Kuy(r)kendall: a Hine follow-up

As I was finally closing the door on all the Hine photos AND all the interviews about them, one name caught my eye: that of Ralph Kuyrkendall. It struck me, of course, because it looks Dutch, but it also looked, well, wrong. Was it supposed to be Kuykendal? Kurkendal? Kerkendal? "Kuirk" is not really an appropriate letter string. But then, Hines often misspells names (e.g. "Albernesi" for Albanese.) But no, Kuyrkendal seems to be how it is spelled. His granddaughter reminisces: 

He said that there were a lot of people in Mississippi with the Kuyrkendall name, but many without the “r.” He would say, “The people without the ‘r,’ were the ones that were caught stealing chickens, so they had to drop the ‘r’ from their name.

A "lot" of Kuyrkendalls in Mississippi! Indeed, a little googling reveals a number of Kuyrkendalls all over America today: Texas, Florida, Louisiana. Is the r part of the name or not? One blog, commenting on the name of a "Kuykendall" playing college baseball, says it's pronounced with an R even when you don't see one! Ever more mysterious. 

After sifting through a certain amount of fora of people musing about the meaning of their name, I found a book giving the genealogy of the name and tracing it back to one Luur van Kuykendal who immigrated in the 17th century. Forced to adopt a proper surname by the English, he attached the name of his home (summarized here). Luur was elsewhere described as from Wageningen; there is a village called Cuijk not far from there, in the so called Land van Cuijk.  There's no "Kuikendal," so one has to imagine that the area was so described centuries ago. Then I suppose the many descendants of Mr. Kuykendal moved south, and many of them ended up in Mississippi. (Similarly, many of the Tanguays and Castonguays of Quebec today are related to one very prolific seventeenth-century fellow of that name...)

That's all very well, but it doesn't explain my initial question, which was--why the R? If the original name was indeed Kuykendal--and not the R variant as Ralph imagined--how did the change creep in? 

Then it occurred to me--the r version seems to be most common in the South. The South, historically, spoke (and speaks) a non-rhotic dialect; something written  "Kirk" would sound like "Kuhhhk." Meanwhile, out in Cuijk, they speak a dialect with a lengthened sort of diphthong for "ui." So quite possibly some southern Kuykendal, tired of being called "Coy Candle," put an r in, to convey the shared diphthong found in both the English and Dutch dialects in question. Ironically, as American English moved to being rhotic, the r became pronounced, and *that* pronunciation became canonical--so that a pronunciation with an R is prescribed even where none is written!
Linguistics is crazy.

Lewis Hine

Yesterday, prompted by some picture floating about the internet, I spent quite some time perusing the Lewis Hine photo collection. Lewis Hine was commissioned to take pictures of working conditions, particularly for children, across America, and his pictures were instrumental in creating child labour laws.  But they are also fascinating as photography--documentary portraits, rather than stiff photo-studio ones, of people in their ordinary work clothes, doing their jobs or eating lunch or what have you. We don't often see the working class of the 1910's, and we don't often see pictures of children by themselves, but Hine has both, in beautiful detail.
His photographs have an agenda, and usually his comment is revealing: that the child is out late, or has been known to skip school, and so on. But in some cases one wonders: did the children perhaps enjoy hawking newspapers and earning some money? Did their families need the income? Being a pin boy at the bowling alley sounds like the kind of job a certain stripe of eleven-year-old would find much more interesting than school, and these boys seem to be grinning about it. (I tried to figure out how much they were earning in today's money. The buying power seems to be about $100 today, which is peanuts for a week's wages but nice to have.) Or take this newsboy, flaunting cops to sell more papers after hours.  (He's also not wearing his badge...). Or what about Louis Birch, working to help his widowed mother? In the long run, maybe he'd be better off in school, but in the short term, he's better off earning money so he can eat. And the long run is a little dubious too--given the class he was in, would having more education have been more beneficial to him than on-the-job experience? Hard to say. There's lots more to be said about class here, but I won't get into it.

Also a topic for discussion: immigration! This was a peak time for American immigration, and most of Hine's youths are young immigrants. Here's a group of Greek kids at an Irish bowling alley (and Italian ones). At the mills you might find Quebeckers. (More on that here. It's interesting how the accusations of "they're taking our jobs!" and suspicions around the speaking of a foreign language have not gone away...). This photo of mugging boys gives Irish names too, and Italian ones; sometimes there are Poles. In the cranberry bogs there seem to be people of Portuguese extraction. Here and there one finds "Syrians." In Boston one might find an Italian boy in a Jewish area. And that's just in the ones tagged for Massachusetts! Almost every photo has the American melting pot on display.
Some of Hine's comments have aged poorly, too: "A half hour car ride to and from work." The horror! What would he think of today's commutes? Elsewhere he remarks on the female mill workers being exposed to crude remarks, or making them. He also editorializes living conditions. Some of the tenements he entered were in terrible shape. A few do seem like they could get a good cleaning, at least. But this "slovenly" house in New Bedford looks to me like a family in a modest little house with an inadequate floor rug. Or what about this "dilapidated" apartment? Respectable furniture, pictures on the wall, a clock--much nicer than many things I toured in Boston trying to find an apartment under 2k.
Of course, there are working conditions that are visibly bad depicted here: young oyster shuckers with injured hands (or sardine cutters),  mill workers with crushed arms, boys working in mines ten hours a day and sometimes losing their legs.But it's interesting that these are somehow deemed intolerable conditions because they are children. Surely adults should also not get their arms crushed? Is there an age at which it *would* be acceptable to have regular workplace injuries? "Don't grind the seed-corn", reads one of Hine's posters--but maybe we shouldn't be grinding up people, full stop! It shouldn't be just children who elicit sympathy.
There are modern parallels here too, of course. In particular, some captions in which the overseer acknowledged that his employment of the child was probably illegal, but he did it anyway, reminded me forcibly of the use of migrant workers in America today. And child workers traveling a great distance for industrial work rather than subsistence farming at home is still a practice today, if not in America--for example in cacao plantations. And again--at what age is this acceptable? Is it bad if a fourteen-year-old wields a machete to support his family, but not an eighteen-year-old? What are our societal guidelines here?

And as if all this weren't enough, there's some really fascinating follow-ups by a fellow in Massachusetts, who has tracked down and interviewed some of the living descendants of those depicted. Despite their hardscrabble lives, they emerge as often interesting, resourceful, kind and generous folk. In many cases, the children got to graduate high school, and the grandchildren from college; in other cases, the later generations are not doing anything so different from their forebears. Some are dismayed by the their grandparent's working conditions; others think it's not so different from their own jobs as kids. Really interesting stuff. 

coming attractions

Above my desk I keep a post-it with some things I really ought to write about, at some point. It's starting to grow out of hand, so I'll abstract it here in case it gets lost and I'm starved for ideas. All are, more or less, rabbit holes I've fallen down at some point or other. For example:
 -Kansas City jazz ca. 1920
-Stanford's Three Motets
-the music at Benediction
-Musical Fakes pt. 3 and 4: John of Portugal and T.L de Victoria
-Caterine van Hemessen
-van der Weyden (not sure I remember what this idea was about anymore!)
-gospel motets
-the history of the death penalty
-Hellmaws in medieval art
-the use of surplices in American choirs
-a poem attr. Murice
-immigration in new England
 -Catholic church statistics
-Lewis Hine photos
-the name Kuykendal
-the duchess of Buccleuch
 Some of these ideas are from just the last few days; others I've been itching to report on for a year now. One day, one day...

a mystery signature

A friend of mine works for what one might call a musical curiosities shop, selling letters and photographs and other ephemera that are tied to famous musicians. Lately she's been leafing through some papers associated with Florizel von Reuter.

I didn't know anything about von Reuter, but apparently he was from Davenport, Iowa, and a violin prodigy who graduated from the Geneva Conservatory at age 11. At the time he was quite famous and you could even get postcards with his picture on them. Somewhere along the way he put the "von" into his name, and he ended up in Europe for the next two decades, teaching in Zürich (later Vienna and Berlin) and touring. His mother eventually because interested in psychic visions--very 1910's--and so did he, writing about messages he got from famous musicians. (His mother named him Florizel and sent him to Europe aged nine, so I suspect she was sort of odd...). His book on these visions had a foreword by Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame!

In the late 1940s he finally went back to the Midwest, settling in Waukesha (of all places, suburban Milwaukee? After Vienna and Berlin?) and living there until his 80s. (I've found a recent review of a re-released recording of his that suggests his playing in adulthood was perhaps not as impressive as it had been when he was small...)

Anyway, so in 1918, while he was teaching in Zürich, Florizel received a letter from somebody writing in German. Evidently FvR had played a recital the previous day, but, the letter-writer confesses, he was only able to attend the first half, which was too bad; he would have liked to hear more, especially since he gave the (unnamed) piece of the first half such fine melodic expression instead of succumbing to its harmonic deviousness. Then there's a signature, but...it's almost illegible. The handwriting is sloppy throughout, but with a bit of careful study can be read: there's a tendency to omit letters here and there, especially if they are similar strokes to the preceding letter, but he almost always dots his i's and demarcates his u's. (In early twentieth century German script, n and u look virtually identical, so u gets a little line over it.) Here and there a letter will lose a loop, or part of it will shrink--his capital M, for example, should have two arches, but the first is compressed to a tiny bump; meanwhile in the letter W, the second point has turned into an enormous loop. But alas, understanding the writer's idiosyncracies hasn't gotten me his signature. I've listed all the letters that appear and don't appear elsewhere, so I can tell that, for example, the last letter of his first name probably isn't a t, though it looks like one, because his t doesn't loop like that; and that the first letter of his first name could, for example, be a D, because although it doesn't match anything on the page, the page also has no capital Ds on it. But that still doesn't tell me who it is. Admittedly, my knowledge of 1918 musical personalities is also hugely limited, so mainly I have been guessing plausible names, e.g. "Dieter is a German name that starts with D" and then seeing if I could will myself to see anything like that in the signature, and then searching to see if there are any musical Dieters that might be relevant. Not a very efficient process.

The content of the letter isn't that much help. The writer seems old--not only because of his erratic and old-fashioned handwriting, but also his (slightly condescending?) remark that "most young players don't bring out the melody." He might be in the same city--he extends an invitation to visit if F is ever in the same part of town--but then, maybe he means "the same part of town that you just had your recital in," which could conceivably be, say, Berlin. I can't find much evidence of where Reuter gave concerts in 1918, although it being wartime one would think he wouldn't have toured too extensively. The letter-writer also mentions that's he's especially sorry he couldn't attend "since I will soon have a chance to write about it," which suggests to me he might be a music reviewer, but who couldn't review this concert because of a schedule conflict. And then there's the fact the letter was kept, even though its content is somewhat minimal--which suggests to me it was somebody sort of important at the time, from whom getting a compliment--even one accompanied by the fact that they didn't hear half your show--would be worth remembering. But who????

Where is Tharsis, anyway?

A propos of my digging about in the "Reges Tharsis" texts (see previous post), I began to wonder--where is Tharsis, anyway? Apparently it's an open question! What we know about Tharsis from the Bible is: a) It's somewhere far away. Jonah tries to go to Tharsis when he wants to get as far from Nineveh as possible. [As an aside, apparently Nineveh is modern Mosul, more or less. The last few years have not been good to the 2500-year-old legacy of the Assyrian Empire. Not sure why I haven't seen this pointed out.] b) You get to it by ship. Usually it's mentioned in the context of "ships of Tarsis" bringing something or other, but it's not really clear if that's just a term for "a big trading vessel" or if a ship of Tarsis necessarily has to be from, well, Tarsis.
c) It seems to be a source of treasures--Jeremiah mentions it as being a place silver comes from (gold is apparently from "Uphaz," another mystery locale.) Ezekiel mentions silver, but also lead, iron and tin. King Solomon's "ships of Tarsis" carry quite a lot: silver, but also gold, ivory, apes, and peacocks.
d) It's probably an island, because it's often mentioned in the same breath, e.g. "Tarsis and the islands."
e) It might be connected to Tyre; Isaiah has the ships of Tarshish wailing when Tyre is laid waste, and tells the "inhabitants of the coast" to "cross over to Tarshish."
Ideas have floated around a long time. There's a town called Tarshish in Lebanon--but Lebanon is not a far-away island, so that's not it. There's Tarsus, in Asia Minor (as in Saul Of), but, again, not an island. Some nineteenth century Brits were apparently convinced that a place full of silver and tin could only be England (???).
Carthage/Tunis/Tyre is a possibility--certainly it was an important trading partner--although it's not on an island. But some references seem to suggest that it is a place separate from Tyre, a place the people of Tyre could go to.
One of the likeliest options is apparently Sardinia, which is a large island. Apparently it used to be well known for the metals trade, and it was an outpost of the Phoenicians (hence the Tyre connection.) There turns out to be some archeological support for this, too; there are silver hoards from the ancient Near East that seem to match isotopes from Spain and Sardinia.
But...what about the other things on the ships of Tarsis? Sardinia doesn't have ivory, for example. My first thought on reading the list of Solomon's treasures was "somewhere in southern Africa" because there are both metals deposits and elephants--but that doesn't really jive with it being an island. Moreover, although there are apparently African peacocks, they're sort of funny-looking birds, not the kind displayed by royalty. (Of course, the peacock has been cultivated as quasi-pet for a long time, so there's no need for the peacocks in question to be native to Tarsis rather than simply bred there. But this did lead to my learning there are three species of peacock! In addition to the African one and the blue kind seen in zoos, there's also a green kind with an interestingly scaly-patterned neck, in which both the male and the female are iridescently coloured birds.) What about India--or maybe Sri Lanka, if we need an island? Conceivably ships coming from India could bear everything described. And indeed, Ophir and/or Uphaz, which are named as sources of gold, are sometimes identified with southern India, in Tamil Nadu (which did a lot of gold trade.) And apparently the Hebrew words for things like parrots, ivory, cotton, and apes are seemingly related to Tamil words for these things!
But how does a ship even get from Jerusalem to India? It doesn't seem like that far a journey, except that, prior to the Suez canal, one would have to go all the way around Africa, or portage across a substantial piece of desert (in which case the goods would surely come to Israel by caravan for their last leg of the journey, not be loaded off a ship.) But wait! Solomon's ships of Tarsis seem to actually be docked at Ezion-Geber (near modern Eliat), which means they were probably headed to the Indian ocean!
So, is Tarsis east or west? Sardinia or Sri Lanka? I figure both. That is, it started off as (maybe) Sardinia, but eventually got used to refer to a variety of different far away places, whether they were called that or no, and maybe used to describe big ships. My analogy here is Guinea: there are three Guineas in Africa (two adjacent, one not), plus a New Guinea. Nobody exactly knows the etymology of "Guinea" either--the Portuguese used it to refer to all southern Africans, possibly getting it from the Berbers, who thought of these darker peoples as "burned" ("ghinawen"). But maybe it comes from Djenné, a trading city on the Niger River. However it came into the language, it also then lent its name to the guinea coin (because it is gold, and gold is from Guinea), and the guinea fowl (pheasant-y birds, some of which do live in the Guinea region), but also the guinea pig, which is decidedly from South American. Maybe the guinea pig is so named because it came via Guyana, which sounds a bit like Guinea; or maybe they were just exotic things that came from a far away place, and so got named after a different far away exotic place. (Aside: its other name, cavia, is derived from what the people of French Guyana called it, but seemingly they were calling it what the Portuguese called it, who got it from the Tupi in Brazil.) Or maybe it's a corruption of "coney." In any case, "guinea pigs" have nothing to do with the country of Guinea, and it's possible that many of the ships of Tarsis had nothing to do with a geographical Tarsis. But there you go.

another for the books

I didn't intend to only write about fake pieces on here, but here we are. Last Sunday at church we sang the Byrd Mass for Four Voices, and a nice Epiphany motet to go with it--Reges Tharsis, also by Byrd. Well, supposedly.

Now, there's a nice four-part motet by Byrd on the Reges Tharsis text. It's the Offertory text for Epiphany, and it's given in Gradualia II. This is not that!

The setting in question is a five-voice piece that survives uniquely in a set of partbooks now held at Christ Church, Oxford, know as the "Baldwin partbooks." Baldwin was a pretty good music copyist, and he's responsible for a number of copies of late-Tudor music, including a few pieces in the famous (and beautiful) Dow partbooks and the entirety of My Lady Nevell's Booke, an important collection of keyboard pieces by Byrd. From what I've been able to learn about Baldwin (largely from a master's thesis I found with a little googling), he was also a professional singer at St. George's chapel, singing tenor. I used to think this was more or less synonomous with singing in the Chapel Royal, but apparently one actually spent a few years proving one's mettle, and then might sign a contract essentially promising you were up for the next tenor slot as soon as one of the current tenors retired or died or what have you, and then you'd be called up--not unlike being in a minor league sports team. So John Baldwin was one of twelve (ish) men at St George's for a while, and then got hired (in 1594) among the thirty musicians of the Chapel Royal, and then sang there until his death in 1615. Meanwhile he got to be friends with many of the major composers of the era, and copied down many of his favourite pieces (presumably from the Chapel Royal/Windsor choir library) into partbooks around 1580. Maybe he suspected that the religious instability of the era would catch up with the music books, and he wanted to preserve them.

The collection is mostly motets--124 of them--and, as one might expect, mostly English: Byrd is well represented (32 items), but there's also Mundy (15), Sheppard (38), Tallis (16), White (16), and Taverner (10), along with assorted one-offs (Bevin, Ferrabosco, Lassus.) Some of Baldwin's attributions are a little odd: one piece we know to be by Lassus is attributed to "Douglas" (maybe mishearing what somebody told him to write down?]; another, by Hollander, is attributed to "mr. orlandus," which again sounds like a mishearing, but there are also pieces by (Orlandus) Lassus so maybe it's mostly misplaced. (He elsewhere attributes a piece by Wilder to "mr philips of the privy chamber" so it's not inconceivable he would give a composer's first name instead of their last.)

Still, it's a great collection of pieces. The problem with it is that along the way, the Tenor partbook has disappeared, so all the pieces are missing a line. For a while people decided this made the partbooks basically useless as a source, but recently some enterprising people have tried composing new tenor lines for the material.

Which is where last Sunday's motet comes in. There's a setting of Reges Tharsis by John Sheppard that centers around the plainchant melody of the relevant responsory for Matins. (The text for the responsory and the mass offertory are very similar, but not exactly the same; the responsory (and this motet) end at "adducent," while the offertory goes on to talk about the people of the earth adoring him.) So, a natural solution presents itself: make the missing line in the Byrd be the chant melody from the Sheppard. Easy!

The problem is, it sounds really quite strange. I mean, sure the composition is full of odd cross-relations, but it's more strange than those dissonances demand. The editor notes that he's tweaked the length of some of the cantus firmus notes to avoid some dissonances, but even then there's still a lot of open dissonance, even at cadences. Where to start the chant is another question, too. Sheppard's setting has an intonation on the words "Reges Tharsis," and so this piece is given one, too--but Sheppard's setting then has the entire choir come in on the words that follow, while in this version everyone repeats "Reges Tharsis" again on their entry. The cantus firmus is also unusually high, and it's really quite unusual to have it be in the middle line--Sheppard's version has it in the second line from the bottom, which is more typical.

In short, I'm not convinced this should be a cantus firmus setting at all. And upon further examination, there are some places that a fifth imitative line suggests itself---places where, say, the second line follows the first by one bar, then there is a two bar gap, then the next three voices all enter one bar away from each other. It could be a fun compositional exercise to see if a line could be reconstructed that way. I suspect the result would also be a little more 1580's in sound, rather than the strangely old-fashioned-yet-dissonant version created by the cantus firmus.

The other thing, though, is that this doesn't sound like Byrd, even without the bogus tenor line. Byrd, for example, likes to have voices enter one at a time; here, the bottom two and top two lines enter as pairs. The texture is dense throughout, where Byrd often likes to have groupings of duets and trios. He is typically relatively careful (though not quite to a Palestrina-like degree!) to only have one snippet of text at a time, or one piece of motivic material, where this has several ideas at once. And the piece also has strange ranges, for Byrd. Byrd often has very wide ranging inner lines (this is true of the Gradualia setting), but his bass parts don't go very low, and his high parts are never very high--they're usually below a written e', well inside the "gamut" and basically in the range of any high-voiced singer (female, child, or falsettist). All the parts also fit very nicely on viols, if one wanted to turn them into instrumental settings. But this piece demands real sopranos, or else really low basses (transposed down), or maybe both. In short, it doesn't really feel like Byrd at all, unless he was in a strangely experimental mode.

But Baldwin knew Byrd personally! They seemingly worked together on My Lady Nevell's Booke, which Baldwin copied but Byrd apparently organized and corrected. It would make sense for Baldwin to make mistakes about somebody like Lassus, but his personal friend? Maybe we should accept that it's Byrd trying something weird--maybe he decided it was an experiment not worth publishing, and that's why this is the only copy. Maybe it would also sound a little more Byrd-like with the original tenor line (though I doubt it.) Or maybe Byrd gave his friend John a neat piece he'd encountered somewhere, and Baldwin misunderstood and thought he'd written it himself. Who knows. It's still a nifty piece--but it shouldn't have that tenor line, and it sure doesn't seem like Byrd.