45. Adeste infideles

I was at a performance of Handel’s Messiah a few weeks ago where—not for the first time, it must be said—I noticed some surprises in the orchestral accompaniment.  I have grown used to hearing trumpets and drums (derived ultimately from Mozart’s 1789 orchestration) creep into the “Wonderful Counselor” exclamations in the chorus “For unto us a child is born.”   After all, you’re paying the trumpet and timpani players, so why not get your money’s worth?  I don’t like this philosophy, but I get the justification.

It was clear, however, that not just the trumpet players but also at least the sole second violin player as well were using performing materials reprinted from the 1902 Ebenezer Prout edition:  numbers that should have had unison violins (the aria “How beautiful are the feet,” for example) had instead a fuller string accompaniment.

SOURCE:  cropped screen shot of Prout edition Vln. II part p. 27 (from scan at IMSLP #47447)

The conductor is a friend, so I asked him about this.  “They brought their own partbooks.  It wasn’t worth fixing.”  Particularly when you're operating on just one or two rehearsals, this is certainly efficient:  they’ve already marked it (bowings, etc.) and are used to it.  Why fight it for the one or two people in the audience who will grind their teeth?  (When it is a community performance anyway, who in their right mind would expect a purist approach?)

Such textual mash-ups hardly do any damage, at least as far as the vast majority of the audience is concerned.  What was performed was basically “Prout lite”:  we didn’t have the full Prout orchestration—flutes, clarinets, horns, etc.—but we had bits of his re-workings running in parallel against (and within the confines of) Handel's economical original scoring.  So what?

I guess the “so what?” is the principle of conflating editions by letting performers in an ensemble supply their own, independently of each other.  I was treated to an execrable example of this a few weeks later, and it gives rise to my thoughts today.  It was a pops concert by a community orchestra which also featured a local chorus.  The show concluded with a holiday sing-along section.  One of the sing-along carols was “O come, all ye faithful” (Adeste fideles—a tune which has a fascinating textual history of its own).  When we started a second verse—to the text “Sing, choirs of angels”—several sopranos in the choir took it upon themselves to sing the descant.  By this I mean a very popular descant devised by David Willcocks very early in his tenure as Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge.

SOURCE:  detail of Carols for Choirs (OUP, 1961) p. 89.

It is popular for good reason, as it makes very effective counterpoint out of a sequential figure familiar from another carol, the Renaissance tune associated with the 1901 text “Ding! dong! merrily on high.”  The earliest source I have located with Willcocks’s setting is a live recording of (portions of) the 1958 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.  (More on that source later).  Many choral sopranos know this descant off by heart, and I have been only mildly surprised to see it appear even in hymnals—an implicit invitation for the congregation to join in as well.  This descant and its attendant harmonization, and with it Willcocks’s organ harmonization of the final verse, have become standards the world over.  Indeed, the final verse’s half-diminished-seventh chord at the word Word shows up regularly in Twitter and Facebook posts at this time of year—apparently as a sort of Christmas “money shot.”  By way of example:

SOURCE: screenshot from Twitter:  do your own search “Willcocks word chord” on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever and you'll get plenty of further examples.

Curious as it may seem, there have been instances in history of a descant supplanting the original as the main melody.  This seems to have happened in the case of “Puer natus in Bethlehem” and—for all we know—maybe “O come, O come Emmanuel” as well.  (For discussion of the textual situations of each, see The New Oxford Book of Carols, pp.172 and 45.)  I don’t think Adeste fideles is threatened at all by the descant, but Willcocks’s descant is clearly here to stay:  maybe because it seems to be such fun to sing.  And so the sopranos sang the descant at the concert—even though it was harmonically incompatible with the version the orchestra was playing.  It sounded awful.  And it could be easily fixed with the rehearsal instruction “Sopranos:  no descant.” If they would cooperate.

On the same program, the choir sang along to Leroy Anderson’s charming miniature Sleigh Ride.  Mitchell Parrish’s very clever lyrics were written for it when it was adapted to be a popular song—an extremely popular song, as it happens.  The original key and modulations don’t really work for singers, and it showed at this performance.  I love the piece, but here it was marred by trying to have both the song and the original orchestral work together:  Messiah wasn’t harmed really by the simultaneous versions, but Sleigh Ride was destroyed—just as was “Sing, choirs of angels.”  I’m not a purist, but without the textual meddling these performances would have been just fine.   Bah!  Humbug!

SOURCE:  scan of 1961 edition cover;
I'm not sure of the date of my copy, but
on the back the printed price is $1.80.

One final note about the Willcocks descant:  I believe it first appeared in print in 1961 in the fantastically successful anthology Carols for Choirs, coedited by Willcocks and Reginald Jacques.  This book has had a host of successors (so that it in reprints it was retitled Carols for Choirs 1), and has spread the “Lessons & Carols” style and liturgy all around the world, providing texts for others to perform.  Even in its earliest printing, however, the descant is not quite the same as the version captured on the 1958 recording.  In the recording, the trebles sing the text “Gloria in excelsis deo” at the start of the verse, rather than (with the rest of the choir and congregation) “Sing, choirs of angels.”  Unfamiliar as it is to me with this text, I have to say that I like Willcocks’s original version better:  the imperative Sing of the congregation is answered by the angelic voices above.  Oh, well; second thoughts are not always improvements.  Maybe some enterprising choral director will restore Willcocks’s original version on occasion?  (A word to the wise: just make sure everyone is singing the same version.)

* EXTRA * appreciating Linda Shaver-Gleason

In the summer of 2016, just as I was launching Settling Scores, I saw a post on the Facebook page of the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) from Linda Shaver-Gleason, a Mendelssohn scholar just finishing up her doctorate at the University of California–Santa Barbara, about the upcoming NABMSA conference at Syracuse University.  Somewhere in the responses to the post someone mentioned Linda's blog, Not Another Music History Cliché!  She, too, had just started blogging—but she started with a bang:  thirteen substantial posts in the first two months.  Intimidating!  She was covering an astoundingly wide range of topics, with a surpassing understanding of historiography [how history has been written], and a winsome tone.  Moreover, she demonstrated that the blog was a good medium not just for musicological commentary, but for real scholarship.  As I read, I thought My students need to be reading this.... Actually, virtually everyone I know needs to be reading this.  She was clearly getting a wide readership, judging from the comments to each post.  Linda was already a genuine public musicologist, still in graduate school.

I was a little nervous about meeting her:  Linda knew what she was doing.  My first post would come out a few days before the conference, and I could hardly introduce myself as a “fellow social-media musicologist.”  I was impressed that she already had her own voice, while I was only (ten and more years after my doctorate) just beginning to realize I had a voice at all.  But then, at a coffee break on the last morning of the conference, I summoned up the courage to speak with her.  She was gracious, encouraging, and enthusiastic.  In fact, she was exactly the person I should have expected after reading her blog:  genuine, curious, irreverent, serious, funny....  I’d like to recall that she friended me on Facebook after the meeting, but I think it was the other way around.

Shortly after that meeting—where she clearly acquired a number of new Facebook friends from the NABMSA crowd, she posted this:

Source:  cropped screenshot from Facebook (taken 5 Dec. 2019).   Yes, that is Alex Trebek on the left:  Linda was a contestant on Jeopardy! in 2017.

Once again I was humbled.  How did she have it altogether, while at the same time battling—and winning—against cancer?  And she also has a young son, who is about the age of my youngest.  As so often in my career, I feel honored just to know such people.

Early in 2017, Linda announced that the cancer had returned and had metastasized to her brain.  It seemed pretty grim then, but she has fought, endured—flourished, even—over the last two and half years.  She was working on transforming her blog into a book.  Tonight, from her hospice bed, she announced that she won’t continue with that project.  Much as I would have valued that book, I suspect it could never have given her the readership that the blog already has, and I hope will, in perpetuity.

A few days ago as I started this post, I feared it would be titled “In Memoriam.”  I don’t want another one of those.  And so why not honor Linda now?

She has been a voracious reader, and always looking for suggestions.  At the beginning of 2019 I sent her a copy of Josephine Tey’s mystery novel The Daughter of Time (1951).  It is an odd example of the genre, and it took Linda a little while to warm to it.  Tey’s regular detective, Alan Grant, is flat on his back in a hospital bed, but his active mind desperately seeks a problem to solve.  He ends up considering the case of Richard III and the princes in the tower, going through piles of library books that all tell the same old story.  Actually, I’ll let Linda describe it:  click here for her review.

At the end of her review, Linda came back to the title, puzzling over what she must have missed.  “Who/what is the daughter of time?”  I realized then that the used copy I had ordered from abebooks.com must have been missing the epigram page, which Tey presents thus:

TRUTH IS THE DAUGHTER OF TIME.

—Old Proverb

(I would gloss this as “the stories as they are told and retold acquire the power of truth, even if they didn't really happen.”  That has been the substance of her pathbreaking blog.)

It occurs to me now that this situation—the missing page, which would be the key to the puzzle—is very much how I see Linda’s work.  In her blog, she explains those pages missing from the way music history has been told; when those pages are presented, the whole picture can look very different.

With Linda's inevitable retirement from the field, suddenly, again, it was if a page has been ripped out.  We have to remember that the source is incomplete, that there is more to be told—and that others may have explained away those missing pages so that they no longer seem necessary.  I am reminded of Mozart’s fragmentary Rondo for Horn and Orchestra, K 371.  The work is fragmentary in two ways:  1) Mozart never completed the orchestration, and 2) the autograph lost a few leaves at some point, only rediscovered in 1990.  The absence of these leaves was not clear to the editors of either the old or the new complete works, despite a bizarre moment at the juncture of the two sections where the 60-bar passage is absent.

Source:  scan of K. 371 as in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Werke, XXIV/1 (1882) from IMSLP #88078, but the reading of the NMA is essentially the same.  This system begins with bar 19; after b. 26 should have followed sixty more bars in the missing leaves discovered by Marie Rolf in 1990.

With Linda’s death, we will have lost a page—nay, countless pages.

... and yet, as history always has still to be written, I should not despair:  Linda has shaped the way so many have approached their work as musicologists—and the testaments on her Facebook page now demonstrate this.  Rather than thinking of missing pages, I expect she’d rather us be looking at the blank pages (and blog posts) of that history waiting to be filled.  Filled honestly, unflinchingly, and with whatever grace we can muster.

Thanks, Linda.  You encouraged me to be myself, and it was probably the most important lesson of my career.

UPDATE  15 January 2020

Linda was assassinated by cancer on 14 January 2020.  There have been a number of tributes in recent weeks, and I’m sure more will follow.  But here are two:
https://nationalsawdust.org/thelog/2019/12/31/linda-shaver-gleason-exit-interview-with-a-public-musicologist/
and
https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/music/myth-busting-music-blogger-honored-mourned-online-in-her-final-days

UPDATE 27 April 2020

And this, from the American Musicological Society newsletter:
https://www.amsmusicology.org/news/503457/Linda-Shaver-Gleason-1983-2020.htm

* EXTRA * EXTRA * In memoriam S. Craggs †

I learned this morning of the death a few weeks ago of a dear friend and (I’m proud to say) colleague, Stewart R. Craggs (1943–2019).  In my very first blog post I wrote about the experience of studying in a library room devoted to the research tools for works of composers, the M3s and ML134s.  Stewart produced an astonishing number of ML134s over the years for a wide range of composers, mainly British.  His first work was on William Walton, and over the decades he revised his works catalogue twice.  It was a great honor when he asked me to write the introduction for the third edition, which appeared as the final volume of the William Walton Edition.  Below, a jolly bunch of Waltonians celebrate the completion of the project at an OUP reception on 27 March 2014:

L-R:  JBK, Stewart Craggs, Lionel Friend, Alessandra Vinciguerra, David Lloyd-Jones, Michael Burden

My introduction for the catalogue was a bit of a gushing tribute.  OUP truncated it a bit, so I thought I would post the unedited version here in tribute to Stewart.  It says what I wanted it to the first time, although it is wholly inadequate to honor him as he deserved.  I send my condolences to his family.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

INTRODUCTION

The cover of the paperback issue. 

James Brooks Kuykendall

The individual that takes this volume down from the shelf is very likely in search of answers; indeed, facts it contains in abundance.  But the labour that produced it was one dedicated to hunting out facts even when they seemed contradictory, or when the pattern they produced seemed at odds with received wisdom.  The result is, to be sure, a nuanced account of the documents surrounding William Walton—documents which amass together to reveal much of the life and works of the man.  Motivating all of the archival research, though, is an abiding passion for the music itself.  Stewart Craggs can recall a fascination beginning already in his childhood beside the radio, ‘when the strength and majesty of the first symphony created an impression that has never faded’.

Dr. Craggs is not Dr. Johnson’s ‘harmless drudge,’ who remains ‘doomed to only to remove the rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius’.  Rather, Craggs’s work  has been devoted to discovering a complex Walton lying behind a number of façades—and the real figure seems to attract more attention from performers and scholars year by year, even as the nuances are revealed.  Craggs’s enthusiasm for even the minutiae of his subject is couched in a very congenial style, yielding a reference work of a sort the late Christopher Palmer classified even as ‘reading-in-bed material’.  Indeed, much else of what Palmer wrote in his introduction for the second edition of this catalogue (1990) still holds.  The compiler’s ‘untiring industry’ has not abated, and the rich harvest of information continues, so much so that it seems a pity that it has to be arrested so that it can be manifested on the pages of this volume.  Naturally the work goes on, and this third edition represents only a certain state of his Walton research, now in its fifth decade.

Craggs’s formal research on Walton began in the late 1960s when he selected the composer as the topic for a thesis to be submitted in application to become a Fellow of the Library Association (now the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals).  At first Craggs conceived of the work to be mainly a bibliography and discography; as his spadework uncovered a body of material that had been completely forgotten (for example, the incidental music for The Son of Heaven, The Boy David, and Macbeth), his supervisor, Alec Hyatt-King, advocated that the thesis include a work catalogue as well.  The thesis was successfully submitted in 1973.  Alan Frank, head of music at Oxford University Press and thus a key contact during the gestation of the thesis, proposed publishing Craggs’s research as a complete thematic catalogue.  This appeared in 1977, and it was perhaps the most tangible and significant of the many seventy-fifth birthday tributes to the composer.  The extended prefatory ‘critical appreciation’ by Michael Kennedy formed the nucleus of the authorised biography that was to appear only in 1989.  Kennedy had deferred writing his full-length biography until after the death of his subject; the publication of the catalogue before the composer’s death made a second edition a foregone conclusion, even with the decline in Walton’s compositional output in his last years. 

Hardly had the 1977 catalogue emerged from the presses before Craggs embarked on further Walton research for a Master of Arts at the University of Strathclyde.  His three-volume thesis “William Turner Walton:  his life and music” was completed in 1978 under the supervision of the eminent bibliographer William R. Aitken.  In the preface, Craggs remarks:

“There has been so far no entirely satisfactory and detailed biographical account of Walton.   Those that have been published all seem to have been based upon factual information communicated by Walton to H J Foss in 1932, to which nothing much has been added over the years.  In my research I have tried to discover the true facts rather than those purported to be true.  To do this, I have approached many individuals involved in Walton’s career.  Thus I have been able to begin correcting prior misapprehensions and have filled in much missing detail of considerable musicological interest....”

Walton himself was only partially helpful, in that he tended to favour the briefest possible reply to any query.  He was wary of the painstaking efforts of ‘Scraggs’ to verify every detail, to supplant a simple explanation with a more complicated truth, and to exhume what lay buried under a carefully constructed persona.  The ‘Grand Old Man’ image had been codified by the press and the BBC in the 1972 and 1977 birthday celebrations, and it was one Walton was happy to adopt as the story he wished to be told.  Although Walton himself had maintained an arm’s-length relationship with his chronicler, his widow recognised that Craggs knew the music and the documents more intimately than anyone had known the man himself.  At her suggestion, Craggs was given the task of examining the voluminous archive of Walton correspondence held by Oxford University Press; this yielded substantial new factual data for many works, and the more complete documentation is clearly evident in the 1990 second edition of the catalogue.  Craggs himself purchased a collection of letters from the young composer to Siegfried Sassoon, subsequently acquired by Walton and now a part of his archive at Ischia.  Moreover, if the composer himself was sometimes obfuscatory, many of Walton’s contemporaries with whom Craggs corresponded were more forthcoming.  Craggs’s archive of these letters from the Great and the Good is impressive to behold, and the 1990 edition is enriched by these recollections.  (Palmer’s ‘reading-in-bed material’ description highlights the remarkable amount of supplementary ‘titbits’ that fill-out the chronology and the source descriptions.)  The second edition was awarded the Library Association’s 1990 McColvin Medal for the outstanding reference book of that year.

As before, the publication of the catalogue left Craggs’s energies for Walton research unabated, producing two further books even as he simultaneously produced substantial reference works encompassing a very wide scope of related figures:  William Alwyn (1985), Malcolm Arnold (1998), Richard Rodney Bennett (1990), Lennox Berkeley (2000), Arthur Bliss (1988 (based on his PhD dissertation), 1996, 2002), Benjamin Britten (2002), Alan Bush (2007), Peter Maxwell Davies (2002), Edward Elgar (1995), Alun Hoddinott (1993), John Ireland (1993, 2007), William Mathias (1995), and John McCabe (1991), as well as a dictionary of film composers (1998)—all the while also fulfilling his professional responsibilities as a librarian and a magistrate.  In 1993 Craggs was appointed Professor of Music Bibliography at the University of Sunderland, producing in the same year William Walton:  A Source Book, which offered comprehensive documentation of the extant manuscripts, first editions, letters, and recordings.  In 1999 he edited a collection of essays, William Walton:  Music and Literature, that has acted as a catalyst for much later work.

Internal OUP documents indicate that already in soon after Walton’s death there was some thought given to reissuing all of their Walton publications in a uniformly bound edition.  This project was not ultimately realised; perhaps this was just as well, as there were no plans for a thorough critical examination of each work.  It would have been little more than a vanity edition, in tribute to a figure who had been a house composer since the very first days of the OUP Music Department.  When the subject was revisited in 1994, it was decided that a credible new edition would require more than photographic reproductions of the already published text.  A critical edition of Walton’s works would be an expensive undertaking, and required careful planning.  With the appointment of David Lloyd-Jones as General Editor of the William Walton Edition in 1995, Craggs was appointed Consultant, and he has given considerable assistance to several volume editors, as well as contributing a Preface that eloquently navigates the complex web of material witnesses to the Facade Entertainments (Volume 7).  Only 23 volumes were envisaged for the new edition.  This final volume—a third edition of the Craggs catalogue—was  subsequently recognized as essential and serves as a fitting culmination to the entire project, drawing as it does upon the considerable research efforts that went into the William Walton Edition in nearly two decades of fruition.

It may seem remarkable that barely three decades since his death Walton would have received already a third edition of a work catalogue when many of his contemporaries await a catalogue at all.  Many factors bear upon this.  With just 106 catalogue numbers, Walton’s oeuvre is not unmanageable (particularly because of his habit of destroying or otherwise obliterating unsatisfactory efforts), even if each work brings its own specific set of bibliographical and philological problems—for example, the Fantasia Concertante (C14), which seems all but apocryphal, and yet receives Craggs’s full attention, together with the survey of works Walton considered but did not begin.  With the sole exception of the piano quartet, all of the published works were issued by a single publisher, making the production files of the OUP Music Department a particularly vital primary source.  More significantly, the bulk of Walton’s Nachlass is generally well-preserved and available to be consulted in a handful of locations (with the autographs principally in the Koch collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library, large portions of the correspondence in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the files of the BBC and the substantial collection of the Walton Museum in Ischia, in addition to the OUP holdings).  This notwithstanding, the task facing anyone attempting to verify every possible detail is herculean; at least Craggs got an early start.  The reader of this catalogue can be assured that ‘Holograph:  whereabouts unknown’ is not an idle phrase of an armchair bibliographer, but is a testimony of decades of indomitable search.   Thus the disappearance of the autograph full score of Belshazzar’s Feast is astounding.  That such a vital source for a work recognised so early to be a twentieth-century masterpiece could disappear without trace beggars belief, especially when at least a portion of the manuscript was extant and loaned out to exhibitions in the 1950s.  But there is hope.  “Tribute to the Red Cross” (1944), a manuscript collection containing contributions of men and women distinguished in politics, literature, art, and music (including Walton, Bliss, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Ireland, Lambert, and Moeran) was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1944, and lost from sight for almost seven decades, only to be tracked down by Craggs only as this volume was being finished.  The foundation he has laid will enable others to continue these pursuits in coming years. 

Stewart Craggs has devoted a lifetime of tireless labour to clarifying the facts of the music of Walton and his contemporaries.  Walton himself warily suggested that Craggs’s ‘sleuth capabilities’ might be turned in some other direction, but appreciation for his work is evident time and again in the front matter of very many publications bearing on this material.  Michael Kennedy’s remark in 1993 that ‘present and future music historians will have every reason to bless the name of Stewart Craggs’ is a prophecy already fulfilled.  Moreover, his caginess notwithstanding, Walton’s own appreciation is manifest in an avuncular gesture:  one of his last compositions was the Duettino for Oboe and Violin (C101) for Barnaby and Cordelia Craggs, published here for the first time.  Craggs himself views all of his efforts as a lifetime labour of love:  ‘to study Walton’s music has been a rewarding experience; to submit to its impact, unforgettable’.

44. Bedtime stories

A few weeks ago I was skimming through Christopher Small’s Musicking:  The Meanings of Performing and Listening in search of something I recalled reading years ago and wanted to mention in this blog.  I did not find what I was looking for; maybe it will turn up eventually and that post will get written.  It was very good, though, to open Musicking again; my skimming quickly became a more extensive perusal.  The book appeared while I was in graduate school.  Although it was never assigned reading for me, it shaped me more than just about anything else I read.  I would put it on any shortlist of the most important books on music of the last century.

I used to assign Musicking in my introductory music course, but I gave it up because my students regularly complained that it moved too slowly.  I think that is actually one of its virtues:  Small’s writing is wonderfully lucid, and filled with so many fascinating observations.  Most of the book consists of a “thick description”—about as thick as possible—of an orchestral concert.  He starts with a long consideration of an audience member's approach to the concert hall,  eventually making his way through the lobby into the auditorium.  He fills five chapters before the conductor is even in a position to give a downbeat, and even thereafter he writes not so much about the music being played as about the relationships established between the notes and the people involved (composer, performers, listeners), in search of “what is really going on here.”  In a chapter of that name he makes a compelling comparison:

“I intend no insult to either the ceremony of the symphony concert or to the works that are played there when I characterize them, at least in part, as bedtime stories told to adults.  The two ceremonies have features in common.  The first is that what is going on in both is the telling of a story and that the story partakes of the nature of the great meta-narrative.  The second is that the stories have become so familiar through repetition that they have lost whatever power they might once have had to disturb.  The third is that in both there is an insistence on perfect repetition of a series of actions that are prompted by a text, which in one case is the reading of words that comprise a story and in the other is the performance of sequences of musical sounds that comprise musical works.” (187)

I cannot do Small justice here; if you find this anywhere near as intriguing as I do, do yourself the favor of reading him cover to cover.  I want to extrapolate from the issue he raises about accumulation of a concert repertoire to consider how the bedtime story analogy illuminates further textual situations of music.  I have spent a lot of hours in the last ten years reading bedtime stories—and maybe that's why I have a new appreciation for Small’s comparison, a detail I had completely forgotten from my previous uses of this book.

I suspect that my family's experience is a common one:  a repertoire of bedtime stories develops over time, and while there are differences between the preferences of different children, there are some stories that become canonic family favorites.  This may not be related to any intrinsic quality of those stories: it may be just that the reader (me) enjoys reading them, and thus the child is used to hearing them before they have a say about what will be read.  Some books are tried once and then go back on the shelf or back to the library.  Others linger around on the floor beside the bed because we know we will be returning to them time and time again.  There are hints of a seasonal calendar to the repertoire—stories that relate to Thanksgiving or Christmas or summertime or the beginning of school—but most of the stories could be read at any time.  (The parallels with the development of a concert repertory are very interesting, but that is Small’s topic more than mine.  Again, I encourage readers to go directly to him; what matters here is that the texts become canonic by repetition.)

Different Texts, Same Story
As a core repertoire of bedtime stories develops in a family, both the reader and the listener inevitably become more attuned to textual details.  Sometimes I have to improvise my way through an already-familiar story because the book is not at hand.  In such cases, if the story is very familiar to the child, I will get critiques about the bits I omitted or over-embellished.  This is even more piquant when I read an already-familiar story in a new-to-us account (one of those “as told by” books); the child recognizes that the printed texts themselves differ—that “the story” and “the text” are not one and the same thing.  I have lost count of how many Star Wars books we have checked out of the library that would fit this situation, but of course it is also common with fairy tales and fables generally.  Perhaps the characters have names where they did not before (Cinderella’s stepsisters, for example), or new characters and scenes are introduced; certainly different texts emphasize different aspects of the story.

Often these differences are literary, having more to do with the construction of the story and the use of imagery or foreshadowing.  Sometimes they reveal different ideological perspectives.  I have seen this most in books of Bible stories for children—the sort of things well-meaning friends gave us when each of our kids were born.  The selection of stories included is revealing enough:  the Bible is full of sex, violence, gore, war, plague, pestilence, and massacre.  Many children’s versions instead tend to focus on the peace and love aspects, although these to me seem so disconnected from real life that I wonder if children will find anything relevant in them.  No, I think the bad and scary stuff needs to be there, and I am always interested to see how such is told.  That said, the storybook that, in narrating the story of David and Goliath, read “because David didn’t have a gun...” went straight into the trash.  (I wish I could include an image of it here, but I don’t even remember which it was.  That line, however, is indelibly imprinted on my memory.)

There are musical manifestations of this sort of textual variety.  Very common, surely, are different arrangements of the same tune (like so many albums of holiday music, each artist putting their own stamp on it in one way or another).  But this can also be seen in the most audible differences between different versions of standard works.  I can remember, for example, when first hearing Richard Maunder’s completion of the Mozart Requiem, the absence of Süßmayr’s trombone/woodwind chord at the beginning of “Rex tremendae majestatis” gave me a sensation akin to the slapstick gag of  leaning back against a wall that was not there.

SOURCE:  composite of the opening of “Rex tremendae” from K. 626:  (l.) Süßmayr's version, as given in the  NMA Ser. II Vol. 14, p. 83; (r.) completion by Richard Maunder (1988), full score, p. 61.  To hear this moment of Maunder's version in performance, click here.  (Robert Levin makes a similar choice in his completion.)

Or, for a similar example, in the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565, generally attributed to J. S. Bach):  when an organist is using the NBA (or the new Breitkopf edition as well), there is a rest on a downbeat where older editions accustomed me to a concluding low D.  I’m not sure that I totally agree with the source argument for leaving out the D:  there are no authentic sources for this work to link it to Bach, nor even to anyone else.  We have different versions “as told by” different copyists.  Either is effective.   So what?

SOURCE:  composite of bb. 12ff. from BWV 565: (top) BG vol. 15, detail of p. 268 (from ISMLP #01335); (bottom) NBA Ser. IV vol. 6, detail of p. 32.

Textual Preferences
In practice, all sorts of textual changes in a family’s bedtime story repertoire might creep in just in the repeated telling of the stories.  The result is something like the liturgical concept of a “use”—essentially a local variant to an established text.  The best known (because best preserved) of these is the Sarum Use, the variant of the Roman rite that evolved in Salisbury around the twelfth century and lingered until it was supplanted by (and adapted into) the vernacular service in the English Reformation.  This variant wasn’t limited to Salibury:  it got picked up by other British and Irish dioceses, and even some further afield.  While basically in accordance with the Roman tradition, the Use of Sarum accrued supplemental bits and pieces and different ways of doing things.

As I say, I have observed this sort of thing in my own bedtime storytelling.  I have made local “improvements” (as I would like to think of them) which have become part of the textus receptus for my kids.  Thus, when I read Joan Heilbroner’s 1962 Robert the Rose Horse, I modify her refrain that leads up to the allergic horse’s increasingly explosive sneezes:

Something about the word itch twice in such close succession strikes me as weak.  I invariably substitute twitch for the second:

His eyes began to itch.  His nose began to twitch.

As I reflect on this now, I note that I also add a rhythm and even a hint of pitch inflection to my recitation of this phrase—probably because it is a repeated figure in the book, with an internal textual repetition as well.   As I read it, it comes out something like

By changing the text, of course, I am usurping the authority of the author herself.  And musicians have done that—made unauthorized changes to a text—as long as we have any documentation that could confirm it.  They (we) still do it today, and I don’t think it is a problem.  I am more troubled, I suppose, by those like David Zinman, whose recording of the Beethoven symphonies was proclaimed as being the first cycle to use the new Bärenreiter urtext edition, but exactly how Zinman uses it is not clear:  I suppose anyone is free to use an edition however they like, but if one doesn’t agree with the Bärenreiter main text, what is the point of putting the name on the label?  Perhaps I can return to that for a later post.  Even if Zinman reverts to more traditional readings in many instances, he is in any case closer to the composer’s text than is (say) Barenboim, whose Beethoven still seems to be that which was in vogue at the time of his own birth.  Still, the “Barenboim Use” (or is it Furtwängler?) has as much a right to exist as any number of others.  Vive la différence.

Performing Texts
At even a more micro- level, the ritual of bedtime stories extends beyond just the verbal text (which I may or may not intentionally alter).  “Do the voices!” says my four-year-old, and I am compelled to read a children’s book as if it were a radio drama, with a cast of characters and a Foley effects man.   Thus this page from Tim Egan’s superb Metropolitan Cow (1999) requires from me the falsetto of Henrietta Gibbons (gasping for breath after a search all over the neighborhood for her missing calf, Bennett), followed by the stentorian basso of her distressed husband, Frederick.  Somewhere along the line, I see that I have made another textual alteration, as now alter the word just in Frederick’s second line to simply:  I [simply] don’t know!

This reminds me, too, of the entire complexes of ornaments that manifest the teacher/pupil lineage across multiple generations—whether it be Carnatic ragas or Rossini arias.  The textual fossilization of accruing ornamentation marries tradition and evolution.

SOURCE:  scan from Will Crutchfield, "Early Vocal Ornamenation" in the Critical Commentary of Il barbiere di Siviglia in Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter, 2008), pp. 361-420; the pages shown collate sources from singers relatively close to the composer for bb. 96-106 of Rosina's "Una voce poco fa"; I have added red brackets to mark the staff which gives Rossini's text (as edited in the WGR).

Ritual Action
In some instances, my enactment of the story goes beyond audible (i.e., radio drama) to physical embodiment.  I go through particular motions at key moments in the story, not unlike those actions specified in the rubrics for the eucharistic celebrant—again recalling the Sarum variants.  Thus in Roger Duvoisin’s Donkey Donkey (1933), I can hardly resist giving the child a gentle pinch on the ear when “the wicked nail” caught the eponymous donkey on his way into his stable.  (If only he had kept his ears up as donkeys do....)

I have found Small’s reference to the ritual of the bedtime story to be wonderfully illuminating because it is applicable far beyond the narrow context to which he applies it.  It is an excellent analogy for how and why concert etiquette and expectations have evolved as they have.  Beyond this, however, I recognize that it also exemplifies the evolution of text and textual practices generally.  Texts do not replicate themselves; people replicate texts, and in so doing there may be all sorts of individual reasons to change ( = corrupt) the text to new ends.  This must surely happen often with family recipes, handed down over generations.  Somewhere along the line someone replaces the lemon with rum, and your great-grandmother’s pound cake is not quite your great-grandmother’s pound cake anymore, even if it is regarded as such.

But, like baking, bedtime stories require someone to realize the text.  Your great-grandmother's pound cake doesn't really exist on an index card, nor does “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” quite exist merely on paper (save for the illustrations).  Bedtime stories are performance art—like music—requiring performer(s) to bring them to life.  As several times before in this blog, I find myself quoting Dorothy L. Sayers:

“From experience I am inclined to think that one reason why writing for the stage is so much more interesting than writing for publication is the very fact that, when the play is acted, the free will of the actor is incorporated into the written character.  The common man is aware of the conflicting desires within the playwright’s mind, and often asks questions about them.  Sometimes he asks:  ‘Isn’t it exciting to see your characters coming alive upon stage?’  Sometimes he inquires sympathetically:  ‘Isn’t it maddening to hear the actors ruining your best lines?’  The playwright can only reply that (unless the production is quite unnaturally good or superlatively bad) both propositions are undoubtedly true.
“A good deal, of course, depends upon the temperament of the playwright.  If he is of the egotistical kind, finding no satisfaction except in the autocratic enforcement of his sole will, he will find actors maddening almost beyond endurance.  This is the type of person who, in the sphere of procreation, tends to become a Roman parent.  But if he is the more liberal kind of creator, he will eagerly welcome—I will not say bad acting, which is altogether sinful and regrettable—but imaginative and free acting, and find an immensely increased satisfaction in the individual creativeness which the actor brings to his part.”  [The Mind of the Maker, pp. 64–65.]

Small’s bedtime story analogy allowed me to confront directly some ways in which I have been complicit in textual corruption—and indeed to see that this is the natural entropy of texts.  If in this blog I am sometimes baffled by certain textual variants—What were they thinking?—it is now easier to see that, at the very least, they weren’t thinking of me.  One can corrupt a text with not only the best of intentions, but with perfectly justifiable results, entering into the creative collaboration of performance.  Some of this came up in my second post, where I considered how much authority the author deserves.  Heresy?  I don’t think so.  If you can only countenance one possible reading of a text—as if set in stone for all time—I think that your concept of art is much too small.

43. seen and not heard

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,

Als alle Knospen sprangen,

Da ist in meinem Herzen

Die Liebe aufgegangen....

[In the wondrously beautiful month of May
as all of the buds were bursting,
then in my heart
love unfolded.]

The opening quatrain of Heinrich Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo (1823) is stirring enough, but it is almost a cliché to point to the beginning of Robert Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe (1840) as reaching heights (and depths) that Heine’s words cannot.  The unutterable longing expressed somehow in the initial piano figure, wavering back and forth in a repeated (it seems) Phrygian half-cadence, D – C-sharp – D – C-sharp in the bass, until it suddenly resolves not into F-sharp minor (to which our ear may be leading us) but with disarming ease into A major.  (A recording is available from the IMSLP here.)

SOURCE: cropped scan of first edition of Dichterliebe (Leipzig:  Peters, c. 1844), p. 3, from IMSLP #25011.

Schumann pointedly leaves this figure unresolved when it returns at the end of the song, the ambiguity persisting several seconds into the next song (again resolving in A major).  It is a great moment—hauntingly beautiful, as I suppose it is intended to be.  And, because of such inspiration, Schumann’s place among the canon is secure.  Or is it?  After all, the canon is really just whoever we say it is.

I moved to Virginia in July 2017, and a few weeks after I arrived white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, about 60 miles away, for a demonstration that turned deadly and seized headlines all over the world.  Appalled and repulsed, I watched white men—people who look like me—proclaiming their entitlement, endeavoring to reclaim privilege they regarded as their birthright.  Even as they chanted their vile slogans, I was working on my syllabus for the second part of a two-semester music history survey for music majors I would start teaching later that month.  As I struggled to pack far too much essential content into a semester, I wistfully thought of all the things I wouldn’t have time to talk about—things that revealed that the claim of entitlement on rampant display a short drive away was really a recurring story in music history.  (“Jews will not replace us!” is the essence of Richard Wagner’s notorious 1850 essay Das Judenthum in der Musik.)  Us versus them is, indeed, the story of so much history that its continuing manifestations in the headlines now seem more akin to “DOG BITES MAN” than to “MAN BITES DOG.”  But when, as is the rule rather than exception in history, the violence is perpetrated by those in power against those excluded from it, the news must always be shouted from the rooftops.

And so in my first year teaching in Virginia I introduced an overhaul to the music history sequence, jettisoning the soup-to-nuts survey from plainchant to the present (an approach which gives students a false sense of comprehensiveness).  Instead I used the allotment of two semesters for a different approach:

1. For Music History I:  genres and forms, I concentrated on only two genres, a mini-survey that allowed us to trace genre-specific traits and innovations over a shorter time period.  I selected concertos and song cycles as our twin foci.  Those were not easy choices, but they allowed me to focus on contrasts between domestic and public music-making, to consider text-setting as well as non-texted music, to have the students learn to navigate orchestral scores as well as (sometimes equally bewildering) keyboard writing.  Although the chronology of the song-cycle is particularly restricted—basically starting in the early nineteenth century—I reached back to solo cantatas and other works that could be seen as antecedent (though not really ancestors) of the genre—just as I brought in concept albums as a continuation of the tradition.  Even with only two genres, I found that I had the same impossibility of fitting everything I wanted to discuss into a single semester.
2. For Music History II:  narratives and ideologies, I wanted a course that was basically “What lessons can we learn from music history?”  Two of the questions considered in that course were pulled directly out of my reactions to the white nationalist rally:  “How does a composer become a privileged voice, and who gets suppressed in the process?”  and “If we view music history not in terms of composers or even of performers but rather of patrons, what does the landscape look like?”  Inextricably part of both of these is gender, and there were plenty of good reading assignments to provoke them to think about the propped-up nature of the canon of Great Composers which we had all inherited.

As will be clear from this blog, Great Composers is (sic) very much my bread and butter.  Even in my first post I tried to be candid that dead white males would inevitably dominate my posts, if for no more nefarious reason than their music generally has a longer paper-trail.  That said, I have been keenly and uncomfortably aware that I have yet to post about the music of a female composer (even though a number of female editors have come up).  As we begin Heine’s “wondrously beautiful month of May,” however, I make this humble effort to emend my ways.

Does this sound familiar?  (Listen to it here.)

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 41, II/31–36 (Breitkopf, 1990).

This is from the slow movement of the Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 7,  by Clara Wieck (later Clara Schumann).  She wrote this in about 1835, and it is a striking anticipation of Robert’s “wunderschönen Monat Mai” figure—the same two harmonies wavering back and forth, even expressed in the same key.  Is it too much to say Robert stole it from her?  He clearly knew the piece well.  An inside joke?  An unintentional derivation?  Common property of husband and wife?  Admittedly Wieck doesn’t use this gesture to slip into A major, as Robert was to do.  More remarkably, this is part of a transition to A-flat major—very far removed from her home tonic.  Indeed, Claudia Macdonald quotes an early reviewer who attempts a chauvinist joke about this:

Women are moody.... [I]f in their cherished domestic and matrimonial circumstance the daughters of Eve would make no other, larger leaps, deviations or evasions than such a teensy half step, then everything would be just fine.

[Allgemeiner musikalische Anzeiger 
in 1838; trans. Macdonald, p. 31]

Did Robert face this sort of nonsense when, in his piano Phantasie for piano and orchestra (also in A minor, and later revised as the first movement of his own concerto in that key) he also modulated to A-flat major?  Or was that just genius?  Granted, Robert’s choice of A-flat may be dictated by a strategy to emphasize melodic unity:  he preserves C-natural as the third scale degree, on which he begins his motive whether in its home minor key or—with the tonic lowered by a half-step—in major:

SOURCE:  composite from Robert Schumanns Werke, Ser. III (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1883--from IMSLP #291223), pp. 147 and 159, with my own indications of the opening of the Ur-melody in each key.

Still, there is something about the same tonal maneuver (A minor to A-flat major and back) in both works that to me has a sense of “anything you can do, I can do better” about it.

SOURCE:  Clara Wieck, aged 16, with the finale
of her concerto on the music desk before her;
lithograph by J. Giere, scan from
Europeana Collections

Much as I love and admire the work, I did not include Robert’s piano concerto in my music history class; I featured him instead in the song-cycle part of the course.  I did, however, use Wieck’s concerto—a work hitherto completely unknown to me.  Her anticipation of the “wunderschönen” figure arrested my attention, but I was equally struck by very many blog-worthy textual details.

The source situation is pitiful:  no autograph from Wieck survives; the only manuscript that survives is Robert’s and is fragmentary, as it seems he orchestrated her finale.  (Like his own concerto later, Wieck’s work started as a one-movement Concertsatz, though in her case it was what would later be the finale.)  There is no extant manuscript of any sort for the first or second movement, and until 1990 the only edition of the work was its first one, published by Hoffmeister in about 1836, and handily available on the IMSLP (#566786).  (A 1987 “edition” reproduced a manuscript full score apparently derived from the Hoffmeister parts.)   I’ll come back to the original edition below.

More than anything else, I have been intrigued and fascinated by rhythmic details of Wieck’s score.  Note, for example the stunning variety of rhythms in the piano sprays tossed off here—at a tempo that make these differences barely perceptible to the audience:

SOURCE:  highlighted cropped scan of p. 58, III/73–79 (Breitkopf, 1990).

(I also like the way the bassoon accumulates longer and longer statements, starting from just the initial motive of the main theme.)

I also noted places in which the solo part has very slightly different rhythms from other instruments doubling the same idea.  In this example, I think she has accommodated the large left-hand jump made across the bar-line:

 SOURCE:  highlighted cropped scan of p. 52, III/41–44 (Breitkopf, 1990).

A similar motivation seems to be behind these alterations:

SOURCE:  my composite from details of pp. 23–24, I/94–97(Breitkopf, 1990).

But I confess that I am flummoxed about what to make of this rhythmic notation [though see ADDENDUM]:

SOURCE:  highlighted detail of p. 41, II/37–39 (Breitkopf, 1990).

The illustrations above come from the new edition issued by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1990, edited by Janina Klassen.  As I compare the cover pages of the original Hoffmeister and the new edition [below], I wonder if Breitkopf’s decision to refer to her only by her married name isn’t just a marketing ploy, linking her music to the canonic name of her famous husband.  She was not yet married when it was first published, and her name was much more widely known than Robert’s was at the time.  She was a pianist of international renown already at a young age.  Indeed, she was just sixteen when she premiered the complete work on 9 November 1835 with Felix Mendelssohn conducting at the Leipzig Gewandhaus.

Despite the many virtues of the new edition, the Hoffmeister original is particularly useful in the classroom, as it exemplifies the practical publication of this sort of work in the nineteenth century.  In place of a full score, the piano part includes orchestral cues throughout (and, as the title page indicates, could serve for rendition of the work by piano alone); the first violin part is similarly cued to facilitate directing a performance; all the string parts have small-note alternate lines to enable the piece to be performed with only a string quintet accompaniment.  Here, for example, is the bottom of the first page of the violin part, bearing the instruction that notes marked avec Quintuor (as on the second staff) are for this chamber version, while the other instrumental cues are only there to assist a violinist/conductor:

SOURCE:  C. Wieck op. 7, detail of Vln. I p. 1 (Leipzig, Hoffmeister, c. 1836) from IMSLP #566786 [p. 29]

In the absence of any other sources, it is impossible to know whether the quintet adaptation is Wieck’s or Robert’s, or maybe even an in-house job by the Hoffmeister firm.  Indeed, in the absence of any other orchestral works by Wieck, we cannot even make a guess about whether the orchestration in the first movement is her own.  I have been puzzled by remarks such as “Whether [Robert] Schumann orchestrated the other movements is not known”:  except for a solo cello, the orchestra is entirely silent in the second movement.  Sometimes I suspect that we musicologists get so caught up in the commentary that we fail to look at the very music we study.

This is only one aspect of a problem musical women (whether composers, performers, or patrons) have faced for a very long time:  seen and not heard, recognized but not valued, subject always to the male gaze but essentially invisible.  (For a recent ripped-from-the-headlines example of an analogous situation, see Imani Mosley's perceptive reflection on the “erasure” of Peter Pears from the public face of the Benjamin Britten legacy.)  I am grateful for initiatives that facilitate addressing this issue—for example the Institute for Composer Diversity and the database Music Theory Examples by Women—and for writings by Cyrilla Barr, Ralph Locke, and Marian Wilson Kimber (among many others) that I now view as required reading for my students.  Systemic prejudice against women composers; exclusion from educational, performance, and career opportunities; dismissal of women’s musical activism as mere volunteerism; and critical approaches that cite women merely as also-rans are just some of the factors that have unfairly shaped the music historical narratives.  That is a much more important thing for my students to learn than any particular “masterwork” of the repertory.

ADDENDUM  2 May 2019

Regarding the “impossible” rhythmic notation I note above, I thank William van Geest for directing my attention to this 2011 article by Julian Hook, in which the Wieck seems to be the earliest example among many similar examples from within the larger Schumann circle: 
http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.4/mto.11.17.4.hook.html