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.