27. “Let the rain pitter-patter”

The weather is fright’ning—

The thunder and lightning

Seem to be having their way;

But as far as I’m concerned,

It’s a lovely day.

Even with that epigram, this is the ninth installment in my now-slowed-down-but-still-appearing

This post is essentially a bit of the pre-history of this blog, and there will be more of that in time.  For now I want to tell about the time that the rainy weather changed my professional trajectory entirely.  And, as Irving Berlin put it, oh, what a break for me!

I have mentioned in passing that I am an organist, although this is very much an avocation.  I don’t really keep up my organ playing as I ought to, and for the first time in 15+ years I’m in a job where (with no organ on campus) I can’t just walk down the hall to practice.  I need to make more effort, and to make time for it.  But I do occasionally fill in for various congregations when the organist has to be away.  And so it happened one Sunday (25 October 2015, to be exact) that I was on the bench of a big downtown church in Greenville, SC for both morning and evening services.  I had a busy afternoon in between, so I had to choose music that I could pull together on minimal practice time.  Usually for me this means Bach, as you can pull the stops and go:  you don’t have to work out complicated registration changes unless you want to.   As on that day the church was celebrating Reformation Day (about a week early), Bach was a natural choice anyway.  I had learned from experience that this congregation didn’t listen to the postlude, so I chose something short and to the point for the evening service:  one of Bach’s settings of Luther’s German paraphrase of the Gloria, “Allein Gott in de höh sei Ehr.”  There are a quite a number of Bach settings extant, but I chose BWV 715, one of the easiest, flashiest, and most striking.  It is one of the six (extant) so-called “Passaggio chorales” which probably manifest something of the sort of chorale playing that got Bach in trouble with his congregation in Arnstadt in February 1706 after his Buxtehude pilgrimage:

“Reprove him for having hitherto made many curious variationes in the chorale, and mingled many strange tones in it, and for the fact that the Congregation has been confused by it.”  [trans. in The New Bach Reader, p. 46]

In these works, the chorale is stated with a dense and aggressively dissonant in-your-face style harmony, with interspersed flamboyant runs and arpeggios.  (Hear Ton Koopman performing this work here.)  Think Jimi Hendrix playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in a high Baroque vocabulary.

That morning between services as I was running through the music for the evening, it occurred to me that the dense chromatic writing would make good fodder for an exam I would be giving on the following Tuesday to my Theory II students.  Then I had an extra credit idea:  spot as many sets of parallel fifths/octaves as you can.  And would my students notice the disguised B-A-C-H in the last two bars?

SOURCE:  conclusion of BWV 715; cropped scan of NBA Ser. IV Bd. 3 (ed. Hans Klotz, 1961), p. 15. 

And so it happened that on the next morning I was sitting in my office working on the theory midterm exam, and I remembered my idea for the analysis question.  I discovered that I had left my organ score in my car.  Looking out the window to see a cold rain pouring down, I thought I’ll just go to the IMSLP and use the old complete works edition.  I had been playing out of the Bärenreiter offprint of the NBA text.  (These offprints sometimes include corrections, although the text in this instance was identical with that reproduced above.)  When I pulled up the BG edition, however, all but one of my parallel fifths/octaves were gone:

SOURCE:  the same passage; a marked-up cropped scan of the BG edition (1893), taken from the scan available on the IMSLP.  Those parallels in the NBA text that do not appear in the BG text are indicated in red (although I have not marked other variants here).  The parallel octave that remains is indicated in blue.

Although I had followed Bach research casually over the years, Bach was not at all my area of study.  I was intrigued by this, however, as it seemed like a pretty good example of different editorial ideologies:  the “1893 Bach” couldn’t have possibly intended such solecisms; the “1961 Bach” was a brash rebel.  It was a music textual equivalent of the difference between these famous representations:

SOURCES:  (left) Carl Seffner's 1908 statue of Bach in Leipzig, photo from wikimedia commons; (right) Bernd Göbel's 1985 statue of Bach in Arnstadt, photo from wikimedia commons.

Of course I wanted to know more, and promptly set aside the midterm.  The college library had many of the NBA scores but none of the NBA critical reports.  I e-mailed Patricia Sasser, the music librarian at Furman University just up the road, asking whether she could send me a scan of the page or two covering BWV 715 from the relevant critical report.  Within about an hour she graciously responded, but it only whetted my appetite.  When I asked for a few more pages and explained what I was looking into, she replied “That sounds like a paper for AMS-SE [the Southeast chapter of the American Musicological Society].”  At first I thought it was nothing more than a diversion from the work I ought to be doing, but having spent an hour pulling out all of the editions of Bach’s organ works that I could lay my hands on, I realized I was obsessed.  It did become a paper for AMS-SE, with the most complicated hand-out I’ve ever put together.  Here’s the first page of it:

There are six extant passaggio chorales attributed to Bach:

• Allein Gott in der höh sei Ehr, BWV 715
• Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 722
• Herr Jesu Christ dich uns zu wend, BWV 726
• In dulci jubilo, BWV 729
• Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich BWV 732
• Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her, BWV 738

These six works offer a great perspective on the editing of Bach’s works because 1) none of them survives in his hand (although they do survive in manuscript copies from quite close to him) and 2) the texts conveyed by surviving sources are problematic at best.  None of these works was published until the 1840s.  Indeed, BWV 715 (together with BWV 726) actually did not make it into print until the 1893 BG volume.  These two chorales survive together in a manuscript copy by Johann Peter Kellner—neither a student nor a close colleague of Bach, but his sometimes flawed copies are nonetheless important sources for much of the Bach repertoire (as Russell Stinson has shown).  However audacious Bach’s chorale playing might have been, Kellner’s copy of BWV 715 is manifestly deficient—not only frequently omitting voices haphazardly, but giving harmonies that are implausible in their own terms or as the result of the counterpoint.  The start of Kellner’s manuscript is this:

SOURCE:  (left) detail of Kellner's score, from Bach-Digital; (right) my Finale transcription

Here the irregularity of the part-writing (at times three, or even just two voices) is surely suspect:  voices don’t merge, but they just disappear for a few beats, mid-phrase.  When the same melody is reharmonized a few bars later,

SOURCE:  as above, this time arranged vertically

that initial quartal harmony is, to the say the least, eccentric.  There are, indeed, enough problems here to make me wonder if Kellner was working from a fully-realized score at all, particularly as the four extant chorales apart from the two Kellner copied exist in two separate lines of transmission—one with full realized harmonies, and the other employing figured bass.    If Kellner was trying to realize the figured bass, though, he did it exceedingly poorly in this case.

All of this warrants further discussion, and this summer I was at work on an article about the editing of these works over nearly two centuries, but I had to put it aside when a new source for BWV 715 emerged.  It appears in a practical notebook of 154 pieces (mostly chorale settings) described on its label as being from the repertoire of Bach’s student Johann Christian Kittel (1732-1809—an exact contemporary of Haydn).  This notebook is dated 1800, and is the work of one Johann Christoph Bach (1782-1846), an organist in Bindersleben.  Speaking of eccentricities, this Bach copies some of the pieces across the full spread of an opening (verso and recto), so that there are only four systems in image below, with the gutter of the binding crossing through each of them:

SOURCE:  BWV 715, in my composite of verso and recto digital scans from the Saxon State and University Library, Dresden 

What I note about this source:

1.  It lacks the harmonic eccentricities of Kellner’s copy, 
2.  While the number of voices is inconsistent (including the disappearance of the bass line entirely in the fifth phrase—was this ever played from this score?!?), there are never fewer than three in the harmonized sections, and there very often more than four (five, six, and at one point eight), and
3. While such a thick texture means that parallels are inevitably present, the parallel fifth in the final cadence which had been eliminated in BG is here eliminated by means of precisely the same strategy—arriving at the tenor C early, echoing the cadence which had concluded the fourth chorale phrase.

Curiously, BWV 715 is the only one of the 154 pieces in this collection to be attributed to J. S. Bach.  There are several other passaggio chorale settings—not surprising, as it was a common practice for chorale playing during the eighteenth century.  If Kittel was the conduit through which BWV 715 entered this collection, it suggests that JSB didn’t regard this showy style of harmonizing and peacock preening as a youthful indiscretion set to annoy his Arnstadt elders:  he was still conveying it to his students in Leipzig in his very last years.

Nevertheless, these pieces have been tainted in some of the Bach literature as unworthy of the master.  On that rainy October morning, one of the first commentaries I pulled off my shelf was candid:

I have much more to say about these pieces, and eventually I need to get around to writing that article, if it doesn’t get scooped.  In the meantime, I reflect upon the strange intersection between weather and career:  if it hadn’t been raining on that Monday morning, all of the subject matter of the blog would have remained for me just items of idle curiosity, and you wouldn't be reading this now.

Long as I can be with you, it’s a lovely day.

26. Moving targets (Episode #4)

A recurring theme on this blog is the source that purports to be one thing while it is actually something else.  (In a previous post I discussed this regarding sources for Handel’s Messiah available on the IMSLP.)  Another recurring theme is the edition (or sometimes even manuscript) that changes over time without necessarily calling attention to those changes.  (A post considered this with the case of Bernstein’s Overture to Candide.)  This post combines a little of both.  And while this may all seem innocuous, I’m not sure that it is.

Musicians will be familiar with the American firm Dover Publications.  By the 1970s and 80s they had turned almost entirely to sturdy reprints of public domain editions.  Their output extends far beyond music, and I can remember browsing through their sales catalog, bemused and amazed by the range of reprints for which they could find a market.  Since the 1990s they have originated a few editions of music, but their bread and butter has been reprinting out-of-print editions at competitive prices.  In contrast to the reprints from firms like Kalmus, Dover has made durable products, and the blurb on the back (“this is a permanent book”) wasn’t much of an overstatement.  A few of the scores I’ve used the most have fallen into pieces, but many of the Dover books I got 25+ years ago are still in good condition.

In about 1997 someone at Dover had the bright idea of issuing miniature scores, which would open up a wider educational market.  There was a problem with this:  a lot of the scores they were reprinting originally had appeared in a very large format—say 14 or 15 inches tall.  That was the case of the old Bach Gesellschaft edition, from which Dover drew extensively.  Dover’s “large” scores were already a reduction of the original dimensions:  often 9x12, sometimes 8.5x11.  The smallest of the Dover “large” scores I’ve used is their reprint of Franck organ works, an oblong volume measuring only 8.25 inches at the spine; the original Durand scores from which these were taken measured some 10.5 inches at the spine (although with more generous margins).  The further reduction to a miniature score format can be awkward.

And that is apparently what happened.  Dover’s first release of study scores were the same size as their popular “thrift” reprints of literature, with dimensions of 5x8 or slightly larger.  Within a few years, the same publications (with the same ISBNs) were issued in a slightly larger format.  The images below show side by side these two issues of one of these early publications:

SOURCE:  I put both copies side by side in the photocopier and scanned them, front and back.

The score on the left I got in the fall of 1998 as desk copy for a course for which I was one of the instructors.  I’m not sure when I got the copy on the right, but judging from some notes I made in it I must have had it by 2002.  The key differences on the back cover:  the elimination of the clause “ample margins at the bottom of each score page for notes an analysis” (which itself betrayed that the dimensions of the publication were not calculated with the right “aspect ratio” for the matter that was to appear on the page), the addition of a list of some other available scores, and the increased price (marked-up 1/3).  The contents are the same, so far as I can make out, and it would surprise me if they weren't.

Note the source of this publication.  Here it is (again) from either copyright page:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of copyright page of the Dover miniature score.

The words “an authoritative edition, n.d.” scarcely inspire confidence.  Most of the publications in this series reprint the same edition that Dover issued in a larger format.  Ironically, the large-score publication of Haydn's London symphonies reprinted a series of miniature scores:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of copyright page of the Dover full score.

Eulenburg scores were designed to be small-format.  To my eye, Dover’s enlargement appears odd (there seems to be too much space between staves, too little information on each page) where the proportions seem right in the original format.

It would be reasonable to assume that the Dover miniature score was a reprint of this same text.  Indeed, the IMSLP has assumed as much:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot from IMSLP (accessed 20 June 2017)

But it isn’t so.  Below is a comparison of the first page:  the Dover 1985 (Eulenburg reprint) is on the left; the Dover 1997 miniature score is on the right.  (Apologies for the size of the image, but you can scroll back and forth as necessary to see the details.)

While even at first glance these are recognizably different scores, the differences are not just in the formatting (two systems for the first page of the miniature score).  There are textual differences too.  The miniature score has an initial dynamic of ff for the entire ensemble, has introduced crescendo hairpins in b. 5, and has accents rather than sf in the Violino I part in bb. 3-5.  The miniature score has 58 pages of music, while the Dover/Eulenburg has 74 (not surprising for a score designed to be in small format).

The score I refer to as Dover/Eulenburg (that is, the 1985 Dover reprint) is what it purports to be.  Here is the first page of the Eulenburg score, as proof of that:

SOURCE:  digital scan of p. 1 of 1936 Eulenburg score (ed. Ernst Praetorius)

What, then, is the “authoritative edition” that Dover reprinted in 1997?  It ought to be on the shelves somewhere—and readers at big music libraries might be able to lay their hands on it quickly.  I have pursued it via interlibrary loan (ordering up every edition I can find), but even then editions can be miscatalogued in so many ways.  I haven’t found it yet, and I would be glad to know.  Anyone?  I will be delighted to have an addendum to this post once the source edition is located.

ADDENDUM  21 June 2021

Many thanks to Rex Levang for pointing out that the mystery text appears now on the IMSLP as a Soviet edition (IMSLP #494060), but there is no indication of whether that edition itself was a reprint.  (I suspect it is--it just doesn’t have the look of a Soviet edition to me, although I freely admit that I can’t muster any specific evidence to support that opinion.)  The IMSLP cites Gyorgy Kirkor as the editor, and all twelve of the London Symphonies appear in the same imprint.  If this was an original edition (i.e., not a reprint), it is an odd choice for Dover.

25. [fermata]

This ought to be a Bach post.  I suppose I could make a Bach connection—like the ways in which his cantata cycle plans were interrupted by the efforts to complete his big passion settings.  Today marks the first birthday of this blog, but it also marks a caesura of sorts—a chance to catch one’s breath.  Life has put a fermata on my blogging.

When I started the blog, I committed to posting twice a month.  I’ve done that, and I’ve enjoyed it enormously.  I figured I would be blogging into the void about things that no one really cared much about.  I have been astonished and gratified by the interest people have shown in it (and sometimes been mystified by which posts approached virality); I’ve been delighted to meet new friends and colleagues; and my list of topics for posts seems as long now as it did 25 posts ago.  It amazes me that I haven’t done more with Mozart yet, as I have a lot I want to do there—for example discussing Ian Woodfield’s fascinating discoveries in the autograph manuscript of Così fan tutte, one of my favorite books.  Or (to name another) John Michael Cooper’s study of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” symphony; or the late, lamented Phillip Gossett’s Divas and Scholars, which so engagingly deals with the very practical consequences of a performer’s view of a musical text.  And there are so many fascinating editions to consider—like the new Gershwin project—to say nothing of the older materials that are coming online at an overwhelming rate.  And I have pedagogical issues to discuss. In so many ways, no matter what I treat on this blog it is always the tip of an iceberg in a sea full of them.  Confronting an overload of textual issues, there is something very freeing about knowing that there’s no need to prioritize or triage:  I can chip away at whatever happens to interest me at any given moment, and encourage others to do the same.  And I am simply delighted that anyone else would want to peer over my shoulder.

I must now lift my self-imposed commitment for twice-monthly posts.  I’ve taken a new job and moved my family 400+ miles into a totally new setting.  In that the blog has been an activity in my free time (something that I wasn’t really aware I had), at the moment there are more important calls on that time, such as it is.  In this year of blogging I have published nothing else, and in the coming months a number of projects return to be proofed or reviewed, quite apart from the new job responsibilities.  I will continue to post when I have an opportunity and to tweet anything I see that looks relevant to musical textual issues; but for the next year or so it must needs not be on a regular schedule.  (During this fall term I will hope for a post every six weeks, and hope to post more frequently in the spring.)  I will complete my Bach-Jahrgang project belatedly (like JSB himself), and I know lots of things I want to get to when there is time, including facets of the pre-history of this blog.  And, for those who have joined late, I hope some will review the earlier posts to see what you might have missed.  In the meantime, a few images to whet the appetites:

But for now it must be au revoir.

24. Against the muddy tide

SOURCE:  scan of Dirk Stoop's engraving Aqua Triumphalis (Aug. 23, 1662, preceding the wedding of Charles II) at the National Maritime Museum; available at http://www.historyextra.com/river

Images like the one above are a healthy reminder to me that George I was not the first to have elaborate festivities on the Thames.  And yet the date that will always be most associated with such water parties must surely be 17 July 1717—the impending tercentenary of which I simply must mark with this post.  As musical water parties are known to have happened in each of the three preceding summers, the eye-catching 7/17/1717 date may not be the first performance of Handel’s Water Music, but it is the earliest documented performance—and it is very well documented indeed.

Water Music fits into a long tradition of music for a social occasion; but as a musical structure itself, the work is shockingly innovative—an orchestral piece of unprecedented length and variety.  Are there any predecessors to rival it?  In a way, Water Music represents the first maturity of the orchestra—and, maybe except for occasional performances of Corelli concerti grossi, it must be the earliest music that can be said to fit into the established orchestra repertoire.  While modern symphony orchestras have largely abandoned the Baroque, edged-out by their HIP rivals, Water Music is still performed by all sorts of ensembles, and seems to be a perennial crowd-pleaser.  New recordings (and cheap reissues of old ones) emerge year after year, and twice in recent years (2003 and 2012) there have been conspicuous performances on the Thames itself—conspicuous enough for me to have noticed, anyway.

SOURCE:  Daily Mail image of the 3 June 2012 Jubilee flotilla on the Thames; the Academy of Ancient Music website has some entertaining videos concerning their part of the festivities.

Probably the work seldom gets performed intact.  The 22 movements that comprise what we call Water Music do not cohere in any traditional pattern, and that has caused problems for Handel scholars in the past.  Lacking an autograph, it was assumed that the strange sequence of movements indicated that something had been garbled in transmission.  Here is a handy index from Christopher Hogwood’s Cambridge Music Handbook:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of pp. 18-19 of Handel:  Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks (2005)

As indicated by the catalogue numbers of the Handel Werke Verzeichnis (HWV), Water Music has been allotted three entries—the movements in F (and two in D minor) are HWV 348; those in D major are HWV 349; and those in G major/minor are HWV 350.  HWV thus presents three “suites” together making up a larger collected work.  Lacking any further evidence, this division would be wholly reasonable—and it is more practical in performance, as each suite is unified not only by key but by instrumentation (with trumpets appearing only in the movements on HWV 349, and no brass at all in HWV 350, which instead features flute and recorder).  The idea that the conglomeration of movements that we think of as “Handel’s Water Music” actually comprise three separate works goes back to Handel’s time: some manuscript copies dating from the late 1730s and early 1740s, together with  the 1743 Walsh keyboard arrangement presents the movements grouped together into the three suites.  That sequence took over the received history, and thus the three catalogue numbers.  The work had appeared as three suites in the Hällische Händel Ausgabe (HHA) in 1962, and that imprimatur led to a myriad of recordings that present Water Music so allotted.  And it works:  I was at a concert not that long ago that had the F major suite at the beginning of the program, a smattering of Bach and Telemann in the middle, and the last two suites as the conclusion, the whole making a very satisfying musical experience.

SOURCE:  scan first page of score (f. 2) of 1718 ms.
in the library of the Royal Society of Musicians [no shelfmark];
scan from https://museums.eu/event/details/120375/handels-water-music

Given Handel’s default modus operandi, it would seem a little unusual if Water Music wasn’t to some extent a thing of shreds and patches.  Terence Best points at the solo violins in the fugal section of the French overture, suggesting that that sort of writing would have been inaudible in the open air, and thus likely to have been retained (unthinkingly?) from some preëxisting work.  And yet, as Best is also at pains to point out, all of the earliest manuscript copies not only mix movements of the D and G “suites” together, but in fact they all preserve most or all of the 22 movements in very nearly the same order.  The 2004 discovery of the earliest known manuscript copy (datable to 1718 [and the first page is shown at right])—which gives the 22 movements in precisely the same sequence as the first published full score (ed. Samuel Arnold in 1788), a sequence familiar to us because Arnold’s edition was the primary source for Chrysander’s in the old complete works volume (1886).  We do not know Arnold’s source (although Best [p. 102] argues reasonably that it was indeed this source), but the newly-discovered copy is enough to verify that this sequence of movements was known within a year of the supposed 1717 premiere.  The HHA has thus now issued a new volume (2007, co-edited by Best and Hogwood) to supersede the old.  (This pair of editions would make an ideal topic for my series of “moving targets,” but I haven’t done sufficient homework comparing them to write that up yet.  Eventually.)

So what about that unusual sequence, now being restored to favor?  It is a curious hybrid of suite and concertante forms, and it doesn’t even settle down to just one sort of suite.  It opens with a French overture, interrupted before a final cadence by a solo oboe number; following that is really an Italian overture (fast-slow-fast) featuring the horns; then a series of conventional dances or dance-like numbers (menuets, bourrée, hornpipe, “Air”).  After all the F major movements are done, there follows a d-minor number displaying Handel’s orchestrational technique at its most forward-looking—but which is hardly either a closing or an opening to a suite.  Thereafter, in Hogwood’s words,

“From this point in the suite both the scoring and the changes of tonality become more varied, a strategy that seems designed to maintain attention through an hour-long performance—the length of time of a full act in an opera, but no other musical form to date.”  [p. 35]

The brilliant brass writing that follows is closer to Handel’s (subsequent) concerti a due cori than to anything else—in other words concertante writing again  The remaining dances are diverse and diverting, but there is no conclusion as substantial as those of Telemann’s Tafelmusik; the “Trumpet Menuet” that de facto brings the whole thing to a close seems perfunctory, and to my ear the weakest part of the whole set.

SOURCE:  discogs.com

Given his later scholarship on this work, I was curious to revisit Hogwood's own recording (1978).  It is inevitably a product of its time.  Hogwood not only followed the three suite model of the original HHA, but also interpolated two much later F-major reworkings of the two central D-major trumpet/horn numbers.  Wonderful music as these are, their inclusion here only muddies the textual waters.  And to confuse things further, Decca several times reissued only either the “horn suite” or the “trumpet suite” from these sessions.  Hogwood’s dominance in the recording market place in the 1980s and 1990s has surely meant that—for better or worse—these performances have played a large role in shaping our sense of the work.  (Or works?)  I’m not even sure that it is a problem, but it is worth acknowledging.  (A similar issue came up in a post concerning Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.)

I tried an informal experiment for this post:  listening to a recording with the CD or MP3 player set on SHUFFLE, hoping to see if any resulting sequence of movements would be viable.  It won’t, at least for me, but if we were to view the whole thing as a sort of compendium of music to keep the party going, a number of routes might work.  A crucial difference is to have a musical intelligence making the decision, rather than just a mechanical randomization.  In other words, it requires a deejay.

23. Tidbits at the first milepost

The subject of this eighth installment of the Settling Scores

comes about by chance.  Quite independently of this project, I had set myself the task of studying all of Bach’s extant cantatas in more-or-less the sequence in which they were performed during his first few years in Leipzig.  (I will go back later to pick up the earlier cantatas—those, anyway, that he isn’t known to have reprised.)  This project occurred to me a few years ago when reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, a stimulating Bach book by John Eliot Gardiner, who himself undertook a different sort of Bach cantata pilgrimage in the Bach anniversary year, 2000.  Gardiner’s book was for me a healthy resituating of the context, especially as he gives much more attention given to the vocal works than to the instrumental works.  (Moreover, Thuringian potato farming had never before crossed my mind.)

Gardiner inspired me to go through the cantatas methodically, giving myself basically a week with each—looking, of course, for specific ways in which Bach himself developed over the years.  I splurged on a copy of the NBA study scores of the complete set of cantatas (and when Bärenreiter tweeted asking for pictures of “towers” of their publications, I obliged with this [at right]—even just my NBA holdings now loom over my middle child).  And so I started in the first week of June with his first cantata for Leipzig, BWV 75 Die Elenden sollen essen, written for the first Sunday after Trinity, 1723.  (At the moment I’m a little ahead of the liturgical calendar, as Easter was later this year than it was in 1723, but this allows me to get Advent in the right place.)

On Sunday, 4 June, I listened to the cantata and read what Alfred Dürr had to say in his magisterial survey.  On Monday, I went through the score and listened again, and then that evening idly opened the relevant Kritischer Bericht of the NBA.  I wasn’t expecting my listening project to be a topic for this blog, but already I find interest stirred by textual minutiae—the “trees,” so to speak, that may well prevent me from giving Bach's “forests” my full attention.  I think I have written already that I can’t look at a critical report without finding something that is curious enough to make me want to say “Hey, listen to this....”  (In this respect I am particularly blessed to be married to a musician; she is used to hearing me go on about such trivia, and while she may not particularly care about it, she at least understands why I do.)

SOURCE:  marked-up Bach-Digital screen-shot

Curiosity no. 1

C. P. E. Bach inherited the now-extant autograph score after his father’s death, but the work is mislabeled in the subsequent catalogue of C. P. E.’s estate.  It is listed there not as “Die Elenden sollen essen” (the first words to be sung) but as “Was hilft des Purpurs Majestät” (the beginning of the recitative that follows the opening chorus) because his economical father had used the empty staves under the chorus to write in the recitative.  “Was hilft” are thus the first words to appear in the score, and the hasty cataloguer of the estate skipped the title page and copied merely the words on the first page of the score, not recognizing that the beginnings of two consecutive movements appeared together.  The first page of the autograph score is shown at right; I have added a red-dotted line to divide the opening chorus at the top of the page from the first recitative at the bottom, and I have circled the quoted text.

Curiosity no. 2

The BG edition omits fourteen bars in the middle of the first aria.  This was discovered by Robert L. Marshall more than 50 years ago, but IMSLP users (or those who use Kalmus reprints of it) may well be unaware of the omission.  It is an egregious textual error:

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of extract from first aria (no. 3): (left) BG volume XVIII, detail of p. 166, downloaded from IMSLP; (right) digital scan of NBA Ser. I Bd 15, p. 106 (although taken from the set of study scores—where it is reproduced as vol. 6, p. *132).

This parablepsis is easily explained, as it relates directly to curiosity no. 1:  the opening chorus is so long that not only the first recitative but also this first aria is notated one-system-at-a-time at the bottom of the page.  The first movement ends on the same page (a verso) that concludes with b. 111 of the aria.  On the facing recto, Bach continues with b. 112 at the top of the page—for the first and only time in that aria.  Wilhelm Rust, the BG editor, overlooked this and the following system as he was preparing the third movement, as for the previous eighteen pages he could safely tune out everything at the top of the page (material that he would have already dealt with for the first movement).  He didn’t realize that he had omitted fourteen bars, but he must have noticed something was wrong, as he altered the text in order to make syntactic sense.

SOURCE:  marked-up composite scan of pages from Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 18-19).

Curiosity no. 3

Hypermeter (that is, groupings of bars in strong-weak patterns).  Much of this is obvious without turning to the critical report—for example in no. 10, an alto aria notated in 3/8 time, but in which the only bar that is a simple 3/8 bar is the very first one.  All the rest are grouped together by means of short barlines into groups of two (effectively 6/8) or, occasionally, three (= 9/8).  I am reminded of Beethoven’s instruction ritmo di tre battutte in the Scherzo of Symphony no. 9—although, with no timpani thundering away here, it may be less obvious to the listener.

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of the first two systems of no. 10, cropped from Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 29 and 30);
I have marked some of the short barlines and circled the first of the quasi-9/8 groups.

Although Bach does not always notate these short barlines in all three staves, the pattern is clear.  He is thus more consistent in his usage here than, for example, in his autograph of the Corrente of the B-minor solo violin partita, BWV 1002  There the hypermetrical paired bars of the musical material is clear enough, but it is hard to know from his notation whether he intended short barlines to indicate the hypermetrical groupings (as above in BWV 75), or if these were merely a matter of notational convenience—that is, a short barline (not always the same length) in the immediate (i.e., vertical) proximity to each note on either side of that barline.  Without pushing any argument here beyond this, I have circled below in red those short barlines that are placed close to the notes before and after; in green the strongest evidence that these barlines are indeed intended to be short (together with the fact that his full barlines tend to extend either above or below the staff, or both); and in blue the two instances where the full barline before the putative “weak” bar is again proximate to the notes on either side (in both cases the d and c in the staff).

SOURCE:  marked-up cropped screenshot of autograph fair copy of BWV 1002/iii, bb. 1-32 (P967 f. 5r  from Bach-Digital)

A further hypermetrical curiosity in BWV 75 is a change Bach made as he prepared the manuscript.

SOURCE: cropped scan of the beginning of no. 5, from
Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 20)

Although it manuscript is very clean (and Stephen Crist has unraveled fascinating evidence by comparing this clean manuscript with the unusually messy manuscript of BWV 76, the cantata that followed it for Bach’s second week in Leipzig), as he began no. 5, a soprano aria with obbligato oboe d’amore, he first notated the solo part with the time signature C, immediately cancelling it by superimposing 3/8.  (As shown at right, the other two staves have 3/8 from the start.)  I have puzzled over this.  This aria proceeds in a regular pattern of 4-bar groups (with few deviations); was he thinking of [re-notating?] it as a compound meter, essentially 12/8?  (If so, why not just write 12/8?)  Was it merely a slip of the pen?  Very curious indeed.

Are we having fun yet?

Curiosity no. 4

Neither the BG nor the NBA text accurately reflects the autograph’s rhythmic notation for the Oboe d'amore in movement five (the beginning of which is pictured above), but this is because the editors sought to present what they surmise Bach intended rather than what he ultimately left on the page.

SOURCE: cropped scan of no. 5 (bb. 16-18), from
Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 20)

The opening figure of the oboe d’amore ritornello recurs as a primary motive in the solo vocal part, but by the time he wrote the vocal entry he recognized that the placement of the dotted rhythm made for very awkward text declamation.  Consequently he moved the 32nd-note earlier in the figure [at left].  The discrepancy between the oboe figure and the vocal figure continues in the autograph until b. 59 (an incipit indicating the repetition of the opening ritornello), at which point he wrote the revised (that is, vocal) rhythm into the instrumental part.  In no instance, however, does the autograph show any signs of an alteration to the rhythm.  Both the BG and NBA presume (reasonably, but not inevitably) that the rhythm should be made uniform throughout.

SOURCE:  cropped digital scan of NBA Ser. I Bd 15, p. 108 (although taken from the set of study scores—where it is reproduced as vol. 6 p. *134)

These were not the only curiosities in this work (for example, how the 32-bar choral setting concluding each part of this cantata was later transformed into the 39-bar setting that concludes BWV 100)—and of course one wouldn’t have to resort to the critical report to find all of these.  Still, I think it is a pity that musicians generally seem to regard the critical reports—even without looking at them—as dry if not actually intimidating.  Admittedly they are not generally page-turners, to say the least.  For Americans, it doesn’t help that they’re often in a language other than English, and even when they are not the technical language can seem impenetrable.  But it doesn’t take long to get used to them with their specialized vocabulary and the ubiquitous abbreviations.  After I got this blog off the ground, a colleague remarked to me that “it’s sort of like you read the critical reports so we don’t have to.”  I hope that’s not the case.   And I greatly respect those editors like Jonathan Del Mar who make a genuine effort to make their commentaries as lucid and even winsome as possible—editors, that is, who seem to take real joy in communicating with others about their work, rather than regarding the critical report as a contractual obligation of unutterable drudgery.  There is buried treasure in many critical reports, a subject I will return to time and again, I’m sure.

22. Sourcing nostalgia

In his brilliant volume The Ingalls Wilder Family Songbook, which comprises all of the music mentioned in the “Little House” novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), Dale Cockrell allows that

“As object, no such songbook ever existed.  As a representation of the common musical experience of a given era and region, however, this heretofore hypothetical songbook might well have informed the musical understandings of more Americans than many a real bindings-and-paper edition.” [p. xiv]

SOURCE:  A-R Editions

So Cockrell (with the editors of the distinguished Music of the United States of America series) gives us a bindings-and-paper volume manifesting this imagined collection—and a hefty tome it is. This is an anthology of disparate materials.  It is a fascinating read, even for one relatively unfamiliar with the Ingalls Wilder novels.  (I need to borrow them from my kids.  I’ll do that.  Eventually.)

Cockrell’s sequencing of the items is sensible and does exactly what he says he wants it too:  it exhibits the broad range of repertory that formed such an integral part of family life in the Dakota Territory.  The first section, encompassing music that Wilder would have known from the oral tradition, has sections for Children’s Songs, Fiddle Tunes, and Folk Songs (although of course all of Cockrell’s sources for this are published, some from much later in the twentieth century)  The second section comes from music that would have been disseminated in print in Wilder’s time. It is an interesting list, which he amply justifies in his preface.

Concert/Theater Songs   [Cockrell parses this as music originally intended for public entertainment]
Hymns/Sunday School Songs
Parlor Songs    [for domestic entertainment]
Scottish/Irish Songs
Singing School Music

For this conglomeration of disparate repetoire, Cockrell has had to devise criteria for selecting his primary source for each item.  He describes three ideal critieria:

1)  “If there is physical evidence that Wilder was actually referencing a specific titled publication or a title from a published collection, then that, ipso facto, would be chosen for editing.” [p. xlii] 

This is true of seven items in his repertory, all from the 1871 songbook Pure Gold for the Sunday School.  Sometimes Wilder herself even cites the page number in this collection.

SOURCE:  screenshot of title page from archive.org scan of Pure Gold for the Sunday School (1871)

2)  “If there is compelling circumstantial evidence that Wilder was actually referencing a specific titled publication or a title from a published collection, then that would be chosen for editing.”  [Ibid.]

For example, Cockrell argues persuasively that The Conqueror (1880) was the singing school book purchased by Almanzo Wilder at the singing school in De Smet in the fall of 1884, when he became engaged to Laura Ingalls (as recounted in These Happy Golden Years).  Thus The Conqueror becomes his primary source, trumping a different collection that remains to this day in the Wilder estate.  (For the full compelling argument you must read Cockrell, p. xliii.)  Incidentally, The Conqueror contains the most exciting advertisement I’ve ever seen in such publications.

Cockrell's third criterion proved to be too idealistic:

3) “For titles without such evidence, the musical source most consistent chronologically and geographically with Wilder’s narrative of the Ingalls family would be chosen for editing.  Ideally, this would mean an imprint or collection from the 1870s or early 1880s out of Chicago or the upper Midwest.”  [p. xlii]

As Cockrell explains,

“It quickly became clear that the madness in these few words far outstripped the method.  Few of the titles referenced in the Little House books were published in Chicago or the upper Midwest during the books’ chronological period, and some earlier published numbers were no longer in print at all during the 1869-1885 period.  A rigorous application of the selection criteria left many exceptions to justify, ultimately an affront to the faith in order in logic that underlies the scholar’s craft.  It was time to rethink the rationale behind the criterion.”  [p. xlv]

I am less troubled by these chronological problems than he is.  When I remember the printed music of my childhood, I think of the contents of piano benches in my grandparents’ homes, and there nothing was more recent than three decades before my birth, and quite a few things were then forty or fifty years old—tattered, torn, taped, and clearly family favorites.  I can only imagine that in Wilder’s youth—when printed music was even harder to come by—such publications would be retained for decades after purchase too.  In any case, his more practical revision to criterion #3 fixes the problem, even if to my mind it goes to an extreme:

3 [rev.])   “For all other titles, the first publication or collection in the United States would be chosen for editing.”  [p. xlvi]

Admirable a project as this is, however, I am disappointed because the product is not what it might have been.  Although it is part of MUSA (Music of the United States of America), a series of scholarly editions that has featured a range of creative editorial approaches, I wonder if the forethought of the offprint series Laura's Music—the considerably cheaper and more practical issues aimed at an educational market—had any consequences on the production of this parent volume.  The main consequence that concerns me is how neat and tidy it all is.  This volume preserves the look of the MUSA series, in that every item has been newly computer-set.  Standard as this practice is in music publishing, in this instance I think it would have been better to leave some (if not indeed the majority) of these as digital scans of the source material.  Although of course some expense would be associated with acquiring the high-resolution scans needed, a considerable expense was already used in the new setting of the music, and the multiple stages of proofreading it.  In the spirit of “teach a man to fish...,” I believe this would be considerably more useful volume if it were to instruct the user how to read the nineteenth-century sources (in all of their notational variety) than to present polished twenty-first-century standardized versions of the texts.  (In a sense this complaint follows from the end of my previous post, quoting Peter Williams about editors willfully misrepresenting sources in order to present them in a standardized new edition.)

For example, why can the reader not be trusted to learn how to deal with a score layout for four-part harmony that puts the melody on the third stave?  At least Cockrell retains the open score (that is, a staff for each voice); but why must he move the melody to the top?

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. 149 of The Conqueror as available at archive.org

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Cockrell edition, p. 318.

Not only would I say that the clean, new presentation does not offer any real advantage over the source text, it actually loses something—namely the notational conventions of the source.  This loss was of course intentional, but I feel it is a pity.

Cockrell also generally removes the mid-bar phrasing barlines characteristic of nineteenth-century hymnals, arguing that “[r]etention of the now archaic barline-convention would, I believe, cause much more confusion than illumination” [p. 343].  In heaven’s name why?  Does he expect the user of this volume to be too dense to understand such a basic practice?  (Omitting these extra barlines substantially simplifies the computer-setting (a subject of a prior post), of course, but that’s no justification.)

Similarly, preserving more recent notation practice, in some instances Cockrell makes minute modifications to rests and repeat signs “to accommodate all rhythmic contingencies” [p. 349].  See the adjustment here to the last bar of each strain:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. 5 of Ryan’s Mammoth Collection  as available at violinsheetmusic.org

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Cockrell edition, p. 19.  (I was surprised to see no comment in the critical notes to indicate that many sources give the first sixteenth-note of b. 4 a tone higher, but as Ryan served as his sole source for this item, I guess there was no obligation to note this oddity.  Curiously, though, Cockrell's note does not record that he has omitted Ryan's D.C. indication )

In the fiddle tune “Money Musk,” Cockrell imposes repeats in order to make it conform with “conventions observed in the fiddle tune tradition” to yield a repeating AABBAABB... pattern.  By relying on one source only, he can’t discuss whether other fiddle tunebooks have these repeats.

In his efforts to track down all of the music referenced by Wilder, he only once fails to locate anything—“The Red Heifer”—and his account of it is consequently one of the most interesting in the volume:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Cockrell, p. 354.

Nonetheless, in other instances I had my doubts that he had settled on the right version of the tune.  His source selected for “The Girl I Left Behind Me” gives the tune more or less as I know it, but it doesn't match the scansion of the lyrics that Wilder quotes, which made me suspect that she had a different melody in mind.  (“Let the toast pass” is a similar situation.) The fiddle tune “The Devil’s Dream” is a stand-in for one Wilder more than once refers to as “Devil’s Hornpipe,” which according to Cockrell is otherwise undocumented.  He sagely notes “it is not uncommon for autonomous tunes, especially ones with local dissemination, to escape collection.”  I am not surprised that the vernacular fiddle-tunes seem to have the most slippery textual problems in this volume.

I shouldn’t be complaining.  Cockrell set himself a Herculean task:  locating and evaluating the disparate sources of Wilder’s musical autobiography, starting essentially from scratch.  Even if he didn’t fulfill this in the way I might want it, he nonetheless fulfilled the task very well.