Three Easter Lies

At Harvard there's a statue that eager undergraduate tour-givers will inform you is the Statue of the Three Lies. The lies are, firstly, that it says John Harvard is the "founder" of the school--in fact, he donated his library to a college that was already extant; the second, that he "founded" it in 1638, when it was founded in 1636; and finally, that it is a likeness of Harvard at all, when in fact it was merely a student  whom Daniel Chester French found suitably aesthetically pleasing.

I mention this because  there's an Easter song that's been in my head for the last, oh, fifty-six days or so. That song is Vruchten, also known as This Joyful Eastertide, and it has Three Lies of its own.
If one looks up this tune in a hymnal reference, one gets some variant on the following:

"VRUCHTEN is originally a seventeenth-century Dutch folk tune for the love song "De liefde Voortgebracht." It became a hymn tune in Joachim Oudaen's David' s Psalmen (1685) as a setting for "Hoe groot de vruchten zijn." The tune is distinguished by the melismas that mark the end of stanza lines and by the rising sequences in the refrain, which provide a fitting word painting for "arisen." Although the melody has a wide range, it has become a popular Easter carol in modern hymnals. The harmonization by Dale Grotenhuis makes for glorious part singing (many hymnals use a harmonization by Charles Wood)."

A love song? I wondered. What were the original words? So I trotted off to the handy database for dutch folk songs.
I found many settings of the words, but none of them were love songs. The tune does go by the title "De liefde voortgebracht," but, as it turns out, the "liefde" referenced here is God's love and suitably Biblically derived. It could, of course, have been a parody of some earlier love-song, but it hasn't survived, if so. Camphuysen, who seems to have been the first to print it, usually didn't bother to print tunes if everybody knew them already; that suggests he might have done some composing. (More here, in Dutch.) It is included in his 1624 Stichtelycke Rymen, which he goes to some pains to establish are poems of model Christian virtue. Every verse has a different quality of love on the rising sequence at the end: love is better, is higher, is stronger, etc.
From there the ditty got rather popular, and I am amused to note that one version, for use in some sort of play about Joseph and his brothers, has the famous rising chorus on "de Backer"...!
The same Camphuysen did play a role in Joachim Oudaen's metrical psalter in 1685, though he didn't include the Vruchten tune.  They collaborated again in 1705, on the Schriftuerlyke Gesangen, which did include "Vruchten," this time to an Easter set of words, "Hoe groot de vruchten" (hence the modern tune title.) It re-appears in 'T Agterhofje (1736), an anabaptist hymnal of "soul-stirring songs," on page 264, where it is based on 1 Corinthians 15. This version is, roughly, what George Woodward translated for the modern hymn. Woodward, though, was more of a poet than a translator, shall we say, and it's decidedly a rather loose translation.
(I've had occasion to be baffled at Woodward before--he also gave us "King Jesus hath a garden," which is several steps removed in content from the Dutch carol he is supposedly 'translating.')

So: not a love song; not 1685; not David's Psalmen. But a pretty fun hymn.

ceci n'est pas un Josquin

I’m frequently drawn to questions of attributions and misattribution, and hope some of my findings will make it here eventually. Last Sunday I was singing a six-part Regina Caeli by “Josquin?”—this is how it is written in some editions, like the Yale Spizzwinks(?).

Evidently the owner of my copy disagreed about Josquin, for he or she wrote “not very likely” on the cover and “hardly, as if” on the title page. (The correction on the dates is probably correct, though). Examining other copies, I saw she was not alone; the director seems to have made a big point about the piece not being Josquin, and one chorister had even re-attributed it to "Zenfl." [These question-mark-free editions, incidentally, are the work of one Jon Dixon, sometime civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, who took early retirement to devote himself to editing polyphony.]

 

It seems the choir was told that the piece was in fact by Senfl, and that it, like Senfl's Ave Maria, was an elaboration of some earlier, four-part piece. This raised my eyebrows, for several reasons: first, I have a hard time seeing how the piece could be a rewrite of something in fewer parts, because the voices interrelate very tightly and two of them are in a strict canon. Secondly—Senfl? My only real knowledge of Senfl are some amusing German madrigals; I had never thought of him as a motet composer of the first order, that one might ever risk confusing with Josquin. But whatever the director said must have left quite an impression, for I found about four or five other copies insisting on “correcting” the cover of the piece. (I might note here that there are several considerably more spurious pieces in the choir library, none of which are quite so vehemently protested against in their markings.) I decided to look up the matter and summarize, for the benefit of those without JSTOR at their fingertips.

 This motet received its first modern edition only comparatively recently, in 1971, thanks to the work of Jeremy Noble (himself a fascinating character, if his obit is anything to go by.) Noble was nosing about in the music manuscripts of the Vatican library, an intriguing but frustrating resource: intriguing, because it contains much of the music written for and sung by the Papal Chapel, one of the most important musical institutions in Western Christendom. Frustrating, because a great number of the manuscripts got incompetently rebound in the eighteenth century and lost most of their titles and author names. Fortunately, Noble was able to find a catalog of the library’s holdings, dating from around 1685, before the eighteenth-century re-binders got their hands on everything. Unfortunately, almost everything in the library has been re-numbered since then. Fortunately (such is the see-saw of academic life) one can without too much difficulty use the catalog to work out what the old numbering system must have been. Unfortunately, some books have gone missing since then…and one also discovers that Panuzzi, the cataloguer, took some shortcuts here and there, like saying that a certain manuscript contains “eight Magnificats” (by whom?) or “several other hymns”. He also, faced with a not inconsiderable amount of music to index, made a fair number of obvious mistakes, naming somebody we know not to be the composer for a certain thing, or one who is not even the person named in the manuscript he is supposedly indexing, or failing to count the number of parts in a piece, and so on.

 All that said, the catalog mentions a series of four Regina Caeli antiphons in what is now Cappella Sistina MS 46, with the third one by “Jusquin”. MS 46 does indeed contain four Reginas Caeli, and all but the third have a legible attribution that matches the one given it by Petruzzi; the third, though, has had the name sliced off, although is is possible, but only just, that the bottoms of the letters that remain could be part of “Josquin.” It is not necessary, of course, and so this historical evidence is circumstantial at best. Stylistically…well, Josquin is stylistically hard to define, as he had a long and wide-ranging career; moreover, much of our dating of his work has had to be "stylistic," which in turn relies on having a date on which to hang that "style": famously, his Ave Maria motet was long thought to be composed for a very specific occasion in 1497, because it so exemplified a "humanistic" style that it simply had to be a late piece--only for scholars to discover that the piece was already known in Germany in 1476 and so was in fact one of his earlier works. In the case of the Regina Caeli, it isn't obvious--says Noble--that it couldn’t possibly be Josquin, and many of its distinctive features have analogues in other works by Josquin. Yet, it does feel a bit late, a sixteenth century piece rather than a fifteenth century one. Josquin’s work with the Papal Chapel, though, was from about 1486-1494 or so. So: why would a piece Josquin wrote while retired in France in the sixteenth century exist only in a singular copy in Italy, without achieving wider circulation?
Perhaps it isn't Josquin at all--Josquin, well, feels more modal, more prone to spare duets and trios, more harmonically rich. This was Noble’s revised opinion in 1991, walking back his earlier attribution. (After our compline, a man I had never met marched up to me to announce --despite not knowing the edition, reading the annotations about the manuscript, or even knowing it was a unicum--"that piece isn't Josquin, by the way." Everyone's an expert, I guess.) Yet one gets the sense that Noble still wasn't quite willing to give up his earlier attribution; as somebody who works with manuscripts, I can vividly imagine seeing the remnant of that cut-off name and trying to match it to the letters in "Josquin," and can't quite bring myself to believe that he merely imagined that aspect of his discovery.

Whatever the piece, it isn’t the work of a hack, though—it is a skillfully written piece, and at some level it doesn’t matter if it was Josquin or a younger successor. (One name floated about is that of Constanto Festa, who had a long career with the Sistine chapel and was very fond of Regina Caeli settings). But in *that* case, why would the piece be ascribed to Josquin both in the 1687 inventory and—perhaps?—in the manuscript before it was cut up? (Certainly, if there are descenders in the cut-off name, it is not “Senfl”, and I have no idea where this idea comes from.) The evidence that the piece is Josquin may be weak, but at least it's evidence, while there's no evidence for it being anybody else--certainly not Senfl, a through-and-through German sometimes considered a Protestant sympathizer, unlikely to have been preserved uniquely at the Vatican.

In other words, who bears the burden of proof: those who go against the places (such as they are) where the composer is named? or those who side with an attribution that is (at best) geographically and (at worst) stylistically/historically improbable? It doesn’t matter, ultimately, who wrote the piece, as long as it is good—which it is;  and perhaps we should thank the inept cataloguer for bringing the piece to our attention with his attribution, where it might otherwise have sat in anonymous obscurity. 

Who put the C in Allegri?

Everybody who's listened to a "Great Choral Classics" recording knows the piece. You know, this one. The one with that impressive high note every other verse. It's a fixture at Ash Wednesday services, too, providing a suitably solemn background to the imposition of ashes. It's been a classic for a while; there's a famous recording of it, in English (as was then fashionable; I wonder when performing in translation became gauche?) from 1963 or thereabouts, and the liner notes tell how the soloist was only tapped just before the service, still grimy from a game of rugger that afternoon. (That soloist, Roy Goodman, went on to be a conductor and was for a time director of a chamber orchestra in Manitoba. Fun fact.) In high school, when I needed to unwind from a day of adolescent complexities, I would listen to Allegri's Miserere, and let the high C's float away like my troubles. The thing is, at some level the piece is a lie. For one, the chant is all wrong; the choral verses are based on a Tonus Peregrinus chant, not the mode 2 chant it is almost always sung with. But for two, the *C* is a lie. This first became obvious to me when I sang the piece as transcribed by Liszt, who made all the verses the same: high Gs, but no high Cs. Looking at it, it seemed the C was just...the previous verse up a fourth, for some reason. But let me back up. Liszt? What's he got to do with it? Well, the piece was famously the property of the Sistine Chapel choir, who didn't sing what was on the page. Allegri had written a fairly simple set of chords around the base chant, but the choir ornamented it at leisure, perhaps doing some ornaments long established by their predecessors, perhaps adding their own, until at some point through the process of mutation and evolution one arrives at today's product. Is it still Allegri, then? A good seventeenth-century composer, Allegri probably *expected* that his composition would change, and would have been most disappointed in a choir that merely sang what he *wrote*. (In other words, he expected there to be something unexpected.) Being able to ornament decorously was important for any Baroque singer; being able to improvise in a group, meanwhile, had been a practice going back to the organum of the middle ages. Allegri might also have been disappointed, by the same token, that nobody changes the notes anymore--if it *doesn't* have that high C, it isn't "the" Allegri Miserere, for a lot of people. One is reminded of the ship of Theseus, each of its boards gradually replaced by another, until it both is and isn't Theseus's ship.
Alright, but how did this piece, in this version, become a fixture of the English choral tradition, in particular? I happened to read yesterday, while looking up Ivor Algernon Atkins (author of a most excellent Anglican chant, friend of Elgar, and translator of the St. Matthew Passion, and arranger of Cornelius's Three Kings for chorus and soloist) that he is credited with doing the job.
Novello published an edition back in 1905, as you can see in this list here. (As an aside, I have tried to find out more about "Ada Marguerite Burnside", lady composer of the Edwardian era, but she seems to have died, at age 45, not long after the publication of her pieces here, and--since I presume she didn't hold an important organist post--her composition and legacies have disappeared without a trace.) This Novello edition, priced at 4 pence, may still be found for one's perusal, for example here. One might note the soprano part in this edition stays below an E-flat--within the compass of an adult male choir.
But the astute musician of the early 1900's might also have read about the piece in a lengthy entry in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (then merely in it's third edition!). Grove was somewhat more colourful in those days, and the entry describes the whole service at which the piece is sung, and relates a famous (semi-apocryphal) anecdote of a teenage Mozart hearing the piece and then transcribing it precisely at a single listen. This edition supposedly made it into the hands of the music historian/chronicler/personality Charles Burney, who published it in the eighteenth century. (The secrecy surrounding the piece added a bit of extra hype). But Burney's edition--though the Grove claims Mozart's transcription was praised by the singers of the Chapel of that time, and that it has been handed down unchanged to the present day--has no high C's either. (It seems likely it merely shows the "simple" version, and that Mozart's version never circulated--if indeed it resembled the version we know today.) All this came from the hand of William Rockstro, né Rackstraw, a decidedly Victorian character fond of Romanticizing early music. Rockstro includes a description of the piece by Mendelssohn (uncited, so I can't find it) who, like Liszt and Mozart, had gone to hear the famous piece for himself. Mendelssohn *does* mention a high C--at least, he does according to Rockstro. I see elsewhere this may be because the choir at that time sang the entire piece up in pitch, for effect (probably about a major third, which Mendelssohn put up another half step to account for pitch differences in Rome--but he seems to have heard it at several pitches, and in any case the choir had a tendency to go flat by the end.)This was not how Rockstro set the piece in his illustration, however; in his version, the first half of the verse is at the written pitch, and the second half transposed up to make the high C's Mendelssohn described.
When Novello issued another edition of the piece in 1951 (there was an intervening edition, also with the high notes, ca. 1931), Ivor Atkins dutifully noted that his abbellimenti were based on none other than Rockstro, thus further propagating the (error? embellishment? creative license?) of nineteenth-century Grove. He also cites Pietro Alfieri, a nineteenth-century fellow who attempted to bring back classics of the Catholic musical tradition from Vatican manuscripts. Alfieri's edition mentions that G's are sung as B's, that is to say, a third up, and conceives of the piece as one using a fixed set of embellishments provided in a table at the back. The same embellishments can be used for the other (less renowned) Miserere sung by the papal choir, by Tomasso Bai; it seems the practice was to alternate versions of the one and the other, and they were in any case basically variants on a theme to start with. The embellishments might be old; they might have been a recent practice in Alfieri's day (ca.1840). But once again--no high C. That, it would seem, is all Mr. Rockstro.
Incidentally, the Tallis Scholars recorded a version with Tonus Peregrinus and with some semi-improvised embellishments. Even then, though, they couldn't face leaving out the high C--it's simply, at this point, too much a part of the piece. There is also an oddly campy recording that reconstructs the Allegri along with the later Miserere by Tommaso Bai with which the chapel choir evidently alternated verses. But is this Bai's composition, or Bai's version of Allegri, or Bai as he might have heard it, or is it how the nineteenth-century papal choir might have sung a two-hundred year old piece?
Who knows. At this point, "Allegri" is only about 40% Allegri, 30% papal choir embellishments as handed down over centuries of oral tradition and periodic transcriptions, 20% Tommaso Bai's verses, and at least 10% an egregious but much-propagated error in Grove. Which goes to show, I suppose, that encyclopedias can have a lasting impact.


post script: there's also a very interesting recording by the Sixteen detailing some of this evolution, based on the work of Ben Byram-Wigfield, whose essay I linked to in part above, and who considers all of this in considerably more detail.