sullivan, particularly their 1875 one-act Trial By Jury.  Shepherd is concerned with getting practical and authoritative texts affordably into the hands of companies producing these shows.  Such companies often work on a shoestring budget, and so have tended to use whatever free performing materials they could access, despite the hosts of textual problems such materials contain, rather than shell out any money on more reliable texts.  I commend Shepherd for taking it upon himself to improve the available performing texts, and for taking the editorial task so seriously.  I also appreciate the transparency of these substack posts—the traces are left everywhere for anyone interested.  Not only can we follow Shepherd’s traces in the decision making (and vis-à-vis other editions of the work), but Sullivan’s traces in the compositional process.  Sullivan’s various short-hand notations and labor-saving devices (ditto passages, colla parte doublings...) left all manner of irreconcilable differences, including a surprising note for Oboe II, even when Sullivan never once had a second oboe in his comic operas.  Although Shepherd’s task is to solve these problems, he goes one better by calling attention to them.  Knowledge of a textual curiosity in one work may well illuminate a real problem in another, and the more minds aware of it the better.  (An example I have mentioned before in this blog of how such wider knowledge is required to answer even tiny puzzles is Jonathan Del Mar’s insight into Beethoven's use of the clef-method of transposition, leading Beethoven to write (for example) an umambiguous c-natural when he just as unamibuously meant c-sharp).

Sometimes we have enough of the materials to verify that what seems odd in a source is actually a trace of something that was odd.  For example, looking through some printed parts for Charles Lecocq’s charming 1872 opera La Fille de Madame Angot, I was puzzled to see three bars of rest notated individually rather than with an extended rest (as elsewhere in the part), and—even more suspicious—an extraneous pp mark:

SOURCE: cropped marked-up scan from 1873 flute/piccolo part on the IMSLP (#876459), p. 15.

Surely there was a story here!  And indeed, the autograph full score revealed that the piccolo had had a pp melody there that had been since deleted in blue pencil.  

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan from autograph full score on Gallica (ark:/12148/bpt6k8559382), p. 113 (f. 52r).

So (my hound nose tells me) the part was prepared before the deletion, but then altered; but as it had been laid out with three bars there, it was easier to put in whole rests in each bar than to make it a three-bar extended rest.  (If you don’t know this work, by the way, this brief promo video for a marvelous new recording is a great introduction.)

I try to get my students to look for such curiosities in whatever we are studying.  For example, we look at the Bach concerto for two keyboard, BWV 1060, asking the question if this was indeed originally written for different solo instruments, what traces can we find to suggest what they were?  The solo lines are so markedly different each other (at least judging by the right hand parts of the solo keyboards) that they do not seem to have been both of the same instrument.  It seems conventionally accepted that it was originally violin and oboe, which certainly seems very reasonable to me—but I do want them to look at the evidence (such as it is) and see what they would make of it.

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan from BG edition of BWV 1060, Bd. 21.2 (IMSLP # 849611), p. 29 

I quoted one line of James Grier’s The Critical Editing of Music above.  I should give him a little more space, and I wholly endorse his sentiment on the traces left by an edition, a starting point rather than a finish line:

“Critical editions should generate critical users.  The advantage a critical edition offers its users is guidance from a scholar who has devoted a considerable amount of time, energy, and imagination to the problems of the piece and whose opinion is therefore worth considering.  This is not to say that users need not do any thinking for themselves, nor that they must agree with the editor in every particular.  But a critical attitude should stimulate a critical response, of which one possible manifestation is a competing edition.  Many of these ambiguous issues can never be resolved definitively, either because source materials have perished or because ambiguities were present from the original compositional conception of the work.  Therefore no edition is definitive, and, perhaps more important, the truth is simply not ascertainable....  The greatest works of music, as of literature, have attracted and will continue to attract the attentions of editors whose approach varies considerably, and so it is inevitable that several editions of a given piece might exist, each different in many aspects.  If such is the case, in variably the truth will fall somewhere in between the competing editions, and the student of the work is better served by consulting all editions or as many as is practicable.  In this way the users themselves can draw conclusions about the whereabouts to the truth” (p. 181f.).

Indeed, for this textual hound, edited texts become as absorbing as the the source(s) to which they point.

SOURCE:  my picture of Lorraine displaying her wingspan (October 2025)

57. Window shopping

I definitely inherited the pleasure of window shopping from my mother.  Sure, there are times when money burns a hole in my pocket, but more often I enjoying mentally acquiring various things, imagining buying this or that, but satisfied in the end to walk away without a purchase.  I am thankful that my kids are even better at this than I am.  And the internet helps:  in the days before abebooks.com, I would often splurge on a book found in a used book store because I thought I might never see it again.

I also enjoy a sort of “textual window shopping.”  This is more the luxury of the scholar over the practitioner.  (As Susan Hellauer memorably put it, “You can’t sing a footnote,” going on to say, “we have to make choices that convince us, and that will convince our audiences” (p. 50).)  Examples of this literally abound.  Indeed, this has been the primary subject of this blog from Day One.  Just for the fun of it (and because a post just does not look right without scans of manuscripts), here's an example:

SOURCE:  digital scans of Gaetano Donizetti:  Don Pasquale, Facsimile dell'autografo (Ricordi, 1999), ff. 1v and 2. 

These are the second and third pages of the autograph manuscript of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale.  A blurb for the new critical edition of the opera explains the situation: 

Continuing with the performance options provided in the critical edition, one particularly interesting example in Don Pasquale regards the opening theme of the Symphony, which today’s audiences know as being played on a cello. However, Donizetti originally assigned the piece to a horn. Indeed, the reviews that appeared following the work’s premiere reveal the problem—the poor horn player put in a regretfully uncertain performance. Donizetti immediately sought refuge and replaced that solo with a clarinet. Apparently, that didn’t work either, and the composer was forced to return to the manuscript to make yet another change, nixing the clarinet and adding a cello. The theme is undoubtedly a beauty when played by a cello, but equally as beautiful if played by a horn—which, after all, was Donizetti’s original intent. If the performance by the horn player in Paris had been up to snuff, would Donizetti have left the part as it had been written? The critical edition gives performers the choice.

But that’s the point: once you start adding options, the performer is forced to choose.  A performer may opt for the “standard” reading, but that is still a choice.  It's like an optical illusion:  duck/rabbit, figure/ground, convex/concave, old women looking this way versus young lady looking that way...  it can be either, but it can’t be both at the same time.  A performer must commit at least temporarily to a reading, while the philologist can have the text exist simultaneously in a multiplicity of options forever.  It is Schrödinger’s Bach:  as long as you don’t actually play it, all possible readings coexist.  From the comfort of my desk (and not an instrument), somehow settling on a single text to present seems like a disservice to my expansive concept of the musical work.  The work is not easily fixed—the notation (and certainly any performance of it) is just too limiting.  (And don't get me started on the marketing adjective definitive....)

I was struck when I heard Alfred Hitchcock uttering a similar idea, from the perspective of the artist.  Here he is in a 1972 interview:

I wished I didn’t have to make [films].  Having worked with the writer on the design of the film, really the whole creative work is finished.  All you have now is to wait and see it diminish, and find you only arrive with 60% of the original conception on the screen. 

SOURCE:  screenshot from the Masters of Cinema interview linked above

The other 40% is—one presumes—irretrievably lost.  But is it also extraneous?  We clearly have done just fine without it.  Don't we bring that other 40% to the film ourselves?  (And, of course, the 100% film is useless if it only exists in the artist's imagination:  no one ever engages with any of it until it is manifested in a form that can be transmitted.)

Having said this about his dissatisfaction about actually making the film, Hitchcock then immediately rejected the idea proffered by the interviewer (William Everson) that Hitchcock could have done all the storyboards and then handed it off to another director to actually make the film.  Even recognizing the artistic compromises of moving from ideal to real, one must draw the line somewhere.  But this also reminded me of an anecdote I ran across in Christopher Small’s Musicking (not the first time I’ve cited that fascinating treatise in this blog):

There are even those who believe that, since each performance is at best only an imperfect and approximate representation of the work itself, it follows that music's inner meanings can never be properly yielded up in performance.  They can be discovered only by those who can read and study the score, like Johannes Brahms, who once refused an invitation to attend a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni, saying he would sooner stay home and read it. (p. 5)

I’ve never tracked down this story in Brahms biographies, so I don't know whether he meant that he could commune with Mozart's score more perfectly by looking at it than by attending a performance; or maybe he meant that it wasn't worth taking the trouble to go out to a performance when the score would suffice; or perhaps both.  Studying the score and enjoying a performance are two different experiences, and both of great value.  I do find that as I get older, I listen to music less, but I’m thinking about it more.  And a few years ago I got into an (amicable) argument on Facebook over whether the scene in Amadeus of Salieri audiating (i.e., hearing in his head) Mozart’s music as he frantically and blissfully scrutinizing the manuscripts would count as diegetic music in the film.  (For reference:  “Diegetic (diegesis) is a concept used in studies of film music to refer to music that is produced and received within the constructed world of the film and therefore forms part of its narrative” Beard/Gloag, p. 54.)   

While I grant that the soundwaves of the music are not pulsing through the air to his ears, I cannot be persuaded that Salieri’s experience of the music is not “real” within the narrative:  this is diegetic music which the 1781 Salieri “hears,” even if Constanze doesn't (nor the confessor in the flash-forwards to 1825, nor maybe even the 1825 Salieri).  I was in the minority in the argument.  Unrepentantly. 

I am willing to grant that there is music which exists more perfectly on the page than in performance:  perpetual canons are such.  (For a more mundane example, try “This is the song that doesn’t end.”  Or better still, don’t try it.)  Similarly, there are plays that really can't be staged--"closet dramas."  To quote the final stage direction of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Drama of Exile (1844),

The stars shine on brightly while ADAM and EVE pursue their way into the far wilderness.  There is a sound through the silence, as of the falling tears of an angel.

This prompted G. K. Chesterton, in an otherwise sympathetic assessment of Browning’s work to remark:

She could write finally of the factory wheels “grinding life down from its mark,” a strong and strictly true observation. Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides “with his droppings of warm tears.” She could write in A Drama of Exile, a really fine exposition, touching the later relation of Adam and the animals: unfortunately the tears were again turned on at the wrong moment at the main; and the stage direction commands a silence, only broken by the dropping of angel’s tears. How much noise is made by angel’s tears? Is it a sound of emptied buckets, or of garden hose, or of mountain cataracts? That is the sort of question which Elizabeth Barrett’s extreme love of the extreme was always tempting people to ask. (p. 180)

And—so long as it doesn't have to be produced on the stage—this is an evocative and effective description, despite Chesterton’s justifiable queries.  (I'm grateful to Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker for calling my attention to both the original and the criticism.)  But Don Giovanni is hardly a closet drama, and I’m not sure even I can stand with Brahms on that one.

What prompted all these thoughts was reading through a volume of selected writings of the late Jonathan Miller—a polymath of extraordinary scope (of whom, as Alan Bennett remarked, “it was always difficult to tell Jonathan anything, only to remind him of it”).  Despite my tremendous respect for the range of his insights, when it comes to music his musings are embarrassingly naïve, in my estimation.  To give Miller his due, I must quote him at some length.  (This essay, “The Afterlife of Art” originally appeared in a slightly different form in his Subsequent Performances (1986); page numbers are given for both.) 

The important point is that the so-called language of music cannot be usefully compared to the language of human discourse.  People speak glibly of the language of music, and although this is only a figure of speech, I think it has encouraged a critical assumption that words and music lie on the same level of interpretability.  The extent to which music can be regarded as a language at all is highly questionable. 

We might accept that a score, like a script, relies on notation, the forming of “phrases,” a syntax, and that music an conjure up images—the third [sic] movement of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony skillfully recreates the impression of a storm.  It can evoke moods and, in its own idiosyncratic way, it can also represent colourful scenes and natural events but, since it can neither assert nor deny, there is no way in which music can be said to describe the scenes that it represents.

Nor is there anything in music, for example, that corresponds to a word: there can be no recognizable units or segments for which one can substitute alternative bits with equivalent meanings.  Perhaps the best way of highlighting the differences is that you cannot even imagine a paraphrase in music.  We talk about phrases in music and we talk about phrases in language, but it is central to language that phrases can be paraphrased.  The meaning that is expressed by a sentence can remain more or less under constant paraphrase, whereas it is impossible to imagine what would count as a paraphrase of the opening bars of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, because there is no central, underlying proposition that would remain constant and survive an alternate expression in another series of notes.  Music is syntactical but not semantic.  (p. 248; pp. 38f. in the original)

But isn’t that what a performance is—each artist interpreting what the musical notation is striving to indicate?  Is that not a "paraphrase"?  I take paraphrase to be something like let me take what I read and put it into the words I would have used, to illustrate how I understand this.  Why else do performances sound so different from each other, even when playing from (essentially) the same text?  Granted, the more specific the notational instruction, the more restricted the range of legitimate “paraphrase”—but the same is true in language.  And Miller seems to acknowledge this, but again with very naïve assumptions about musical notation:

Shakespearean scholars, for example, often insist that the metrical structure of the verse automatically distributes the stresses to convey the meanings that Shakespeare had in mind, and to eliminate the unacceptable alternatives.  Now, while there is a great deal to be said in favour of this argument, in so far as a disregard for metre usually leads to a misconstruction of meaning, the structure of the verse does not specify as much as the scholars believe, and playgoers are often startled to discover that metrically indistinguishable readings are, none the less, enjoyably different.  The question all these points raise is: why do playwrights submit their work in such a remarkably indeterminate condition?  Musical scores, after all, leave much less to the imagination of the sight-reader.  Over and above the accurate specifications of pitch, key and rhythm, composers often make detailed references to loudness, energy, and overall phrasing.  Changes of pace are indicated and the tone of a passage is often identified by reference to a rich, descriptive vocabulary.  Nothing comparable is to be found in the text of one of Shakespeare’s plays.  (p. 256f.; p. 45)

Indeed.  Nothing comparable is to be found in the music of Shakespeare’s time, either.  Nor any music until... well, when?  In different historical moments, composers have specified different degrees of information, but one could argue that we were well into the twentieth century before the latent indeterminacy of so many of these factors in the score is replaced with much greater specificity of the sort that Miller seems to imagine has always been a regular characteristic of a musical score.  Bach’s scores hardly look like Stravinsky’s, and the degree to which a listener will recognize the various liberties a performer will take with Bach will depend to a very large extent on what factors the listener values (or is even aware of).  And it is because different performers value those factors differently that, if we listen, our ears are offered such a wealth of interpretive possibility.

Miller holds that a critical difference between musical and dramatic performance is that a musician doesn’t have to “be” a character in the way that an actor does:

Whereas the artist who plays the solo instrument in Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D can successfully perform the part without having to imagine being anything other than a cellist, she does not have to pretend to be Haydn or some person imagined by Haydn.  The actor who plays the part of Claudius, on the other hand, can expect to succeed only if he imagines a person who consistently means something by the lines that appear opposite his name in the script. (p. 249; p. 40)

Well, I am not much of a performer, but this is certainly not consistent with my experience.  It’s not just that I feel I’m a different me when performing, say, Bach or Mozart, but that even within the works of a single composer the me playing is a different sort of person than I am—that is, that Bach calls from me emotions that I can’t say I have ever felt beyond the experience of living in the music, even if only for the moment.  I’m not imagining being an organist, or even being the sort of organist who plays this sort of music.  Actually, I am not aware of “imagining” anything, but I am trying to live through the character of what the music suggests to me at that time in that space on that instrument.  I wonder:  Does that makes sense to anyone else?

It seems to me that it is precisely because subsequent performances of Shakespeare’s plays are interpretations, rather than copies, that they have survived.  The amplitude of Shakespeare’s imagination admits so many possible interpretations that his work has enjoyed an extraordinary afterlife unforeseeable by the authors at the time of writing. (p. 266; p. 55)

Yes.  But is this not also true of Bach or Mozart or any other composer you might care to name?  There is always textual ambiguity, and it is in the interpretation of that ambiguity—even the defiance of it—that we find ourselves.  We may think we’re looking through a window, but it turns out to be a mirror.

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 the source as the Kingsway Carol Book, but that source preserves Reed's arrangement almost intact.  

So how did this metrical change happen?  While I think that Fr. Thirion’s communication to Guilmant was an aural transcription, 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 think it very likely 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 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 upon 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.